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Marriage American Style: Don DeLillo’s Domestic Satire Marriage is something we
make from available materials. Don DeLillo, The Names Those familiar with Don DeLillo’s fiction
know he has an uncanny prescience into what is au courant and the ability to seize its humorous and
absurd aspects, as though he were bent on always being one week ahead of The New Republic’s former
“Zeitgeist” list. DeLillo’s
postmodern social criticism contains such vast, all-encompassing cynicism that
the particularly unstable state of marriage in America today cannot have
escaped his attention. Indeed the
rising divorce rate must be viewed as either comedy or tragedy, or from a
postmodern perspective as such a common cultural phenomenon that to eliminate
it from the text is to belie the context of contemporary reality. And preoccupation with the dilemma
confronting the modern family is what we frequently find in DeLillo’s
fiction. Like Thomas Pyncheon, DeLillo is highly
reclusive. He flatly refuses to do
the kind of tours and interviews most authors are willing to endure to
publicize their work. As Tom LeClair,
his major critic puts it: “DeLillo
moves around, keeps his past and his address to himself.” DeLillo himself insists: “I’m an outsider, not a recluse” (“Missing
Writers” 51). He has relented a few
times, the most extensively in 1982 with LeClair. Other interviews have been brief pieces on recent work, except
Robert Harris’s “A Talk With Don DeLillo” (1982), and Charles Champlin’s “The
Heart is a Lonely Craftsman” (1984), which offer a few facts about DeLillo’s
own marriage. For example, we learn
from Champlin that his wife’s name is Barbara, and that in 1984, they lived
“in an almost painfully clean and tidy two-story house on an unpretentious
tree-shaded street in suburban Bronxville, N.Y.—the kind of street on which
half of middle-class America might well say it grew up.” We learn also that Barbara accompanied him
to Greece where they lived in Athens for several years while he was researching
and writing The Names (Champlin
7). I have great respect for DeLillo’s
stubborn insistence on privacy. As
Champlin puts it, DeLillo “takes a bracing and regrettably rare attitude
toward writing, as an act of creation whose rewards are in the process
itself, not in the royalties.” But I
must confess that like many, I share an inordinate curiosity about the lives
of the rich and famous. Pandering to
this kind of curiosity is exactly what DeLillo is trying to avoid—the
prurient talk-show trivialization of artistic lives—the commodification of
individuals and experience which is his ongoing subject. Understanding DeLillo’s sensitivities on
this question, his editor and friend Gordon Lish writes an amusing
non-interview, “What I know about Don DeLillo and Certain Other Unnamed
Persons,” with DeLillo acting like one of his characters, only to learn at
the close that Lish made it all up and that DeLillo is nothing like any of
his characters. I too have created
some DeLillo-as-character scenarios. For
example, I saw him as Axton in The
Names, because his characterization comes closest to what we look for in
traditional realism. Incidentally, I
edited this fantasy and refused to imagine that DeLillo-Axton could actually
rape any woman, in this case Janet Ruffing; I pretended instead that he just
accompanies his seduction with very strong physical encouragement. But it is very hard to read much extended
autobiobiography into DeLillo’s characterizations because they are usually
vehicles for ideas and clever dialogue.
Consequently, although DeLillo uses multiple marriages in both his
1979 play The Engineer of Moonlight
and later in White Noise (1985),
I do not see this as anything more than comic reworking of the multiple
marriages of many contemporary celebrities.
Moreover, although early on in his short stories he introduces
elements from his own New York environment, he very soon abandons serious
realism for the comically grotesque, as in “Baghdad Towers West,” where a
recently divorced man attempts an hilarious seduction of three women
simultaneously. If we look at what DeLillo is saying about
marriage and divorce American style, we find that beneath his sophisticated
postmodern format, his satiric vision is fairly conventional, moving away
certainly from his Italian-American, Catholic origins, but still retaining
enough of that heritage to color his presentation. The fact that he satirizes marital breakdown and divorce so
frequently suggests that he sees it as a major cause of the pervasive emptiness
of modern existence. His second two short stories, “Take the
‘A’ Train” (1962) and “Spaghetti and Meatballs” (1965), both tell of Italian
men whose wives have left them. In
the former, Cavallo (Horse) marries an English woman while in the service, whom
his brutal father constantly insults because of her infertility and because
she is not Italian: “She is a
stranger, that woman. She is not of
us. She no belong here. Why she no give you kids? A woman is to give kids. She no give kids, she no woman” (30). When Cavallo was a child, his father
taught him about sex by making him take down his pants and grasping his penis
“in his coarse hand” until it hurt.
Cavallo never becomes the man his father wants him to be. Not only has he married a non-Italian who
is not woman enough to give him children, but he is only a poor janitor who
likes to play the horses, so he constantly has to borrow from the father who
berates him for not taking advantage of America’s wealth: “This country big country. Lots jobs. Even carpenter like me make so much money in one week that in
old country I dropa dead joost to look at it. But you, my son, no can find good job” (29). DeLillo suggests that Cavallo’s failure to
throw off the old man’s power ultimately makes his wife leave him for another
man. When the story opens, she has
been gone nine years, and Cavallo is being hunted by loan sharks from whom he
hides for days in the subway. It is not
certain whether DeLillo intends us to see this as a wholesale condemnation of
all the old-schoolers of whatever nationality or religion who want to keep
the clan intact, or whether he sees Cavallo’s father as a personification of
machismo who emasculates his son by his brutal attitudes toward women as
purely sex objects. Cavallo’s
self-destructive behavior suggests the crippling effects of both these
attitudes. Although DeLillo soon
abandons this mode of contextual realism where we are given specific
background about characters which may explain their behavior, nevertheless,
most of his men remain weak and ineffectual in their relations with women,
latter-day Prufrocks, too absorbed in their own impotence and malaise to ever
fully satisfy a woman or raise a healthy family. In The
Engineer of Moonlight, which I will discuss later, DeLillo dramatizes a
scene of revived tenderness between an estranged husband and wife, which
concludes with a verbal analysis of marriage and divorce. She notes that the much divorced male is
perceived as “having lived life to the fullest,” whereas the woman “with many
husbands in her wake” is seen as a “Man-eating bitch,” “A jade. A worn-out horse.” She then defines marriage as a “sacrament
by which a baptized man and a baptized woman bind themselves for life in a
lawful marriage and receive the grace to discharge their duties,” the duties
part being “hazy.” For DeLillo, a writer to whom choice of
language is of utmost importance, to use the word “sacrament” in a discussion
of marriage and divorce I believe is extremely significant, and I repeat my earlier
suggestion that underlying DeLillo’s sophisticated postmodern satire is a
much more traditional view of marriage and divorce stemming from his Italian
Catholic heritage, where marriage was seen as a life-long religious
sacrament, and where the duties of reproduction and child-rearing were
central for women. In other words,
though DeLillo like most of us has grown away from his childhood heritage and
makes no attempt to impose its value system on the reader, his fiction is
still colored to some extent by these inherited values. That the family is of prime importance to
Italians and Italian-Americans is axiomatic, and I maintain that DeLillo’s
analysis of marital breakdown in much of his fiction stems from his inherent
conviction that such breakdown is part of the overall cultural malaise his
satire diagnoses. Of his Catholicism, we get occasional
references: to the nuns who taught
him early on; to his experiences at Jesuit Fordham in the late 1950’s with
“ingestions of theology, philosophy and history (‘I learned it all, by
rote’)” (Champlin); and to an appreciation today of its theatrical elements: Being raised as a Catholic was interesting because the
ritual had elements of art to it and it prompted feelings that art sometimes
draws out of us. I think I reacted to
it the way I react today to theater.
Sometimes it was awesome, sometimes it was funny. High funeral masses were a little of both
and they’re among my warmest childhood memories (LeClair Interview 28). Like any good satirist, DeLillo makes his
points by implication. Rather than
inveighing directly against the disease, like Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver, he disguises his intent and
makes us question whether a voice of sanity does in fact exist within the
text or whether instead we must search for it outside in the social context
he is satirizing. I suggest that
particularly in DeLillo’s images of marital breakdown we often have to go
outside the text and consider what he is implying by its omission. All of his fictional writings—totaling
nine novels, two plays and ten short stories—satirize the deteriorating
quality of American life, particularly in sex, marriage and the family. In his early novels, he seems more remote
from his topic, treating it to some extent as a literary phenomenon rather
than an actual reflection of life.
For example, in his first novel Americana
(1971), we get several flashbacks depicting the breakdown of David Bell’s
marriage to Merideth who “might have been one of those girls parading before
the TV cameras every New Year’s Day” (28).
David is a successful WASP television executive, suffering from
Oedipal guilt which DeLillo implies in this novel symbolizes the inherited
guilt crippling middle-class America.
During their marriage, the Bells behave as though they were two
characters in a movie. When the
marriage breaks up, David eventually heads across the continent to make a
movie of the real America—the embodiment to David of Goethe’s eternal
feminine. In the process, he makes
love to a pseudo-mother figure, Sully the scuptress, thus replaying the
incest fantasies which he has been trying to exorcise through his
camera. Linking cinema with psychic
disturbance and using it as a possible therapeutic tool introduces the
ongoing use of technology we see throughout DeLillo’s fiction. He has said several times that the work of
Jean Luc Goddard was a strong early influence on his literary development,
and he depicts the romance and breakup of Merideth and David in cinematic
terms. However, like its Freudian
explanation for the “illness” of David and, by extension, the middle-class
society which has molded him, the cinematic structure and imagery seem
deliberately superimposed on the text to give it a “literary” authenticity
which ultimately, at least in my view, does not succeed. On the other hand, when he returns to the
Oedipal theme in Libra, his
treatment of Lee and his mother, though still satirical, is much more
compassionate. And this compassion
colors his depiction of Lee’s unhappy marriage to Marina. Indeed, I find that in his last three
novels, The Names, White Noise, and Libra, DeLillo’s satire of American domesticity takes on a
gentler, much more humane edge. As a result, in all three, he looks
sympathetically, if still satirically, at what happens to children—the main
victims—in divorce. James Axton, for
example, in The Names, has a
nine-year-old son Tap, who stays with his estranged wife, Kathryn, on the
small Greek island Kouros where she is a volunteer on a dig. Tap is writing a novel, and James helps
him with language when he can get to see him, but it takes seven hours to get
there by two different boats from Athens.
Also in the novel, David Keller, who divorced his first wife, sees
their children in a hotel room in New York, where he buys their love with
banana splits at $8.00 apiece from room service. If we wanted to employ traditional satiric
categories, we might say that DeLillo has moved away from his early
Juvenalian mood to a more tolerant Horatian attitude toward human folly. But these categories have less meaning
when examining postmodern writers like DeLillo whose fiction tends to
dissolve prior boundaries with their simultaneous presentation of comedy and
horror. As in much modern classical
music, postmodern satire violates conventional expectations to provoke a
genuine response—to break free from the indifference which repetition
creates. We see horror, for example, in Players (1977), another novel
of marital breakdown. Jack Daws
experiences such intense guilt for betraying his lover Ethan by making love
possibly for the first time with a woman, that he sets himself on fire in the
town dump. Recalling the Buddhist
immolations during the Vietnam war, whether legitimate here or not, translates
that horror to sexual betrayal, an ongoing cause in DeLillo’s fiction for
marital failure. He uses horror again
as a major plot component in the The
Names. Axton, an unwitting CIA
agent estranged from his wife and son, becomes fascinated by a mysterious
cult which murders victims whose initials match those of the murder
cite. White Noise dramatizes the horror of global
pollution. A deadly chemical leak
into the atmosphere, known as the Airbourne Toxic Event, produces cancer in
the main character, Jack Gladney. His
wife becomes addicted to the drug Dylar supposed to inhibit the fear of death
and prostitutes herself to keep up the supply. Ritual murder and suicide, the Vietnam war, global pollution,
cancer, prostitution and drug addiction are all part of the grotesque reality
of modern existence DeLillo incorporates simultaneously with trenchant wit,
hilarious wisecracks, and absurd comedic dialogue. The more comedic elements of modern
marriage appear most obviously in White
Noise. Jack Gladney has been
married five times, twice to the same woman.
As Philip Roth says, contemporary reality itself is so crazy,
literature cannot possibly top it.
Until the advent of AIDS, Americans practiced what Newsweek several years ago
dubbed “disposable marriage.”
According to the statistics at that time, divorce in America rose
steadily from 1970 to 1985, with the median length of marriage in 1976 down
to 6.5 years. Although the rate has
dropped—4.89 per 1,000 people in 1986 was .2 percent below 1985’s rate—Americans
still have the highest divorce rate in the world. Some reasons frequently given for this
high rate are: the “liberation” and
increased earning power of women; the ease of getting a divorce and the
disappearance of the social stigma once attached to it, which Edith Wharton
wrote so knowingly about. Both Players and The Names where the marriages
fail have portraits of working women.
Pammy, in Players, works for
a firm called Grief Management Council.
“Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental
suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like”
(18). Her stockbroker husband Lyle
finds her work a source of amusement, as does DeLillo: “What’s with Grief? . . . I don’t hear lately.” When she tells
him that she and her gay co-worker Ethan have made a pact that it doesn’t
exist, Lyle responds in Wall street jargon:
“You bottomed out in the second quarter. You’re in the midst of a mini-surge right now. You’re also talking about diversification”
(54). Kathryn Axton, in The Names, after divorcing James for “casual adultery,” has “no
experience and no degree.” She
volunteers to go on an archeological dig on the obscure Greek island of
Kouros where she is paid nothing to wash the director’s clothes, make lunch
and clean house, until the grant money runs out. Only when the others leave is she finally given her own
trench. Axton recalls her early
feelings about this prospective work and recognizes that he resents her newly
kindled ambitions which don’t include him.
“Other jobs she’d had, good ones, jobs she liked, never took hold so
powerfully, the way this mere prospect took hold. . . . I began to understand it wasn’t just a reaction to our
separating and I didn’t know how to take this. It’s almost comic, the number of ways in which people can find
themselves diminished” (15). Babette, Gladney’s fifth wife in White Noise, on the other hand,
represents that vanishing phenomenon, the housewife who only does volunteer
work—reading the Enquirer to
an old blind man and teaching posture to the elderly. The absurd nature of these activities
diminishes what she does even further.
Gladney has divorced his other three wives—one twice—because of their
involvement with the CIA. Making the
CIA directly responsible for marital breakdown is of course on one level
ludicrous, but on another, DeLillo’s paranoid vision of CIA power is
emblematic of the kinds of social breakdown he sees ultimately corrupting our
culture. DeLillo’s first play, The Engineer of Moonlight, was begun before Players, in the same period when he was studying mathematics for Ratner’s Star—1974-76, but not
published until 1979. As far as I
know, it has never been professionally staged. Like Players, it also
examines a failed, childless two-career marriage. The couple are Diana Vail, a forty-year-old, successful
business executive, third wife now divorced from brilliant, half-mad
mathematician, Eric Lighter, who is recovering from a seven-week stay in a
mental institution. Vail now lives
with his fourth wife, twenty-year-old Maya and his twenty-nine-year old
assistant James Case. Eric is
described as “fifty-five, a bit stooped, wearing faded old clothes.” And yet he inspires slavish devotion in
Maya, who silently serves the others food and drink, stays up nights with
Eric counting, sometimes in Sanskrit which she is teaching him. She is doing research on the fifteenth
century, but does not feel intelligent enough to study for a degree: “I’m unintelligent. I insist on that. And I don’t have the background. My background isn’t in the pattern.” In describing his “course on women,”
Lighter insists that they “know what’s happening . . . . . They know how low
you are.” Diana wants to know which
of his four wives or all four “inspired this course? . . . Not Maya, certainly.” Whatever selfhood Maya may possess is
concealed in a “wife-as-slave” role.
We get some hints that Maya and James may be the children Lighter
never fathered. Also, the ending
where Diana suggests that she may stay on indefinitely, creates the
possibility that the four may venture a variant on the traditional
family. Maya’s response to this, as
would be supposed, is ambivalent. She
interrupts a scene of verbal tenderness between Lighter and Diana by
insisting that he come to bed, and once he is there further insists that she
wants henceforth to lead a purer, more ascetic existence, maintaining silence
and eating alone. But she never
protests directly against the possibility of Diana’s permanent return. Gordon Lish, in his afterward, can make
nothing of the play’s plot—plots not being DeLillo’s major interest, except
in their more grotesque CIA disinformation form. Discussing The Engineer
of Moonlight with LeClair, DeLillo says that what “connects” the
four characters is “the awesome power of loving.” He sees Lighter as a “pathetic but compelling ruin,” and the
play’s “line of development,” if it has one, as hinging on whether Diana will
“abandon a recent marriage and successful career to help the others
transcribe and type Eric’s half-insane memoirs, along with other day-to-day
chores and obligations,” which James Case says will be mainly doing the
laundry. DeLillo claims that the
divorced wife in Diana “still feels a powerful love for Eric, for the aura of
greatness that clings to him, and we feel uncertain about taking her at her
word” (LeClair Interview 31). Maybe
she will return to Eric, but what is DeLillo implying? That conventional marriage is insufficient
for great men? That we should allow
them their harems to compensate for the suffering their vast intelligence
subjects them to? What happens to
Maya? Do we get an ironic reversal
here of the conventional aging male deserts old wife for young chippie plot? Or is DeLillo, whom some critics see as
always searching for Walden Pond, attempting some return here to a simpler
communal existence, such as many sought in the sixties? On the other hand, it is very tempting to
give this a negative feminist reading—aging male desires not only young,
slavish concubine, but conquest of the new achieving woman to prop his obviously
failing ego. Why otherwise would two
seemingly intelligent women be interested in this aging wreck? In his delightful short story “Creation,”
written during this same period, 1979, DeLillo again presents a variant on
the menage a trois. This time what seem to be two New York
yuppies, who have been cruising on a chartered yacht in the Caribbean, are
bumped from their plane in a remote island airport because they have not
reconfirmed seventy-two hours before departure. The story begins with the kind of airport horrors confronting
travelers in more remote regions.
DeLillo’s by now characteristic refusal to give us any but the most
essential exposition forces us to scrutinize whatever happens for clues. The other two characters are Rupert the
taxi driver and Christa, a woman travelling alone who may be a German mother
living in England and who has also been bumped from the plane. Rupert drives the three to a romantic
seaside hotel where the couple stays in a pool suite. The man, whose name we never know but who
is a writer, enjoys the sensual delights of the place so much that when the
three return to the airport the next morning, he sends Jill who may or may
not be his wife—they call themselves a “team”—back to New York alone and
returns to the hotel with Christa. The title “Creation” suggests a return to
Eden, a Caribbean Walden, with a new Eve or female Christ, but is there more
happening here? Jill, like Diana in Engineer of Moonlight, is also
depicted as an ambitious, supposedly successful businesswoman. She must be back in New York on Wednesday
when “Bernie Gladman comes down from Buffalo . . . It took only six weeks to
set up the meeting” (37). Her anxiety
to leave is such that she even calls on God “if you exist, please get me off
this island.” Jill’s desire to leave
Eden is paralleled later in Christa who again, after a romantic night,
deserts the writer. Like Jill, she
too is preoccupied with her own work.
When he awakes in early morning, he sees her reading some papers, and
begs her to return to bed: “I want
you next to me.” But she must finish
her work. When he wants to know about
it, she tells him “It’s very dull.
You don’t want to know. We
don’t ask, you and I. You’re half
sleeping or you wouldn’t ask.” When
he asks her the next day to return to the hotel with him if they cannot get
on the plane, she says “I don’t listen to this” (43). In both cases, it is the women, not the
men, who are too busy pursuing their careers to take more than a cursory
moment out for romance. Are we seeing
here resentment of the liberated woman and a longing to have her return to
earlier ways depicted as Edenic? Another frequent reason for divorce is
so-called male menopause, where the aging husband seeks a youthful second
wife to prop his failing ego. Take
Jerry Lewis, for example. At
eighteen, Lewis married a woman five years older than he, had six sons, but
thirty-six years later, “at 54,” he tells us, “I felt frustrated . . . .
There was no fun in my life.” So he
remedied his “frustration” by trading in fifty-nine-year old Patti for
thirty-two-year old SanDee (Rader 6). In The
Names, David Keller, probably a CIA agent, has taken a wild young wife
Lindsay to replace his “old gray” Grace.
“‘We met on a plane,’” David tells Axton. “‘She looked so great.
In her Pan Am flight socks.
You just wanted to hug her, you know?
Like an elf. Her hair kind of
delectably frazzled. You wanted to
give her a brownie and a glass of milk’” (6). Axton wonders “if some men tore through first marriages believing
this was the only way to arrive at the settled peace that a younger woman
held in her flawless hands, knowing he’d appear one day, a slurry of blood
and axle grease. To women these men
must have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari” (55). He warns David about becoming a stereotype: “‘It’s bad enough you have a new young
wife. You don’t want to be thought of
as one of these men with an old wife and old kids back in the states. These are the wives who weren’t dynamic
enough to keep up with men like you in the great surge of your multinational
career. The old wives and old kids
are gray and stooped, sitting in front of TV sets in the suburbs. The wives have head colds all the time”
(69). Another possible cause for the rising
divorce rate is modern reproductive technology in the form of safer
contraception and abortion, freeing women from “biology as destiny,” a
freedom which will be lost according to pro-choice advocates if Roe vs. Wade
is repealed, a freedom which pro-life advocates see as destroying not only
innocent fetuses but the “sanctity” of motherhood. In a very short sketch entitled “Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.”
(1966), DeLillo satirizes a typical sixties couple who contemplate abortion
sketched in pre-Roe. vs. Wade imagery:
“The abortionist’s office is cold and sterile. Everything in the office is white. The boy and girl are nervous but the
abortionist’s nurse is not nervous.
The nurse has hooded eyes. She
smokes a cigarette. The abortionist
is smoother and very much to the point.
He’s been through this scene thousands of times. He has a moustache and long elegant
fingers” (392). They decide instead
to have the baby, and the sketch ends with them first cavorting on a beach
among the seagulls and sand dunes, then going home where “He kills a
roach. They see what their life
together is going to be like” (394). In orthodox views, the primary purpose of
marriage is the creation of a family, whereas emphasis on companionate
marriage is a relatively recent development in history. In the orthodox view, failure to produce
children is either tragic or sinful, depending upon whether sterility is
through God’s will or human intervention.
DeLillo suggests that both physical and moral sterility is responsible
for marital failure in Players. Everything about the lives of Pammy and
Lyle suggests sterility and the absence of passion. We are told that:
“Pammy hated her life. It was
a minor thing, though, a small bother.
She tended to forget about it” (32).
At the Stock Exchange, Lyle entertains his co-workers with comedy
routines he has memorized from records.
Both as the title suggests play at life but without the joy and
spontaneity which Huizinga posits in Homo
Ludens is necessary for psychic health (17 ff.). Both are totally surface. Whenever someone confronts Lyle with a
tragedy in their lives—a wife with cancer or a friend who has committed
suicide, he replies “We must have lunch sometime.” Pammy takes tap-dancing lessons and likes to buy fresh fruit. Lyle teases her that although she loves to
buy fruit, she never eats it, but leaves it “in the fruit bin to shrivel up
like fetuses” (33). When Pammy asks
Lyle what he got her for Valentine’s Day, he replies “a vasectomy” (52). Throughout the novel, both Lyle and Pammy
keep wondering if they have become too complex for the simpler things in
life. DeLillo of course sees the
opposite. They have become too
shallow to value the simpler things which DeLillo sees as most
important—love, family, harmony with nature.
Their thoughts instead are totally solipsistic, even when they make
love, so that their sex life has taken on a quality of chilling, calculated
logic: “‘It is time to ‘perform,’ he
thought. She would have to be
‘satisfied.’ He would have to
‘service’ her. They would make
efforts to ‘interact’” (35). Only in White Noise do we have a large family, but ironically not of the
old-fashioned Victorian variety.
Instead, DeLillo satirizes the multi-parent families created by
frequent divorce. Jack Gladney’s
children are Catherine, Heinrich, Bea, and Steffie; Babette’s are her
daughter, Denise and the baby, Wilder.
Jack mentions his oldest daughter Catherine once and then we never
hear anything about her again. Bea
lives with her mother, Tweedy Bonner, in Washington, D.C., where she is starting
seventh grade and “having trouble readjusting to life in the States after two
years in South Korea.” When she
visits the Gladney household, she is an outsider who makes the others
self-conscious. “If Denise was a
pint-sized commissar, nagging us to higher conscience, then Bee was a silent
witness, calling the very meaning of our lives into question” (94). This reversal of traditional roles, with
children functioning as the family’s conscience symbolizes the moral decay
DeLillo sees at the heart of the modern family in industrial society. He again hints through satire that women
working outside the home may contribute to this moral decay. We learn, for example, that Heinrich’s
mother, Janet Savory, Gladney’s third wife, is now Mother Devi who lives in
an ashram in the former copper smelting town of Tubb, Montana, now called
Dharamsalapur. She operates the
ashram’s business activities:
“Investments, real estate, tax shelters. It’s what Janet has always wanted. Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context” (87). Gladney worries about fourteen-year-old
Heinrich who is losing his hair and plays chess by mail with a convicted mass
murderer, suggesting that an absent mother and a much-married father have
exacerbated normal adolescent anxieties.
We see this suggestion again in Steffie’s mother, Dana Breedlove, who
now lives in Mexico City, reviewing fiction for the CIA. Steffie is afraid to fly to visit for fear
her mother may try to kidnap her.
When Steffie is upset, she works it out by burning toast,
experimenting with the different aromas achieved by rye, whole wheat, so the
house constantly smells as though it may be on fire. Obviously this is not the large family of
Italian tradition, but some new evolutionary organism in the social structure
which, given DeLillo’s satire of it, I suspect he worries about. What is happening to all of these
children, flying alone across continents to visit absent parents? Bea’s mother, Tweedy, insists that it is
good for children, that negotiating not only transworld flights but airports
should be basic training for all children.
But before Bea’s plane arrives, DeLillo treats us to a harrowing
account of a near-plane crash which does not occur but from which the
passengers emerge in a state of traumatized shock. This is what we should accustom children to, he suggests? Why?
Because their father does not like any plots, particularly those
involving the CIA, so he divorced his first four wives, one twice? This is madness. Yes, but more frightening when we realize that DeLillo’s
paranoid versions of CIA plots have their very real Iran-Contragate
counterparts. DeLillo emphasizes the importance of
children through the baby Wilder in White
Noise who symbolizes goodness to Jack and Babette. Watching his children sleep, especially
his daughters, is the closest Jack can come to feeling religious. Protecting these children from actual evil
enters the plot both from traditional human venality and threatening
technology. Babette’s betrayal of
Jack with Mink threatens the very foundations of their marriage, but her
betrayal has nothing to do with simple lust.
Rather it stems from her complex fear of death which a product of
technology—Dylar—promises to alleviate.
The “airbourne toxic event” is another threat to the family, and it is
the pater familias who saves his brood by unwittingly exposing himself to
Nyodene D to get gas for the car.
Finally, we have the novel’s mysterious conclusion with first Jack and
Mink visiting nuns who have lost their faith and then Wilder’s miraculous
trip on a tricycle unharmed across a busy throughway. By contrasting these two elements, loss of
faith and potential miracle, and then ending the novel back at the
supermarket check-out counter where “Everything we need that is not food or
love is here in the tabloid racks,” DeLillo creates a postmodern dialectic
opposing science and technology with humanity’s spiritual needs and
concluding that they can only be found in those elements not satisfied by the
“tabloids”—food and love. In Italian culture, food is love, and the
distortion of it in contemporary America seems to symbolize to DeLillo the
demise of the American family in general.
In his short story “Spaghetti and Meatballs,” food is presented as so
central in Italian culture that although Santullo has been evicted from his
apartment and his wife has left him—” that bitch . . . And she took the
mattress with her”—he can still enjoy life sitting in the sun, his
possessions on the sidewalk around him, a beach umbrella overhead, soft music
on the radio, smoking a cigar and then eating a sandwich with his friend
D’Annunzio. Their happiness is
complete when they each name the one meal they could eat for the rest of
their lives. D’Annunzio says “all I
ask is some bread, some cheese and a glass of wine. It is simple and yet it is everything. That is all I would need.” Santullo agrees this is a good choice. Classic.
His choice is the spaghetti and meatballs of the title, which
according to Italian food expert Marcella Hazin is not traditionally Italian,
but Italian-American—the food that until recently, along with pizza, most
non-Italians associated with Italian food.
Be that as it may, both men are so content that Santullo says: “This must be what God intended when He
made the world.” Only memories of
Santullo’s departed wife—”That bitch.
With nothing she left me. With
nothing and with nobody and with nothing”—spoil an otherwise perfect lunch: “It was a good lunch until toward the end”
(249). Is DeLillo suggesting that
even the strong Italian sense of family cannot combat the onslaught of a
different value system in contemporary American culture? Is he moreover using attitudes toward food
as an overall symptom of deteriorating family life? Seldom in his fiction do characters dine. In the two pieces where characters leave
potential careers for a simpler, sensual existence, The Engineer of Moonlight and “Creation,” the decisions are
prompted in part by the pleasures of a leisurely meal, followed by brandy and
some form of play. In “Creation,”
they wander knee-high into the ocean and in Engineer they play the game of the title “Engineer of
Moonlight.” In both cases, relaxed
dining is part of the inherent quest for joy, which tends to be lost in
family life today, so that elsewhere in DeLillo, families do not so much dine
as graze, particularly in White Noise,
where when they are not eating at fast food places or take-out Chinese,
everyone forages for themselves.
Babette may occasionally defrost corn or make her Chili-Chicken but,
despite her not working, she rarely provides meals made from fresh, natural
ingredients. We see this again in Players, where Pammy buys fresh fruit,
but prefers junk food. When Ethan and
Jack visit, once they bring leftover meatloaf (!) and another time, Lyle
orders the meal from Dial-a-Steak.
Never is there the kind of food-as-love meal central in Italian
tradition. Only be leaving America,
do Catherine and James Axton dine leisurely on a Greek island, but it is too
late to save their marriage. Along with the CIA, television is another
DeLillo bete noir, so it is not
surprising that it too plays insidious roles in the marriages he
depicts. In several of his novels,
watching separate television sets replaces sleeping in separate bedrooms as a
major signal of a deteriorating relationship. In Players, we know
Pammy and Lyle’s marriage is floundering when they buy a second
television. While Pammy watches
television in the living room, Lyle spends his time at home in the dark, 18
inches from the television screen, zapping the channels: “He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching
channels took precedence, however . . . “ (16). In The Names, David
tells Axton he knew his first marriage was over when they began watching
television in different rooms: “When
she went to the same channel I was watching, I switched channels myself. I couldn’t bear watching the same stuff
she was watching. I believe this is
called estrangement” (69). But the major cause of marital breakdown
in DeLillo’s fiction is sexual infidelity.
Lyle in Players commits
casual adultery with two different women.
DeLillo stages a concluding bedroom scene with a comic prop to shock
us into an awareness of how obscene Lyle’s conduct really is. About to have sex with Rosemary, Lyle
undresses, admiring himself in the mirror, while Rosemary goes into the
bathroom to undress. When she comes
out ten minutes later, she has a plastic phallus harnessed to her body (197). Pammy also has casual sex with Jack Daws,
Ethan’s lover. In the beginning, they
touch each other playfully, then for a long time, she masturbates with her
own shirt. When he does enter her,
she remains detached, studying “her own involvement,” until the climax, which
she experiences as “a transporting sequence of falling behind and catching up
to her own body” (168). Jack’s guilt
at betraying his lover, as we have seen, is so intense he commits suicide. Earlier references to pornography and
obscene behavior establish the inseparability of public and private
horror. On her way home from work,
Pammy sees a man in a car facing her: She saw through the window that his legs were well
apart . . . His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing . . . ‘They roamed in
cars now.’ . . . In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer
. . . She carried him around like a dead beetle in her purse (25). One of the public-access television
channels Lyle watches has an hour or so set aside every week for “locally
crafted pornography, the work of native artisans.” “There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital
aggression. People off the streets
looking for something to suck.
Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch” (17). All of these references to pornography and
perversion meld the public and private pervasiveness of horror in
contemporary society and counterpoint the novel’s dual themes of marital
breakdown and terrorism, suggesting that the surfeit of sexual appetite
creates a longing for greater and greater forms of excitement, leading
ultimately to a craving for violence and death itself In The
Names, Axton also commits casual, indifferent, almost reluctant adultery
with his wife’s friend. It is his
indifference which angers both women.
The friend tells his wife in order to avenge herself for his
reluctance. His wife subsequently
tries to stab him with a potato peeler, not so much because of his infidelity
as his indifference. “Casual
adulterer,” she calls him, and their marriage falls apart. In White
Noise, adultery is again meaningless.
We are told that Babette’s former husband Bob Perdee used to go
disguised to Coaltown where he paid a woman to talk Swedish to him while they
“screwed.” “It was the Swedish that
enraged Babette . . . “ (58). Babette
in turn prostitutes herself to Willie Mink, the “slimy” tester of the illegal
drug Dylar, because it is supposed to repress the fear of death which
obsesses both her and Gladney. When
he learns what she has done, his first response is a mad search through their
home for the remaining pills. Failing
to find them, he then tracks Mink to a dingy motel room where satire
intermingles with melodrama. Gladney
first shoots Mink, then tries to save his life. We are never sure if Jack’s passion is prompted by jealous
rage, desperation for the drug or some enactment of a final existential
ordeal committed to free him at last from his crippling fear of death. Perhaps it is all three, again thwarting
our expectations and forcing us to relinquish any traditional explanation. In his most recent novel, Libra, DeLillo treats another aspect
of family breakdown. For many women,
no-fault divorce has created a new “feminization of poverty,” as couples are
forced to split the only asset most of them have, the house, even though the
wife still must rear children, usually on a greatly reduced income, with
child-support money frequently going unpaid.
DeLillo’s portrait of Marguerite Claverie Oswald in Libra depicts the shabby
gentility and near poverty single women and single mothers traditionally have
had to contend with. Marguerite like
Lee lacks the character, education, and intellectual acumen to escape
undamaged from her crippling environment.
Both try in opposite ways to achieve some sense of wholeness and
dignity, she through traditional middle-class values, he through the adopted
marxism he really does not understand.
Confronted with Lee’s crime, Marguerite insists that she could not
have neglected him because she always made “such a decent home, which I am
willing to show as evidence, with bright touches and not a thing out of
place. I am not afraid to make food
last. This is no disgrace, to cook up
beans and cornbread and make it last” (11).
DeLillo is of course satirizing her confused equation of cleanliness
and thrift with a good upbringing, the superficial emphasis on appearance and
decency rather than intrinsic worth.
In her struggle to remain in the middle class, Marguerite grasps at
the outer shell to retain her dignity, never realizing its emptiness. Instead, typically, as women have been
trained, she looks to marriage and family to provide the fulfillment she is
denied. When her second husband keeps
on being unfaithful, she leaves him and takes back her earlier name. DeLillo’s portrait of Marguerite is
satirical, but she never becomes simply a mouthpiece for witty dialogue the
way many of DeLillo’s earlier characters do.
He makes us see the claustrophic, latently incestuous, unhealthy
closeness of mother and son, and sympathize with their futile attempts to
escape both from each other and from an environment neither ever really
understands. Children of divorce frequently divorce
themselves, but Lee’s marriage to Marina is doomed for many other reasons,
too numerous to go into here. But it
is significant that his ongoing desperate attempts to create a self through
allegiances to a world of his own fantasy are threatened by the wife who
loves America and finds other men very attractive, symbolized by the
charismatic John F. Kennedy. One
strand of the intricate web of conspiracies DeLillo weaves around Kennedy’s
assassination is Lee’s jealousy, with a possible motive being the impotent
husband avenging himself on his wife’s potent fantasy lover. Again in DeLillo’s depiction of this, his satire
is much gentler, much more Horatian than anything else he has done to date. Cecelia Tichi in her review misses the
“usually ebullient and bold DeLillo” who so “curtails his range of language
here that he competes, unsuccessfully, with his own sources.” She sees the novel lacking in “imaginative
depth” and not enough “the kind of novel we have come to expect from DeLillo”
(16). It is interesting that after
the celebre d´estime of White Noise DeLillo has tried his hand
at two new modes, absurdist drama in The
Day Room and historical fiction in Libra. In both cases,
some of DeLillo’s critics dislike these new ventures and want him to return
to his more characteristic satiric mode.
But I believe a main source of DeLillo’s creative vitality is his
ongoing willingness to explore new modes of coming to terms with the
complexities of contemporary culture, even if it means using formats he once
ridiculed such as the “around-the-house and in-the-yard” brand of fiction
which reflects “marriages, separations and trips to Tanglewood” (Champlin 7). In the beginning of White Noise, he transforms this variety of domestic realism into
a much more complex satiric rendering of quotidian existence. We see another metamorphosis in Libra where the historical novel
format takes on much more varied and intricate dimensions. We also see him returning to some extent
to the urban working class domesticity of his earliest fiction, but with much
greater compassion. I for one
therefore await his next work eagerly, where I hope he will continue to train
his keen vision on the multiple dilemmas facing the contemporary family. Judith Laurence Pastore University
of Lowell References Bawer, Bruce.
“Don DeLillo’s America.” The New Criterion, April 1985: 34-42. Bryant, Paula.
“Discussing the Untellable: Don
DeLillo’s The Names. ” Critique, 29 (Fall 1987) 16-29. Bryson, Norman.
“City of Dis: The Fiction of
Don DeLillo.” Granta 2 (1980) 145-57. Champlin, Charles.
“The Heart Is a Lonely Craftsman.”
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Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983:
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Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987. ___. “Missing
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