DeLillo

And to ask that of DeLillo, who by the time of that interview had poured out almost a dozen novels in a torrent of productivity, probing his interests in everything from sports to mathematics to the inflection points of the American century … well, no wonder the man had a reputation for being paranoid.

In fact, despite all of DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism and death cults and the impotence of the individual swept up in unstoppable social forces, I’ve never considered him to be an especially paranoid writer.

DeLillo’s prose often summons this kind of music, whether he’s writing about nuclear annihilation or the Zapruder film or mass media or Hitler’s sex life.

But those early books are also marred by a shaggy, frenetic jokiness and a sense that DeLillo was still finding his way.

For years when I was younger, and still dreamed that I might be a novelist instead of an editor or a critic, I kept a quote from Don DeLillo’s 1993 Paris Review interview pinned to the bulletin board above my desk as a sort of talisman or goad prompting me to write: “Do you think it made a difference in your career,” Adam Begley asked him, “that you started writing novels late, when you were approaching 30?”