Midnight in Dostoevsky

I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.

Don DeLillo’s Midnight in Dostoevsky is a nervous parable of obsession, more Kafka than Dostoevsky in its unease. It follows two college students in their efforts to construct a narrative around Ilgauskus, their mysterious Logic professor, and a nameless old man they’ve seen on winter walks around town. They are interested in building a consistent story, filled with details, that links the old man and the professor, and are resistent to outside details that threaten their crystalline tale. The world and its facts are a threat to their constructed system of context and meaning.

Jill Lepore’s essay on the politics of death, and the unfortunate convergence of medical technology, overheated rhetoric about Nazis, and the medicalization of life’s inevitable end, was also a highlight of the November 30 2009 New Yorker. But DeLillo’s anxious fable is the piece that sticks with me.