Midnight In Dostoevsky by Don DeLillo, 2009
The magic trick:
Beautifully demonstrating a specific truth about friendship
We wrap up our run this week of college campus stories. Today Don DeLillo takes to school.
This is such an all-encompassing story. Small-town, college town, faded glory, winter winds. You feel like you’re there. This story creates a world.
There’s a lot happening here too. An inscrutable but revered professor of logic. Two students who spend their time observing the mundane around them and making up back stories for all of it. The narrator doesn’t share the story with very many I pronouns. He’s using we this, we that – assuming a unified experience with those around him. Especially his friend Todd.
And that’s what this story really is. It’s a story about friendship. It almost doesn’t matter the setting or their specific concerns or activities. At its core, it’s a story about how a specific friendship can define a specific period of your life; and then, without warning or even drama, it changes and the spell is broken.
And that’s quite a trick on DeLillo’s part.
The selection:
About an hour later, I was part of the mass movement of students going in opposite directions, in wind-whipped snow, two roughly parallel columns moving from old campus to new and vice versa, faces in ski masks, bodies shouldering into the wind or pushed along by it. I saw Todd, long-striding, and pointed. This was our standard sign of greeting or approval – we pointed. I shouted into the weather as he went by.
“Saw him again. Same coat, same hood, different street.”
He nodded and pointed back, and two days later we were walking in the outlying parts of town. I gestured toward a pair of large trees, bare branches forking up fifty or sixty feet.
“Norway maple,” I said.
He said nothing. They meant nothing to him, trees, birds, baseball teams. He knew music, classical to serial, and the history of mathematics, and a hundred other things. I knew trees from summer camp, when I was twelve, and I was pretty sure the trees were maples. Norway was another matter. I could have said red maple or sugar maple, but Norway sounded stronger, more informed.
We both played chess. We both believed in God.
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