Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm from KCRW, Santa Monica.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Don DeLillo.

This is the second part of a conversation initiated by a talk about his new novel, Cosmopolis, published by Scribner,

but which has been bending so far into the other work as well. I wanted to begin today with something that terrified me in the body artist. The opening scene is miced almost like a Kubrick set.

You hear the sounds of glasses and toast going down, clicks and pops.

And it's not until the middle of the novel that we realize why.

Hiding in the walls and the cross space of this house is a gnome-like person who has learned

to mimic the sounds of intimacy and will provide for the woman who lives in the house

the noises of the man she loved who lived there.

And I began to think that this is, you know, a mimetic machine, more human than a tape recorder, but less than human.

And I began to think how interesting that he seemed so childlike

and seemed almost as if representation and our need for it

was a human need but one that requires us to become

machine-like in order to be precise and accurate.

It seems as if like the very basis of what narration does, imitation and representation,

was being thrown into a really frightening

...