Roth, DeLillo and DBC

We finished discussing Everyman, his meandering philandering towards the loneliest death. Noonie points out that I wouldn't like him if I met him. No, of course, but on the page more than anywhere else I'm forced to go beyond the him I can see and observe. What a novel lesson.

Eventually it's just Noonie and me and we're eating cornichons and talking about reading old letters and times spent drinking gin. I pack the dishwasher full of glasses and head upstairs to read White Noise. Mr Treadwell's sister dies of "lingering dread" after four days lost in a shopping mall. Lingering dread.

A man in Glassboro dies when the rear wheel of his car separates from the axle.

I remember watching the front tyre of my car begin a very separate trajectory, rolling forward, to the side and eventually over an embankment as the car itself ground to a an uneven and scratchy halt on a blonde dirt road between Bathurst and Sofala. I remember thinking not in Russell Drysdale's wildest dreams. Inadequacy and dismay and the heat of the February sun on the top of my shiny boots until two men in a ute happened along. One of them removed a bolt from each of the remaining wheels while the other scrambled down the embankment to retrieve the tyre. Using their jack and mine they replaced the escapee, used a crow bar to lever the bent panel away from the tyre then in a nod to the yin-yang way of the world lent on the same panel to smooth it out a bit, issued laconic warnings about care and attention and continued on.

I remember white rage by the post and rail fence on arrival at my destination, and feeling like the stupidest daughter in the world. I remember a wedding at an RSL Club in a side street off the mall that somehow wasn't worth the ordeal.

DeLillo's next page has Babette and the Hitler Studies guy (name??) arguing over the relative size of the hole that would be left depending on which of them dies first. I'm back at Ruby Moon immediately and wondering about the conflict between the figurative and tangible hole. The gorgeous idea that optical illusions might account for everything that goes wrong in the world. The cartoon view of the world where if you move your legs fast enough in a running motion as you fall over the side of the cliff, you won't fall into the abyss. And the flip side. If someone puts a black circle on the ground in front of you, you will be sucked into another time or space.

DeLillo reminds me of....Dirty But Clean? If it's true, that should be Dirty But Clean reminds me of DeLillo.