>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> I want to introduce you to the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, [applause] and we're going to go ahead and start with that. Welcome, sir. [ Applause ] >> James Billington: Thank you very much. Good morning. Good morning everybody. I hope you notice the smiling crocodiles on these orange shirts. Library of Congress staff -- excuse me -- volunteers. So welcome. Welcome to you all to the 13th Annual Library of Congress National Book Festival. Today we offer you more than a hundred outstanding authors, poets, illustrators for people of all ages and all tastes. There are also many interactive offerings that you'll see for adults, as well as children. So I invite you all to stop by the Library of Congress pavilion and find out more about the library which has sponsored this event throughout its 13 year history. The library belongs to all of you as well as to the Congress and it welcomes anyone, over the age of 16 to obtain an easily obtainable readers card. Use our 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill and for younger readers you can enjoy a visit to the libraries, new young readers center in the beautiful Thomas Jefferson building. There's some wonderful exhibits there, as well. Particularly, the Civil War one, early American's and Thomas Jefferson's library. Anyhow, we most sincerely thank the festivals sponsors; Wells Fargo, The Washington Post , Target, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts, PBS Kids, AT&T and many other sponsors and partners for their welcome support which make this a genuine public partnership for all of us. Now, today it's my distinct pleasure to inaugurate something new on this occasion. The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction which is a successor to the Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement Award for the Writing of Fiction, which we made first in 2008 o the great American writer Herman Wouk. He sent us greetings. He's 97-years-old, still working on two books. Ever since the Cain Mutiny. So he's with us in spirit today. And since then the award has been progressed to be given to such luminary writers as John Grisham, Isabelle bendy, Tony Morrison, Phillip [inaudible]. [Inaudible] Book Festival Creative Achievement Award. Don DiLillo is a master of the post-modern novel for his works including Mao II, Underworld and White Noise. Which won the National Book Award. His other works include the novels Americana, End Zone, Raughtner's Star, Players, Running Dog , The Nomes, Libra, The Body Artist and Cosmopolist. If that doesn't send a pretty wide signal of this guys remarkable coverage and his long and distinguished career. It's very interesting that we awarded it this first time to someone from New York and contrary to what you might think all throughout the country there was a very wonderful reaction to this most remarkable author. His most recent book is The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Like -- a little bit like Gozansky from a very different culture, Don DiLillo in our culture probes deeply into the social, political morrow life of this country. Over a long and important career he has inspired his readers with a diversity of his themes and the virtuosity of his prose writing. So it gives me great pleasure to name Don DiLillo the recipient of the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. [ Applause and Cheering ] >> Don DiLillo:: Very briefly, we're told the novel is a doomed object but here is proof that that's not true at all. [ Applause ] >> James Billington: Ladies and gentleman, Maria [inaudible], who's -- doesn't need me to introduce her. She's familiar to you as one of our National Book Festival authors this year for her excellent biography of [inaudible]. She's Editor at Large for The Washington Post. She's a consultant to me and other's at the Library of Congress. She will interview Don DiLillo on the stage today. She's done this before. Nobel Laureate. She's an outstanding person. We're grateful to have her. She's going to take the lead in a wonderful two-day celebration of Mexico that we'll have here at the library in December. So, we have a great first winner and a marvelous friend to bring out the two of them in a good discussion. >> Maria: Thank you. >> James Billington: Thank you Marie and thank you Don DiLillo. [ Applause ] >> Maria: Thank you very much. I'll say a few words at the podium before we sit down and have a conversation. It's really great to be here Dr. Billington. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I am so thrilled to -- to have this prize given to Don DiLillo whom I have admired for so many years. He's really quite a brilliant, astonishing, always original writer, and a great tribute to American literature. So as you can see we are in the presence of a prodigiously gifted writer. A novelist who's cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising and precise. He writes novels on the large scale. Aims for America's most pressing social and historical questions. And stretches the norms of narrative to fit the story. He is known for an outsize imagination but he is also known for meticulous attention to linguistic detail. He has given us work after work that probes the American mindset and captures the temper of our times. Among the most celebrated of those of course were the ones that Dr. Billington mentioned. And you all know them. White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man. I like very much what William Boyd who is a fine writer in his own right said about Underworld and I think it gets to the heart of DiLillo's gifts. So here's what Boyd wrote. "In this book we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers. Reading the book is charged and thrilling esthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do. And indeed does better than any other art form. It gets the human condition. It skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else. The novel is the great book of life and as long as there are human beings who are readers it will survive and with a little luck even flourish. Don DiLillo's Underworld is a formidably potent and hugely encouraging testimonial to this undeniable, indomitable and strangely consoling fact." Ladies and gentlemen we will now have a conversation with Don DiLillo. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] Can everybody hear us? Can you hear us [laughter]? We'll try it till we get it. Can you hear us now? >> A little more. >> Maria: Can you hear us? Turn it up a little bit more. We're getting there. Are we getting there? Can you hear us now? >> [Inaudible response]. >> Maria: Yes? Higher. I think I'll hold my mic. How's that? >> Yeah [applause]. And I'll try not to fiddle with it too much. Thank you all for being here. My first question Don to you -- thank you so much first of all for being here. It's such a delight to have you present on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But my first question to you is really a very -- a very human one. Your parents came to America from Italy during The Depression and you grew up in what I imagine was a hectic little house with three generations and 11 children. How did that childhood effect what you write? >> Don DiLillo: I'm not sure what the direct connection may be, but the fact is it was -- it was quite a happy household despite the volume of noise and the number of people. And as I got -- as I got a little older it began to occur to me that this -- this place in which I lived, which I could summarize as the Italian Bronx, might be a place worth writing about. And so when I started work this is what I did. I wrote -- I wrote several short stories set in this area and one or two were actually published to my astonishment. Once I left home to -- to live on my own in Manhattan I -- I realized that on some level I was repeating the journey that my parents took. That is traveling from one culture to a completely different culture and for them it worked. They -- they came to this country for better lives and they found them. And now what I wanted to do was get out of those dark narrow streets and find America just as they had done. And this is why I suppose my first novel is called Americana. >> Maria: Now as I remember you were working for a while as -- as really quite a few novelists have done -- working in a ad agency writing ads and I know that there are many who have done this of course. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously worked at an ad agency for a while. Let's think of some others. Joseph Heller worked at an ad agency. I think Salman Rushdie worked at the same ad agency that you did, Ogilvie and Mather. Did -- how -- did that -- negative influence, positive influence? What did that do to you? That short experience of yours working at the ad agency before you left forever, to become a writer. >> Don DiLillo: No influence [laughter]. >> [Applause] Yeah [laughter]. >> Maria: Good answer [laughter]. Well as I remember that you said also that being -- I think I have it written down here somewhere -- that a young writer which is what you were at the time when you wrote Americana, very young actually. A young writer needs really little more than a piece of paper -- here's what you said, "Writing is convenient. It requires the simplest of tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny. He can place himself clearly in the world." Writing is an inexpensive enterprise. >> Don DiLillo: And -- and that was important in my case. I had an apartment in the middle of Manhattan. I was paying $60 a month and all I needed was -- was an old typewriter and some paper and my imagination. Nothing else. And over a period of years I found myself in the midst of a novel to my -- to my surprise. It took two years before I was convinced that I was a writer. Two years of really daily work before I understood that I was -- I was a writer and I would be -- I would remain a writer despite the fate of this manuscript I was working on. And finally I did finish and one day the -- the first finished copy of the book arrived in the mail and I looked at it and said, "Well, so what [laughter]?" And then I went to work on another book and another. And here we are all these years later. >> Maria: Of course before you became a writer you were a reader and I've also read somewhere that you -- after the conflicting stories. There's ones that says that you read in the park bench and there's one that said you read as a life safer at a beach or a pool. But it was -- or a parking garage I think it was. Working in a parking garage. There are -- could you clarify... >> Don DiLillo: Yes. >> Maria: ...where you were when you were doing all that reading [laughter]? >> Don DiLillo: Happily. It was -- it was -- I was in college and it was the summer break and I got a job in a playground in the Bronx. And people who had this job were called parkies for some reason. And it was my job to just watch over the playground and make sure that if there was any kind of violence that it might be calmed down and any disturbance at all. And I was supposed to wear a uniform of a white t-shirt and a brown pair of trousers and hang a whistle around my neck. I did none of these things [laughter]. I sat on a bench reading [laughter] James Joyce, and Hemingway, and Faulkner, for about two months straight. And none of the kids even used the playground knew who I was [laughter]. And until two of them got in a very serious fight. Blood was shed and I had to take one kid to -- to the hospital and my cover was broken. But I managed to finish the summer more or less undisturbed [laughter]. >> Maria: Don, tell us a little bit about how you actually construct or how do you find a story. >> Don DiLillo: It's a mystery and this is the -- one of the wonderful things about writing fiction. We don't know directly how the sources develop, where they come from. In some cases yes, but often an idea for a story or a book is just a vague image, a visual image. Sometimes it can be a single sentence. A sentence came to mind not so long ago. I won't repeat it but this one sentence I've been following ever since. And it's the first sentence in -- in a novel in progress. The sentence hit me in such a hard -- in such a direct way that I felt I had to go on and -- and justify its existence and so it's -- it's the inspiration for a novel. In other cases visual images. A man walking on a street carrying a briefcase, wearing a suit. His -- his face and -- and clothing covered with dust and ash. And I thought, "What was this?" And I realized it was an image from the terrible events of September 11th, 2001. And then it occurred to me that the briefcase that the man was carrying was not his. And that's when I decided this might be the beginning of a novel. >> Maria: The -- the thing that struck me that you said once in your constructing of a novel was that you -- you feel the rhythms and the sounds of a sentence and that the rhythms and the sound of the sentence drives you through that work on a sentence level. And I -- I really -- I really appreciate that because you're writing is actually very musical, there's a musicality to it. There's a -- it couldn't use -- a sentence couldn't use a more, a word less. It's obviously been very carefully constructed. But then you also said that when you get beyond the sentence it's almost like sculpting. And so you're work -- you really -- it struck me because you use both the sound and the sort of visual arts both -- both as craft arts to describe what you do. >> Don DiLillo: Yes, this is true. At some point I began to pay much more attention to the shapes of letters, the shapes of words, what they look like. So that to some extent I -- I'm not only trying to convey meaning, but at least to myself, I'm trying to find a kind of visual responsibility that is an element -- a primitive element of visual art in letters and words. And -- and this happened original when I lived in Greece and -- and looked at -- I had to learn a new alphabet. Greek. And -- and began to see the letters, the shapes of letters had to begin to understand that this is a visual art. That the alphabet itself can be a visual art and -- and this is what -- what led me in the direction that I've now taken. >> Maria: When you -- when you say that you saw the man covered in ash carry the briefcase that wasn't his, at that point have -- do you sit down and plot out the novel or do you just let that image carry you along? How -- how much are your novels actually plotted in advance? >> Don DiLillo: They're not plotted at all. They proceed essential sentence by sentence and I -- I find that discovering the structure of a novel is very important and at some point it just occurs to me that the novel ought to proceed in this particular manner -- with this structure. Perhaps symmetrical. Perhaps a structure in which the end of the novel repeats, the beginning of the novel. But in many cases -- not all cases -- in many cases a structure reveals itself. That's how -- that's how I have to put it. It reveals itself. It's not something I consciously work at. >> Maria: So you're laying it down sentence by sentence and -- until it revels itself which is -- which is a remarkable thing really. I remember John Gregory Dunn who was a critic and he wrote movie scripts and novels himself and a journalist. And he said, "You know, writing is a little bit like laying pipe. You might as well be laying pipe. You're putting things down, you're building bricks, it's a construction." Do you think pretty much the same thing? >> Don DiLillo: Yeah I do. Absolutely. One of the peculiar things about -- about writing novels is that it's so immensely unpredictable. I can't -- I can't plan too far ahead because I don't know what ideas will intervene between this day and -- and when I think I'll be finishing a particular chapter or a particular part of a novel. And -- and so it's very much a minute-to-minute, word-to-word process. >> Maria: I think all of you will agree who -- who are Don DiLillo fans and who have read his works that they really are distinguishable by their art at the sentence level. But that doesn't -- that doesn't really describe it all the way because there are sentences that are bright and shinny as gemstones and then there are sentences that go on endlessly fluidly. It's almost a little bit like -- as the sentences themselves, the endlessly fluid part and the way that you write reminds me a little bit of Jazz. How -- was Jazz at all an influence in your life? And to what extent would that have been? >> Don DiLillo: Well I've certainly spent many, many hours, days and months listening to Jazz. Ad I don't know if I can identify a direct connection but I -- I do think it's there. Some of the greatest moments I've spent as a young man was in Jazz clubs in New York, and to this day on CDs I listen to the same Jazz I did when I was 20-years-old. The same artists. The same tunes. And it never -- it never gets tired. It never becomes repetitive. It's a kind of -- it's a kind of miracle and I'd like to think that my work has some connection to that experience I enjoyed. >> Maria: You've also said that movies have been a tremendous influence on your life along with the reading of the James Joyce and the Faulkner, and whatever on the park bench ignoring the children. You were also going to movies and movies sort of helped you construct the kind of artistic view of the world. >> Don DiLillo: Well yeah, but in a way that I could never clearly identify. It -- it's just the visual aspect and -- and the fact that at a certain age I became very conscious of what movies looked like. The work of the cinematographer. The -- the way images lapse into other images. The sense of -- the sense of a classic American image which to me would be a man on a horse riding across the screen from one end to the other. There's something beautiful and very American about this. And I -- it's not something I would consciously try to duplicate but it's just the power of images. Which I might use that phrase to summarize the -- the themes of some of my work actually. Particularly my first novel and -- and perhaps one or two others. Simply the power of images. >> Maria: I see you Don as being someone I mean far beyond other writers. Someone who really captures a sense of contemporary culture in the way that Thomas Pynchon did in Gravity's Rainbow, or -- or Cormack McCarthy in Blood Meridian, or Normal Mailer in Harlot's Ghost about the CIA. Blood Meridian of course was about the taking of the west. And -- and certainly many, if not all of your works have -- do this. They do this in an astonishing way. They capture who we are and sometimes in very disturbing ways and in ways that you make us look into a mirror and sometimes the vision is not very pretty. But it is who we are and it is what we face. And do you do this on purpose? Do you set out in a way to say I'm, you know, well in -- in Underword I'm going to capture a sense of X. in White Noise I'm going to capture a sense of X. Is this a deliberate thing on your part? >> Don DiLillo: No. But -- but I have to -- in two months we'll be observing the 50th year of -- of the assassination of President Kennedy and this event when it happened in 1963 had enormous impact on the country and much of the world, of course. I had no idea at the time that it would in a way define the work I did as a writer. It -- it began to occur to me as I -- as I worked through the 70s and into the 80s that I -- that my work to some degree was about living in dangerous times. We had that terrible moment in November of '63 followed by Vietnam protests and -- and race riots and other assassination attempts and other assassinations. Robert Kennedy and Dr. King of course. And eventually the impact of these events began to seep into the way I thought and the way I -- I -- and the way I write. It never occurred to me that I would actually write a novel about the assassination of the president. But eventually this did take place and it was three years of very intense work and research and thought and second thoughts. But it's something I was driven to do. I felt I had to do it and I think it -- it changed the way I think of myself as a writer. >> Maria: You actually said I think at some point that you could not have written the books that you write before 1963. Before the assassination of Kennedy. That everything changed at that point and it -- the works that we have of yours now could not have existed in a way. >> Don DiLillo: I think that's true. I didn't know it at the time. I -- I had no idea that this would be an event that -- that would effect me as a writer. But yes it did in a profound way. And it -- it seems very strange to me that it's -- it's about -- that 50 years have passed since that day and here we are again. >> Maria: You also said that you write to make the simple more complex. Which I think strikes me as an astonishing thing. I mean there are so many of us who are, you know, used to wanting from our writers complexity reduced to the simple. And this is not what Don DiLillo does. He takes the seemingly simple and flushes it out, throws it against the wall and makes it very complex. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Don DiLillo: It's -- it's very natural. I -- I don't know quite how to explain the workings. As I said earlier fiction is ultimately a mystery. And I think a writer's mind develops in ways he doesn't necessarily understand. But the idea of -- of living and writing do have these -- these ways to live. Do have a connection but it's not identifiable easily. And who knows what -- what a novelist is going to do next. We don't and -- and this is one of the -- one of the surprises and pleasures of writing fiction. >> Maria: We're -- I'll ask one more question before we open it up to the audience. So please get ready with your questions and come to the microphones here and here, when you'd like to address a question to Don DiLillo. But I want to ask this -- this question which is important to me at least. You had said that movies were -- that the 20th-century -- we're just coming out of a century that has been obsessed with movies. Has been obsessed with the visual images. You also seem to feel that technol- -- even as technology gets more advanced our fears as a public, as a people, as human beings actually becomes more primitive. So even as the -- the world is getting ever more sort of technologically advanced, we are becoming in many ways more sort of Cro-Magnon like in our instincts or our reactions. There's something that's happening to us in this world as we advance through technological sort of finesse. >> Don DiLillo: Well in a curious way despite the enormous powers of technology I think it -- for many people it narrows the world rather than widening the world. It -- it makes facts enormously accessible. Instantly accessible. But I think as -- as people grow into the particularly, their personal technology that -- that it has the ultimate effect of creating a world that's centered on an individuals immediate needs, immediate desires and excluding much of what is most interesting about -- about the lives we ought to be living. I think that whatever technology is capable of doing becomes what we desperately needed to do and I'm -- I'm not sure that's such a hopeful situation. >> Maria: Thank you. Questions please from the audience. Can we have a few? It's a great opportunity. We don't often get Don DiLillo with us, so it's wonderful to actually be able to step forward and ask him a question. Over here, please. >> It's on? Okay. First let me say Mr. DiLillo, thanks for letting me ask you two questions two days in a row. So you once wrote in a letter to David Foster Wallace and I think I have the quote right that, "the novel is a fucking killer". And you also -- I think he borrowed an image from you characterizing an in progress novel as a mutant deformed drooling baby that follows you around [laughter], and refuses to ever be more than like more than one room away. And so I was wondering if you could describe a little bit the -- the pain that can be involved with the pleasure or writing a novel or the -- you know, the emotional and intellectual stress or, you know, the dark side maybe that you go through. >> Don DiLillo: Yeah. It's -- it makes a writer feel inadequate not only as a writer but as an individual when things -- when barriers seem to arise concerning the work you're doing. I -- I remind myself all the time that I've had a lucky life as a writer. And this is true. It all -- it could have turned out very differently under slightly different circumstance. And this is -- this is what I use when things aren't going well. And -- and the other thing is a kind of patience. I won't describe it as -- as religious in any sense but there's an element of letting -- letting the hours and days pass without -- without due stress and waiting for the moment. It's -- it's an element of waiting and being confident that things will change. >> Maria: Thank you. Over here, please. >> Hi, is this working? Yeah, I once did a literature seminar in New York City and there was this brilliant young girl who wound up going on to the Iowa's Writer Workshop who at the time was reading Underworld and she was gushing about it one night at the bar how much she loved it, and the next morning she just had to get through the last chapter. And we're sitting there in a seminar and she's reading, totally ignoring the speaker, gets to the end of the last chapter, shuts the book and kind of looks at me and says, "What the hell was that [laughter]?" And... >> Don DiLillo: That's what I said [laughter] [applause]. >> What -- what would you say to her [laughter]? [ Laughter ] >> Don DiLillo: I'd say this is modern fiction [laughter]. >> Maria: Fair enough indeed. Thank you. [Laughter] Over here. >> My question is also about Underworld actually. I finished it two months ago and it was amazing. But it also took me keeping notes of all the characters and months and felt very different from your other work. And so I think I read once that you said that it was only a novel that a young writer could write. >> Don DiLillo: What kind of writer? >> A young writer. >> Don DiLillo: Uh-huh. >> And so I'm curious now looking back on Underworld as opposed to your other novels what your thoughts are. >> Don DiLillo: Yeah. Again, you know, the novel is an endless surprise to a writer. I don't -- I had no idea that I would one day write an 800-page novel. And it just kept building and the more momentum I felt, the better I felt. This is what -- this is what the book wanted -- this is what the idea wanted. And the -- it took five years. And, you know, I never begrudged a minute that I spent doing this. And it -- it involved some travel, as well. And I was just totally involved every minute of those five years. And I -- I felt it -- I felt it driving me in a curious way. I felt the momentum that came right from the book itself. From the pages. From the manuscript. That kept me going and kept me, oh -- how shall I say it -- happy. I was happy to be doing what I was doing. And I had no idea, not a clue what the -- what the public would think of this book. What anyone would think of this book. Nothing. Not even the faintest idea. And that -- it's been that way with me for much of -- for much of the time, for many of the books. And -- and so my work was rewarded but I would not have needed a three dimensional reward. The work itself was the reward. >> Maria: Thank you for that. Now we only have time for one or two more questions. Over here, please. >> Many of your contemporaries, most notably Phillip Roth have commented on the future of the American novel. How it's changed in the last half-century or so, and have expressed dismay or pessimism at it with all the changing technology and expectations. I was wondering if you share that sort of pessimism of its life and it's impact in the future or if you have the same sense that people said about your novels. About their flourishing power. >> Don DiLillo: I don't have a sense of pessimism. I -- I think it may well be that -- that readership will diminish a bit. But I think that the best young minds, creative minds still are joined to the novel. Perhaps, more than any other form. People have a need to write. Young people do. And the novel is the most satisfying outlet for this need and -- and for this ability. It make take various forms of course as we want it to. It may be very different 50 years from now. But I -- I think as long as there are people such as yourselves who read and -- and eagerly explore new kinds of fiction, they're be people to write that fiction. >> Maria: That's a wonderful note on which to end this session. Let's thank Don DiLillo very much for being with us here today. >> Don DiLillo: [Applause] Thank you. [ Applause and Cheering ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.