Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro, is a 2005 collection of interviews with the greatest American novelist that somehow some people have never heard of. Conversations with Don DeLillo is now also a 2026 comic collection by artist Drew Lerman. His peripatetic interviews with DeLillo, however, are, as it happens, entirely imaginary.
According to Drew Lerman, “It just felt right to steal the title; as soon as it occurred to me it was decided.” Many of DeLillo’s novels feature characters who question the nature of reality and language. Indeed, Don DeLillo might appreciate the title’s ambiguity. His novel White Noise (1985) features two characters who walk and talk, so Lerman’s idea tracks.
Yet, for me—a long-time DeLillo reader, DeLillo scholar, and the President of the Don DeLillo Society, which is a real thing—these fictional conversations ring true, as good fiction does. I couldn’t believe Lerman’s little book existed. It meant, among other things, that at least one other human alive has also imagined having conversations with Don DeLillo. Probably more than one. DeLillo’s fiction even lends itself to it.
Who among us, after reading White Noise —DeLillo’s satire of academia and mass media, about love and death, disaster and the supermarket—has wished to speak with its creator? Who can read Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s magnum opus about baseball and the bomb, the macrocosm of millennial America with the local color of the 1950s Bronx, and not afterward see the world differently? Who doesn’t marvel at prose like “All plots move deathward,” “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” and “His voice betrayed a craving for terrible things,” and not immediately start spouting DeLillo-esque aphorisms—and maybe have imaginary conversations?
“It made sense to frame it around DeLillo,” Lerman says, “for the simple reason that he has been my favorite living writer since I first read Underworld 20 years ago, the summer I graduated from high school. I think there’s also a sort of sweet spot of fame with DeLillo—he’s obviously an incredibly well-known writer, but there’s also something a little inside-baseball about him, at least compared to Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, which I think makes it funnier.”
At the same time, Don DeLillo is, in real life, a famously cryptic conversationalist. In one of his first major interviews, in 1979, he produced an engraved business card that said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Of course, he did talk about it. Also, of course, he described his philosophy of authorship as “silence, exile, cunning, and so on,” referencing James Joyce.
Drew Lerman’s ersatz Don DeLillo is more social. As Lerman continues, DeLillo is “not generally the greatest interview subject—he’s not especially forthcoming or chatty, and often repeats the same ideas from interview to interview. And so I just tried to recreate in cartoon form the person I’ve gleaned from his public remarks and appearances. I didn’t worry too much about nailing his physiognomy in the strips, although I am pleased with how I drew him on the cover.”
It’s true—the DeLillo of the strips bears only a passing resemblance, but the premise allows Lerman to attribute hilariously un-DeLillo-like lines such as “I don’t want you to post about it over Instagram.” Don DeLillo understands the ontology of technology better than anyone alive, but he may not know what Instagram is. At the same time, Lerman’s comic avatar gets to ask DeLillo questions like “Remember that scene in Underworld where Lenny Bruce is in Miami, and it’s like the Cuban Missile Crisis[?]” only to have comic DeLillo answer, “Vaguely,” which again tracks.
It also lets him take a few entertaining jabs—not at DeLillo, of course, but at the alt-rock band the Airborne Toxic Event, who cribbed their name from White Noise, and especially Jonathan Franzen, who shows up to interrupt Don DeLillo before he can provide an answer Drew Lerman has been waiting on since 2012—when Franzen interrupted DeLillo in real life during a New York Public Library event. Again, it tracks.
Each strip, though, ends the same way: DeLillo says he loves Lerman’s work. “I really wanted to honor the conceit that, at the end of each strip, DeLillo (or one of the other authors) compliments my comics. Some of the great classic comic strips—Krazy Kat, Count Screwloose—reused the same structure over and over again without fail, for years or decades, and that was something I wanted to explore with this strip. How do you keep repeating the same basic joke or structure but keep it interesting to yourself and the reader? That was a challenge.”
Unlike comic DeLillo, comic Franzen yells, “I’ll never read your comics! Never!” For the right audience, this is very funny. I am the right audience.
Even with the absurdity of the proposition—a famously reclusive, nearly nonagenarian novelist who has never written a book review in his nearly six decades of public life, offering effusive praise on regular buddy-buddy strolls—the comics end genuinely, sentimentally, with Lerman’s mentor letting him know that he’s not disappointed in him. Like the conversations with DeLillo, it’s a lovely wish fulfillment.
Lerman says he was surprised at “how personal the strip became as it went on. Just before starting the series, I had been thinking a lot about my days in New York in the early 2010s, trying to make it as a novelist, and all that introspective stuff ended up getting filtered through the DeLillo strips. That was definitely not my intention when I began.” Even comic Franzen comes around, saying, teary-eyed, “Your comics are beautiful, Drew.”
If one word is associated with Don DeLillo’s cultural observations, it is prescience. Libra (2008) engages in conspiratorial thinking paired with information overload before both became the fabric of day-to-day life. DeLillo seems to foresee toxic events and the prevalence of psychopharmaceuticals in 1985’s White Noise; the War on Terror ten years early in 1991’s Mao II; Occupy Wall Street and the financial meltdown of 2007 in 2001’s Cosmopolis; he even published The Silence in 2020, envisioning a global shutdown just as it was really taking place. His stories, like his observations and enigmas, have led me to wonder, when confronted with the mysteries of modern life, What Would Don DeLillo Say?
So, what would the real Don DeLillo think of Conversations with Don DeLillo? “I don’t think he’d be bothered by it, or especially amused. Just more cultural detritus floating through America.” “But,” Lerman concludes, “if he ever does read it, and feels inspired to take a walk with me, I’m ready.”