>The New Yorker: "Midnight in Dostoevsky" by Don DeLillo

>This story is going directly onto my top-ten list for the year. I enjoyed this more than any DeLillo I’ve read, and I’m going to assume that it’s not excerpted from a novel. (Readers will remember “The Falling Man,” a DeLillo “story” in The New Yorker that was, in fact, a single story line extracted from his novel of the same name; DeLillo himself didn’t even do the extracting.) Although I have some qualms about the ending, the rest of the story is completely engaging.

Two college students, Todd and Robby, take long walks in their college town where there is little else to distract them. On these walks they engage in verbal battles, the point of which seems to be to sound as plausible as possible while making up explanations for things, or naming them. The narrator, Robby, for example, points to a tree and pronounces, “Norway maple,” although he’s not sure that it’s even a maple, much less the variety, but adds the specific to build credibility (like a fiction writer!). An ongoing discussion they have involves what kind of coat a man they see sometimes is wearing. Is it an anorak? A parka? Or something else?
Meanwhile, they are in a logic class with Professor Ilgauskas, who is wonderfully odd. Jenna, a girl in the class whom the narrator seems to like, tells Robby she’s seen Ilgauskas in the town diner, reading Doestoevsky. Jenna reports that she quoted a line of poetry to him, “like midnight in Dostoevsky,” but that the professor didn’t answer. (The line is from “Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara.

The story feeds the boys’ ongoing debate about the man in the parka, and Robby now constructs an elaborate explanation for him—he’s from Russia, Ilgauskas is his son, etc. Because they are competitive, and because Todd seems to be a bit brighter (a “determined thinker”) and looks odd (“tall and sprawling, all bony framework”). In the end, Todd decides to test the explanation by speaking to the man, but Robby protests that this will spoil everything. What he really means by that, I think, is that it will end their discussions by exposing their fiction to the truth. And this conflict brings the boys to blows, in an awkward sort of way.

There is so much going on in this story! The character of Todd is fascinating and, it seems to me, Robby is taken with him, not in a sexual way—he seems interested in Jenna—but in a hero-worship way. After all, his parents are absent (Dad’s in Beijing and mom is off somewhere with her exotic boyfriend) and all he really has is the connection to Todd. This is threatened by what Todd proposes to do. And so Robby, who is still a boy, lashes out.

More thoughts?

November 30, 2009: “Midnight in Dostoevsky” by Don DeLillo

About the author

I am the author of three novels--THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE, OLIVER'S TRAVELS, and THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY--and three story collections--IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY, HOUSE OF THE ANCIENTS AND OTHER STORIES, and WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. I am also the co-founder and former editor of Prime Number Magazine and the editor of the award-winning anthology series EVERYWHERE STORIES: SHORT FICTION FROM A SMALL PLANET.

Comments

  1. >I'm not a Delillo fan usually, but I loved this story, too–though I'm still suspicious that it's from the forthcoming novel. The relationship between the two boys was especially well-drawn. Actually, it this were from a novel, I'd want to read more.

  2. >Probably it is. I still haven't received my copy of the magazine, so I read the story online and it's not easy to find the contributors' notes–so I didn't know if he had a novel coming or not. The passing reference to Robby's parents made me suspect that there might be more . . .

  3. >I'm not sure this is from the novel, unless it's a really isolated scene. Point Omega is described this way:
    "A young filmmaker [who] visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man's daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn."
    Also, it's only going to be 120 pages in hardcover. So unless the guy in the anorak is the "secret war advisor" . . .

  4. >The story appears to be about the consequences, and the choice, of fiction. Todd, dear death, winds up on the side of life — and not art. Which can make you immortal. In college we learned such things as words picture ideas. Ilgauskas and his dad, the narrator's idea, seem a fact learnt by serious young men of Delillo's generation, and the laptops and cellphones in this story, and their banishment, hint this bildungs-short story is really about Don and the 60s/70s. But disguised. The writing is lovely and mysterious, like midnight in Dostoevsky, the first stop on the trainline to novelbegirsk.

  5. >I really liked the story. I took something a little different out of it then "the consequences of fiction." Although, now that I read that comment, it makes sense…

    I thought it had something to do with the fact that there are actual, measurable truths. Just because something exists in your mind, doesn’t mean it truly exists. For example, despite the vigorous claims, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of the advocates of “The Secret” who claim we can have anything we want, if we just wish for it strongly enough. Maybe that’s too ambition of a reading, but it’s what I took out of the story.

  6. These are more or less the remarks I made at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May, 2013 with the exception of some improvisation I injected concerning Bosley Crowther, Manny Farber, and Sam Peckinpah and what I believe their works can contribute to understanding DeLillo. I also used graphic examples from the films of Tarnatino and Kubrick to illustrate how auteurs repeat images from film to film.
    http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2013/09/remarks-on-don-delillo-at-ala.html#.UyN3Gz9dXxA

  7. 5 years later, I just read this for the first time. I thought it just outlined the importance of one’s thoughts. In other words, the bliss of one’s imagination. Robby seems to be upset that Todd is so willing to destroy the world that they had for so long try to build. does that sound right to anyone?

  8. It was great experience for me to go through this awesome story . even English is not my first language,but i really enjoyed reading this story .thanks for my professor mr.york for the link of this story.

  9. To me this story is about boredom and art. Boredom is the blank canvas. Their town is the blank canvas. This short story, to me explores how our minds protect us or destroys us depending on how we’re put together.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.