Having a Don DeLillo Moment

Having diagnosed a feeling or a situation or a place, an artist may be forever associated with it. We understand bureaucratic obfuscation that borders on terror, for example, in large part thanks to Kafka. A child’s face may have an uncanny resemblance to one in a Mary Cassatt painting, as if the artist had seen that particular face before you did. Many varieties of bourgeois ennui sometimes seem to have been invented (and not just depicted) by Chekhov. Graham Greene placed his own distinctive copyright on shabby little equatorial police states infused with self-pitying melancholy—Greeneland. When Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying” that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” he implied that many experiences, thanks to art, have already established themselves as clichés when a person arrives at them for the first time. By now, for an educated person, a fresh experience of the Kafkaesque may be rare. To cite another instance of belatedness: in middle age I drove across Utah, thinking that Monument Valley looked like a background for a John Ford movie, which indeed it had been, many times. The entire landscape was boring and exasperatingly familiar to me even though I had never actually been there before.