In a literary landscape often obsessed with the immediate and the topical, John Pistelli offers a rare, meditative excavation of what makes a novel endure, pitting the human warmth of Philip Roth against the symbolic architecture of Don DeLillo. This is not merely a ranking of authors but a profound inquiry into how fiction captures the human condition, arguing that the choice between these giants reveals more about the reader's own sensibility than the objective quality of the work.
The Rock and the Cloud
Pistelli begins by addressing a reader's challenge to choose between Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Roth. He quickly dismisses McCarthy, not for a lack of skill, but for a perceived lack of cohesion. "McCarthy's corpus has a certain artificiality," Pistelli writes, noting how the author shifts from Southern Gothic to Hollywood spectacle without a singular, unifying métier. This critique is sharp, suggesting that while McCarthy's prose is often masterful, his thematic range feels like a series of masks rather than a deepening exploration.
The real debate, Pistelli argues, lies between Roth and DeLillo. He champions Roth for his ability to conjure characters who feel undeniably real, invoking Harold Bloom's comparison of Roth to Shakespeare. "One feels, even in the memory of reading Roth, warmth toward certain characters and situations," Pistelli observes. He lists a parade of Roth's creations—Eli the Fanatic, Sabbath, the Swede—to illustrate how Roth's work is anchored in the "pain of the relations between children and parents, and between husband and wife." This focus on the domestic and the moral is presented as Roth's great strength, a "prophetic" engagement with the friction between traditional morality and modern reality.
The Rothian difference from Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon also should be emphasized. Roth paradoxically is still engaged in moral prophecy; he continues to be outraged by the outrageous.
However, Pistelli does not simply dismiss DeLillo. He acknowledges the counter-argument that DeLillo's work lacks human warmth, citing Laura Miller's review of Underworld. Miller warned that readers "could not come to him in need of human warmth," noting that the novel "bleeds as a result of never settling on such a character." Pistelli admits this is a valid critique but reframes it. He argues that DeLillo's value lies in his "symbolic construction" and his place within the American romance tradition of Hawthorne and Melville, where characters often serve as allegorical figures rather than psychological case studies.
The Architecture of Form
The commentary shifts to a defense of DeLillo's unique approach to characterization. Pistelli suggests that comparing DeLillo to Virginia Woolf is more fruitful than comparing him to realists. In both authors, "character is not the bedrock of the Rothian self slamming through the flesh and into the world but is rather a hazy cloud of memory and desire hanging loosely amid an estranged body." This is a crucial distinction. Pistelli posits that DeLillo's "arch dialogue" and stylized wit resemble Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde, using society as a stage to explore absurdity rather than to document individual psychology.
Critics might note that this defense risks elevating style over substance, potentially alienating readers who seek emotional connection in their literature. Yet, Pistelli pushes back against the idea that art must provide "superficial affirmation." He insists that "the form affirms, not the content," suggesting that DeLillo's ability to capture the numinous and the haunted is a valid, if different, form of truth-telling.
Artists should be more than recorders; they should, while they're transfiguring the real anyway, bestir themselves to leave it in better order than they found it.
Pistelli concludes that the "perfect novel" would be a synthesis of both approaches: thickening and thinning characters depending on the situation, acknowledging that humans are not equally "all there" at every moment. This nuanced view avoids the trap of declaring one author superior, instead suggesting that the tension between Roth's humanism and DeLillo's mysticism is where the richest literary territory lies.
The Desert and the City
Beyond the Roth-DeLillo debate, Pistelli turns his attention to the cultural landscape, specifically the "pull toward the desert" in contemporary literature and his own work. He reflects on Willa Cather's time in the Southwest, noting how the "light-hearted mornings of the desert" offered a spiritual freedom that vanished once the land was tamed by agriculture. "Something soft and wild and free... released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind," Pistelli quotes from Cather, highlighting a longing for the "bright edges of the world" that seems increasingly urgent in a hyper-connected, urbanized society.
He laments the disappearance of artist colonies, questioning why "literally everything is still in Brooklyn." This observation serves as a call to action for patrons to fund new cultural centers outside the major hubs, perhaps in places like Pittsburgh, which he notes was once seen as the "American Paris." This section reveals Pistelli's concern with the geography of creativity and the need to preserve spaces where art can flourish away from the commercial pressures of the coast.
Where are all the artist's colonies today? Why is literally everything still in Brooklyn, no offense to Brooklyn, which I enjoyed visiting?
Finally, Pistelli touches on the political dimensions of literature, referencing an essay by a Republican writer from the 1930s who criticized the left-wing demand for art to serve political causes. He quotes the writer's rejection of the idea that the "poet [should be] Citizen Shelley," forced to "step into line and speed their pen... in helping to solve the economic problems which confront society." This serves as a reminder that the demand for art to be politically useful is not a new phenomenon, and that the tension between artistic autonomy and social responsibility remains a central theme in literary history.
Bottom Line
Pistelli's analysis succeeds in reframing the debate between Roth and DeLillo not as a competition of talent, but as a choice between two distinct modes of engaging with reality: the human and the symbolic. His strongest argument is that both approaches are necessary to capture the full complexity of the human experience. The piece's only vulnerability is its occasional reliance on high-modernist jargon, which may alienate readers less familiar with the canon, but the core insight—that the "perfect novel" requires both the rock of character and the cloud of form—remains a compelling and enduring truth.