Episode 36: Ratnerama
From Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize by Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit
June 7, 2026 · 2h 15m · Episode 36
About this episode
The episode celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of DeLillo's Ratner’s Star, exploring its themes, narrative style, and connections to his other works.
Transmission incoming from the insane world of Ratner’s Star, DeLillo’s fourth novel, a major change in his fiction and his most difficult text, underappreciated as precedent for his later turns on encyclopedic form in Libra and Underworld. Ratner’s also has, though, tons of connections to earlier works like Americana and End Zone. In this episode DDSWTNP celebrate Ratner’s fiftieth anniversary with a wholly new re-reading of a book that remains for us hilarious, pleasurable, and a huge reading challenge. We consider how Ratner’s Star, like any masterpiece, teaches us how to read its fabulations from its first page on. We examine its relentless juxtaposition of minds and bodies, as well as its dissection of the impulses toward pattern, order, and other “convenient fictions.” We ask what kinds of narrative experimentation with time and perspective DeLillo carries out, especially in the quest for an ultra-logical metalanguage in Part 2. We wonder about how science and math as fields of knowledge and uncertainty relate to DeLillo’s later turns to examining history. We do our best to try to understand the relationships of DeLillo’s “mohole” physics to Einstein’s relativity, and we…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jeffrey Severs, Michael Streit
Topics covered
- DeLillo's Ratner’s Star
- narrative experimentation
- juxtaposition of minds and bodies
- science and math in literature
- Catholic education satire
- literary criticism
Keywords
- DeLillo
- Ratner’s Star
- narrative
- literary analysis
- science
- Catholicism
- Pynchon
- juxtaposition
- pattern
- order
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Ratner’s Star, Libra, Underworld, Americana, End Zone, Pynchon
More episodes of Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize
- Episode 35: "Creation" · April 26, 2026 · 1h 24m
- Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair · March 11, 2026 · 1h 48m
- Episode 33: Mao II · February 2, 2026 · 2h 60m
- Episode 32: Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket · December 12, 2025 · 2h 42m
- Episode 31: An Interview with Gerald Howard · November 20, 2025 · 1h 13m
- Episode 30: "So What?" · October 16, 2025 · 1h 15m
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