DeLillo professes not to take much of an interest in reviews and scholarly critiques of his work. Normally I look at the first wave of reviews. After that it's not what reviewers say that become a problem, it's just reading about myself and reading yet another summary of the book that becomes a bit difficult. There's a certain kind of soul-weariness that sets in. Underworld 's freewheeling cast of real and fictional characters may prompt other readers to question the novelist's fidelity to the record.
Fiction comes out of another level of experience.
It comes out of dreams, daydreams, fantasies, delirium. It's everything in a writer's life that finally determines how and what he writes. And all of these things declare a kind of opposition to history. And there's a sense in which a novel may, as in the case of Libra , fill in gaps in history, in the sense that Libra proposes a specific conspiracy to fill the blank spaces of that particular afternoon in Dallas in 1963. There's a sense that fiction can rescue history from its confusion.