Don DeLillo and Move-In Day, Revisited

White Noise; Robert Towers and Noah Baumbach; Bronxville Days; Passaro in the chapel; Delillo and Scorsese; “Deft Acceleration" still sings.

"When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way.”

Don Delillo to The New York Times, 1979.

Last year I saw Niagara Falls for the first time. It was part of a road trip I took with my son to fulfill a rashly made promise to him a couple of years earlier. He had announced to me that he was a fan of the Buffalo Bills, an enthusiasm and affiliation entirely of his own making. I am not a Bills fan, and not even a particularly passionate fan of football.

“We should go to a Bills game in Buffalo some time,” I said. I assumed this random enthusiasm would pass. It didn’t. Two years later, we went to Buffalo. When in Buffalo, see Niagara Falls.

Football, the Bills, Niagara Falls and the spectacle of all that water pouring down in a sheer cliff—it has nothing to do with the topic of this piece, which is college move-in day. But it does provide a metaphor for the over-the-falls feeling with which I am now confronted as my daughter prepares to leave for college.

Over-the-falls, to me, has two connotations. One is when you are literally going over the falls: Getting married, for example, or having a baby, or some other less happy event when within the roar of the ongoing moment you think, “Here we go.”

The other connotation is when you are in the calm water but you can see the falls. The water is moving. You are being swept along and there is no going back. That’s the space I now occupy. Move-in day is rapidly approaching. I can see it. I am counting the hours to when I pick up the rented vehicle that will transport her to college. Such is my focus on this particular part of it, the transportation, that I went to the rental car place in person to reserve it. “I’m taking my kid to school,” I said, as though that would matter. But I felt the need to share the fact.

It’s a cheerful time, for the most part. The living room is strewn with supplies. There are even supplies for the supplies— a packet of compact but sturdy purple bags made out of some unholy shiny material - duct tape without the sticky side, as far as I can tell - that unfolds to a capacious size with a zipper at the top. There are things that need to be assembled. This is my job. I do it with the befuddled dad cheer, a role I am grateful to play because it’s amazing to feel these imperatives well up within me. It’s hormonal, almost primal: you must embarrass you children with your lack of shame at your own ridiculousness. In some ways, I have been refining this role my whole life. It’s almost a profession.

2.

Nine years ago - almost to the day - I wrote about the opening scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which takes place at a college during move-in day. “The station wagons arrived at noon,” is the novel’s first line.

It's commonplace that rereading a book is edifying in part because while the text of the book is the same, you are now different than the person who first read it. The same river twice concept applied to literature, with the reader as the river.

My daughter was nine years old at the time I wrote the piece about move-in day nine years ago. Which means she is now...¹

Why is eighteen the age of majority? What a strange milestone. It used to even be stranger because of the draft, by which I mean, ‘conscription.”² It’s because of the draft that the age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen—if you were forced into military service, the argument went during the Vietnam war, then you should at least be able to vote for or against the politicians deciding to send you.

I try to console myself, when thinking about our current politics, that at least there is no draft. The enlistment model leads to various perversions about who gets to serve, or is compelled to, but it's still not quite as horrific as conscription, especially during wartime when the odds are high that you will be maimed or killed, or have to maim or kill, or have to see someone maimed or killed, or simply have to participate in a system of logic³ that produces the phrase: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”⁴ And then there is the fact that college students were exempt, and graduate students, and people with the means to fib convincingly, like our current president.

But I've somehow gone to the topic of war and politics when I simply meant to go to college.

3.

I finally got around to watching Noah Baumbach’s movie adaptation of White Noise. It’s an interesting combination of surrealism, hyper-realism, and autobiography. In the novel, the opening scene is move-in day, and it’s present here, too, but it’s the second scene. First, the viewer is treated to a lecture on the American appetite for car crashes illustrated by archival footage of such collisions. There is no mention of insurance. It’s merely implicit when we cut to the technicolor parade of station wagons seen from above; a series of witty vignettes in which parents mortify their children (“I can’t believe you said that to my roomate. You don’t even know him!”) gives way to the protagonist’s point of view, watching from his office. That is when we hear the first words derived directly from the novel. They are the same the ones I highlight in my piece, below, from chapter 5: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days…”

What strikes me about White Noise, the novel, from my current vantage is the narrator’s sensitivity to his fourteen year old teenage son, and his desire for secrecy and private space. When I think of it now, I think of how much more private space my fourteen year old son will have when his older sister is not in the house. I can’t imagine it. Soon, I won’t have to. The treatment of the son might be Delillo’s most impressive imaginative act in White Noise, even beyond the formulations in the book that have achieved nearly Catch-22 levels of cultural relevance: “Airborne Toxic Event,” most of all. Honorable mention to “The Most Photographed Barn In The World.”

In Baumbach’s White Noise, there is a detectable autobiographical element, which is the autobiographical element that animates many of his movies—a difficult father⁵. What Rembrandt was to portraits of himself, Baumbach is to portraits of difficult bohemian fathers. If that seems too broad, I could narrow the category further to, “Difficult fathers in creative fields who are in need of a parking spot in New York City.”

I always find a thread of autobiography in a work of art to be enriching of the work, and as someone who uses autobiography in my writing, I tend to look for it in the work of others. Sometimes it's completely in your face, as with a Rembrandt self-portrait. And sometimes it's barely there, barely acknowledged, such as in the recent documentary Drop Dead City, which was criticized, somewhat understandably, because one of the two filmmakers was the son of Felix Rohatyn, a central protagonist in the dramatic events charted in the film. But I thought Michael Rohatyn’s unstated personal connection to his father added a melancholy depth to the movie.

I sometimes feel that a problem with the personal essay is that the autobiography in it is too explicit.

4.

I first read White Noise sometime in my early 20s, when it was assigned in graduate school by Robert Towers. I wrote about it in a paper, handed it in, and then rushed to tell him about a mistake—a testimony to the fact that this bizarre thing we all do where we send a text message and then immediately send a correction is an impulse that predated the smartphone. Towers was gratifyingly amused to hear that Microsoft Word had changed every reference to Delillo to “Delilah.”⁶

On that first reading of the novel, just a few years out of college, the novel’s treatment of move-in day felt contemptuous, and I was eager to join in that sentiment. I didn’t really think about the start of college when I read it. I thought about the end of college. That is what was fresher in my memory and, to be frank, what hurt more.

I went to the same college as Noah Baumbach. We weren’t there at the same time, he came later, though I overlapped with some of the cast of his early films. How we met was a mystery. Then the other day, I remembered: we met after Robert Towers died of cancer - with shocking speed, when I think of it - in 1995 and we both spoke at his memorial service. I had completely forgotten about this detail. Later, Baumbach was a contributing editor at Open City Magazine, where we published both his brother and, several times, his father, Jonathan Baumbach.

There was almost something Deliloesque about my having forgotten the Towers memorial. When I remembered it, what came back to me was a vivid but rather random image of Vince Passaro sitting to the left as you walked into the chapel with a little boy draped like a sack asleep on his lap. Passaro, in dark suit and white shirt and tie, was unperturbed. I don’t recall much of what I or anyone else said that day, but I recall that image.

Perhaps to see what further irony might be found in this moment, and just confirm that I wasn’t making it up, I called him. Being a figure from the old world of landlines (about which he has written so well), Vince picked up. Yes, he said, that was his son Paul, age three at the time, who had fallen asleep on his lap in St. Paul's Chapel on the campus of Columbia University. And, he added, the memorial service missed something about Towers: "The gracious old world, Henry James side of him."

We chatted amicably for a few minutes and then I started shouting, because I had the sudden realization that the errand of calling him had an unintentional logic: Passaro, is a deep reader of Don DeLillo’s novels, and has written about the man himself.

When I told Vince that I was preoccupied with that opening scene of White Noise he interrupted me with the phrase, "Massive insurance coverage."

“I know!” I said. “That is the line that obsesses me.”

“Of course, in 1980 large amounts of insurance coverage seemed so much more exotic.”

Vince speculated the line had some connection to Bronxville. In 1980 Delillo, who had moved from the Bronx to a Manhattan studio in the vicinity of the Morgan Library, had just moved back from a couple of years in Greece. He decided, with his wife, that Manhattan was too expensive. Instead, they got a place in the corner of Bronxville where it’s a bit less pricey because if you had kids, they would go to school in Yonkers. Sarah Lawrence is there, too. I refuse to make Sarah Lawrence as some sort of model for the college in White Noise, though I suppose it is as good a candidate as any for a Hitler Studies program.

Delillo attended the same high school as Martin Scorsese, Cardinal Hayes⁷, and then went to Fordham. Manhattan must have been the great escape. Vince thought that when they landed in Bronxville in 1980, it was a shock, culturally speaking. That atmosphere of contempt for the insured dads in their station wagons must surely have had, at least to some degree, his new home of Bronxville as its source. At any rate, its safe to say White Noise was composed in physical proximity to Bronxville’s big houses and their discontents.⁸

5.

When I first wrote about Delilo and move-in day, it was from the point of view of a father of two young kids. Not just that, but a college professor surrounded by the rituals of move-in day, an event at that takes place earlier at southern schools. At Tulane and other southern schools, classes have already begun by late August. Further north, the day of the station wagons comes later.

By 2016, I had found some empathy for those parents in their station wagons. But my attitude towards the topic of insurance remained contemptuous. Insurance, precisely because it was so necessary, was a shape-shiftingly malevolent as a determining force in our world. I got to Tulane in 2008. My entire time there has been a project, in part, in understanding New Orleans, and Katrina in particular⁹. Insurance plays a role in that story.

The piece, below, is a halfway marker to where I am now, getting ready to partake in this very ritual. The station wagon has been replaced by the SUV but the principal is the same. I'm going to make the trip in a either a rented SUV or a minivan.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The biggest thing that is available at the time” said the lady behind the counter.

Whichever it is, I am getting the insurance.

6.

Don DeLillo and Move-In Day

Originally published in The New Yorker, September 6, 2016

It is move-in day at the university where I teach. E-mails have been sent out warning everyone away from campus. As is the case every year at this time, my thoughts turn to the opening paragraphs of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise.” It’s like a seasonal hit—like the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” or Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”—that goes into heavy rotation for a week or so and is otherwise dormant.

The novel begins, “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of . . .” And then comes a list of the things these station wagons carried. The book was published in 1985, and, with the single exception of “phonograph records and cassettes,” the list—sports gear and kitchen appliances, hair dryers, personal computers, and snack food, all occupying the gray area between necessities and luxuries—is as pertinent now as it was then.

The passage’s hook, the lines I think of every year, comes at the bottom of the first page:

The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. . . .The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant and ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage.

It’s that last line, about the insurance coverage, that has stayed with me. It’s like a weapon of contempt that, simply by reading it, one gets to pick up and handle. The book proceeds to veer into domestic comedy, a satire of academic life, and finally to “The Airborne Toxic Event,” for which it is famous. But something about this opening pierced me and I always think of it, which is odd, because, although I had a liberal-arts-college experience with the same trappings as described on that first page, my father died when I was quite young. There was no man to send me off, massively insured or otherwise. Maybe that is why I found the low-grade contempt smuggled into those lines so satisfying; they mock the dads’ delusion that the worst can be guarded against, mitigated, or hedged. There is a feeling of inevitability in that line of station wagons, advancing like a column of tanks, and DeLillo’s words provide subversive ammunition against them.

This year, however, something is different. The song has not remained the same. Or, rather, another tune has taken its place in my head as I drive by traffic signs set up around campus with blinking lights that say “Move In Day” and “Unloading Zone.” This new song was sung by Bill Clinton during the strange, suspenseful spectacle of his speech at the Democratic National Convention, in August, when he described dropping Chelsea off at Stanford.

The scene was suddenly so vivid—Bill staring out the window, “trying not to cry,” while Hillary is on her knees putting contact paper down in all the drawers. His description of his own grief seemed real, but it was Hillary’s movements and attitude that brought home the underlying emotion—the desire to offer one last bit of help, to make things as nice as possible, to pass on the accumulation of hard-won wisdom (use contact paper on shelves when you move in!). Chelsea’s move-in day took place in 1997. Bill concluded the anecdote by saying, “Finally, Chelsea took charge and told us ever so gently that it was time for us to go. So we closed a big chapter in the most important work of our lives.” He made a reference to what a good job Hilary had done as a mother, and to what a good job Michelle Obama is doing, and then, continuing the history, Clinton said, “Now fast forward, in 1999. . . .”

That whole speech, for me, was informed by the suspense of how he would handle the Lewinsky debacle. He handled it by hitting “fast forward.” It was disingenuous, expedient, and added context to the Lewinsky scandal that I had not previously considered—all the stuff with Monica, a college-age intern, happened just after he had sent his daughter off to college. I don’t mean to further indict him or exonerate him by observing this. It just deepens the story.

We are so conditioned to follow these Presidential campaigns as horse races. Like in a sporting event, we make odds, we keep score. But they are stories, too. It takes time to see their pattern and theme. The spectacle of having a former President as a First Husband, intriguing enough for its sheer novelty, is further charged by the way Bill’s appetites and emotions are always so close to the surface. (There was a GIF that circulated on the last night of the Convention in which Bill walks behind Hillary as the balloons float down; he is cradling a red balloon in each hand as though he can’t believe his luck. He seems to be weighing them, as one would a breast. Then he flips them up in the air. Was it lewd? Or maybe just mischievous? Even childish?) A Hillary Clinton Presidency, should it occur, would be one long episode of recontextualizing Bill’s Presidency, which will become a twice-told tale. Stories, read again, tend to change, deepen. Or, rather, our perceptions of them change; it’s not the story that has changed but the reader.

Maybe it was the slight sense of rueful nostalgia permeating Clinton’s speech that made his move-in-day story so poignant to me. Or maybe it was the simple now-versus-then whiplash of imagining Bill Clinton in the White House again, occupying the same rooms, the same bed, bringing everyone who experienced it back to those days. My life now is much different from my life during the Clinton Administration. The principal difference is that I am married with two children. My son has just started kindergarten, which I suppose is its own kind of mini move-in day. Less momentous, but maybe more provocative, my daughter is now nine—the age I was when my dad died. She’s halfway to move-in day. She has always been a physical kid, averse to skirts and dolls, but is suddenly interested in makeup and her hair, and has discovered the mirror. Also books. The beginnings of a private life.

Looking at DeLillo’s “White Noise” again, I’m struck by the opening line of Chapter 5: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.” I had underlined it way back when I first read the book, in the nineteen-eighties. I wonder what I was thinking.

7.

The words that rang out to me in my early twenties, still ring out now. I might be more overtly grateful for the encouragement to enjoy what you have, when you have it, and feel more acutely the tension within “aimless days.” Above all, I am especially attuned to the feeling of “deft acceleration” as you approach the falls.

—

(The author on move in day, Poughkeepsie, NY, 1983)

__

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1. I recently asked a student old they were in 2017. It was the first day of class, he was from Ohio, and I wanted to bring up the Kyrie Irving trade request, as one does in creative writing classes. The student had to do a lot of thinking in order to produce a response. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” I said. Everyone waited. Finally he said, “nine.” But then he corrected it to thirteen. Maybe the problem was math under pressure. But I think it was something else, some intrinsic wish to be confused about the chronology of one’s own life, which proceeds in a manner that is relentlessly linear and yet which we experience in ways that are anything but.

2. The word “draft” is as ubiquitous in modern American life in 2025 as it was half a century ago, but the meaning has changed. I am tempted to say that the primary uses are in connection with “NFL” and “NBA” but I don’t think that is quite right anymore. “Fantasy league” might have usurped those associations, by virtue of encompassing them. Above all, “Kings,” as in the sports betting platform “Draft Kings,” might be the main association at this time. That a word that once had such a direct, personal, meaning to the people who were drafted, or who burned draft cards, should be so totally subsumed by the sports entertainment complex, which is itself now engulfed and entwined with the gambling industry, seems… strange

3. Here I must add that the Delillo quote about explaining one’s own writing at the top of this piece came from an interview he did in 1979 with Tom LeClair, a novelist and critic who may be most well known for his book about the systems novel.

While I was down at the bottom of the Don Delillo well, thrashing about, I noted that Tom LeClair was also into basketball (apparently he has moved on to ping-pong) and I decided that this basketball playing Delillo scholar (apparently DeLillo also played basketball in his Bronx youth) should have my book on that very subject. I wrote to a publication where he has a byline in the hopes of instigating a process that might result in him having it. I have a new book coming out this fall, and that is the book I should be foisting on critics, editors, and bookstore owners… in Oxford, MS, Boston, Washington, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, if any of you are out there. So of course I throw myself at Tom Sinclair asking if he will receive my previous book. Five minutes later, a faint memory stirs, and am lead back to this. I am capable of this sort of confusion at any time. But it’s more acute in the going-over-the-falls moments in life.

4. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” is the exact quote. Or is it? ‘Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did,’ is the opening of Daniel Immerwahr excellent piece about the financial underpinnings and motivations for arson in the Bronx in the 1970s. The lede continues: ‘When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette respond, “Let them eat cake”? No, but the line captures the aristocracy’s witlessness. Patrick Henry probably never said “Give me liberty, or give me death,” either.’

5. It’s a poetic irony that the catch phrase of the father in The Squid and the Whale is, “Don’t be Difficult.”

6. I pondered pursuing the Delillo related ironies that could be be found this suggestive name, but after some rummaging around there was just one thing to report, beyond the fact that the name, in spite of it’s pretty dark implications in the bible, is the 50th most popular name among English speakers: on a list of popular middle names that can be paired with Delilah, along with “Delilah Rose” and so forth, is “Delilah Wren.” This gave me pause. People are giving their children the middle name of Wren? I don’t object. I have no opinion. I just stared at this fact, this word - wren - while Buster Keaton’s deadpan expression bloomed in my soul. Hello my little wren! It seems odd.

7. Cardinal Hayes is a famous basketball school in the Bronx. Michael Carey, number five on Vassar Men’s’ Basketball total points list, is now Principal of this very school. As Steven Wright remarked, “It’s a small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

8. The bassist of my high school band, The Woofles (go to the 3:000 min mark here for what we sounded like) lived in Bronxville, and we used to practice in his garage. I once went on an expedition with Mike and his dad in search of his younger brother. Mike was a passionate music fan and wore gold, wire rimmed glasses just like John Lennon, whose death I will forever associate with the sight of Mike weeping before school on the morning it was announced.

On the day in question, Mike’s younger brother had apparently teamed up with a bunch of other local miscreants and they were roaming the neighborhood, unsupervised and causing trouble. How Mike’s father got word of this, I do not know. But there was a sense that it was not uncommon. There was a reconnaissance mission to find them, and for some reason I was taken along; maybe I was getting a ride to the train station. I got a tour of the plush corner of Bronxville, which I think is most of Bronxville, with its big houses and neat lawns. It seemed empty of people. Then a gang of youth scampered across the road.

“They they are!” said the dad.

There were a pack of them. They appeared and then vanished into the shrubbery on the other wide of the road.

I was used to the landscape of Manhattan in the 1970’s, the subways, the parks to be avoided at night (the parks of the era are well represented in The Warriors). The city might have been more objectively scary, but I knew the territory. The idea of a gang of little vandals marauding Bronxville, pelting houses with pebbles or whatever, seemed to me weird and alarming.

I can not decamp from Bronxville without recommending a fantastic book by Patricia Bosworth, The Men in the My Life: A memoir of love and art in 1960’s Manhattan. Its early chapters involve a love affair she had when she was a Sarah Lawrence student with a man from the seedier precincts of Bronxville. It’s fantastic.

9. There are too many valuable resources on this topic to list, but on the matter of insurance in particular and its role in shaping that calamity, I recommend Andy Horowitz’s “Katrina.” The story of my own education on the topic is here. I still think of the sensitivity to the colors of New Orleans evoked by Sarah Broom.