DeLillo goes into detail to describe the conversations Jack Gladney has with family and friends. The conversations that stick out to me most include the bedroom conversation between Babette and Jack in Chapter 7 in which they argue for almost two pages about who should be pleasing whom. Jack says about the interaction, “I get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth. The burden of being the one who is pleased” (28). Both are reluctant to spell out what they want and instead act ridiculously polite.
Though the interaction was supposed to be arousing (it’s about sex), the conversation is not sexy at all. I got the feeling that neither wanted to be pleased, and that perhaps neither wanted to do the pleasing. Babette doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading “sexy stuff” to Jack, though she seems to do it regularly-just like she reads the supermarket tabloids to Old Man Treadwell even though she thinks the reading material is trashy. Why does she do this?
Another conversation that stuck out to me was one that Jack and Babette had with Murray Siskind in Chapter 9. Murray invites Jack and Babette to dinner, but is inordinately polite about it to the point that it sounds self-deprecating and silly. He says:
I don’t want to feel like I’m holding you to something. Don’t feel you’ve made an ironclad commitment. You’ll show up or you won’t. I have to eat anyway, so there’s no major catastrophe if something comes up and you have to cancel. I just want you to know I’ll be there if you decide to drop by, with or without the kids. We have till next May or June to do this thing so there’s no special mystique about a week from Saturday. (40)
He seems desperate to make sure they know he isn’t trying to force them into “an ironclad commitment,” giving them several ways to back out of his invitation to dinner. He never says, “I really want you to come to dinner.”
In both conversations, there’s a noticeable reluctance to state clearly what one wants, how one truly feels. People in the novel seem to use others as a gauge for how they should feel. I think that’s why the family watched Wilder “with something like awe” after his marathon crying session. Jack describes Wilder as coming back from “a place where things are said,” emphasizing how people don’t really say what they mean (79). Wilder’s crying was a true, intense expression of personal feeling, something that his family regards as a feat “of the most sublime and difficult dimensions” (79).
Wilder doesn’t seem like a “normal” child. Jack mentions that he thinks Wilder is too big to sit in the supermarket shopping cart, yet it is his childlike behavior that endears him so much to Babette. Does Wilder have a mental disorder? It hasn’t been explicitly mentioned.