Episode 39: Long Tall Sally and Elegy for Left Hand Alone with Curt Gardner

In Episode 39 DDSWTNP look at Parts 1 and 2 of Underworld and welcome back to the show Curt Gardner, creator of the most important DeLillo resource in cyberspace, Don DeLillo’s America (https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). We talk with Curt about his indispensable site coming online thirty years ago, just as news of DeLillo’s big novel was breaking, and at the episode’s end we get Curt’s thoughts on the emergent Internet of the mid-1990s as space for literary discussion and as this novel’s climactic example of an underworld where everything may indeed be connected. The bulk of this discussion focuses on “Long Tall Sally,” “Manx Martin 1,” and “Elegy for Left Hand Alone” as they shift the narrative terrain from 1951 to the 1980s and 1990s, retrospect on the meanings of the Cold War and its end, and introduce Nick Shay as a figure of memory, marital strain, middle age, repressed violence, and compromised fatherhood. Topics in this episode include all the evocations of and key differences from past DeLillo in this novel, especially White Noise; the explorations of visual media, violence, and loserdom brought out by the portrait of the Texas Highway Killer; the distinct DeLillo view of the aging self and its fear of mortality that arises in Parts 1 and 2; and what he might be up to in his nuanced depictions of drugs, forms of self-protection, and Marvin Lundy’s remarkable idea of “the dot theory of reality.” Curt shares with us many insights into the expectations and mysteries around this novel for keen DeLillo readers like him throughout the 1990s, while also helping us work through exactly how Parts 1 and 2 launch the novel’s deeper investigations of creativity, time, mean New York streets, and public and private identities. It all adds up to a great continuation of the Summer of Underworld with DDSWTNP and someone who’s spent more than three decades illuminating DeLillo for readers and scholars worldwide.