#michael gorra

DeLillo has since stayed small

Michael Gorra has a thoughtful essay on Don DeLillo’s late style in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Ostensibly a review of DeLillo’s latest, The Silence, Gorra’s essay considers DeLillo’s body of work against some of his peers and literary forebears, arguing that DeLillo’s finest novels were composed and published in his “full middle age”:

The core of DeLillo’s oeuvre is the…

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra

US: https://amzn.to/31tOsfj

UK: https://amzn.to/3huXr5E

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra 

US: https://amzn.to/31tOsfj

UK: https://amzn.to/3huXr5E

Conrad didn’t just spot the dawn, he also invented a way of telling, and his sense of narrative structure remains utterly inseparable from what he has to say. “Nostromo” breaks chronology and switches wildly from one point of view to another. It skips forward and then stops, repeats itself, offers a second version, it goes back and starts over, as if history itself were stuttering. I want more on such things...

That’s not a point William Gass makes. He doesn’t need to. But it’s something you can learn from reading him, from letting yourself drown in On Being Blue. For Gass has an ear like a Pantone chart, exquisitely alert to the semitones of sound and sense, fifty red words here and a hundred greenies over there. His blues themselves are enough to swallow you down, and if you weren’t going to read it in just a few minutes I would quote the entirety of this book’s page-long first sentence, with its rattletrap inventory of some few of the things that particular color can be, the “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings . . . beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . watered twilight, sour sea.” Russian cats are blue, and oysters, the Social Register too, and it is also, he says, the color of “everything that’s empty,” which makes me remember the high windows that Philip Larkin opens onto “the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”