As we return to some version of normalcy, many of us are looking forward to resuming and de-Zooming a cherished literary tradition: bookstore readings. This prospect has me thinking about if not the best, then certainly the most memorable reading I ever attended. It happened nearly 30 years ago, and it involved me almost ruining novelist Don De­Lillo's night.

In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to get a slice of Hemingway's "movable feast": I lived in Paris. My Shakespeare and Company was a bookshop called Village Voice. Its Sylvia Beach was an energetic Frenchwoman named Odile Hellier. She organized readings by leading English-language authors on an upper floor of the premises, a converted garret.

The announcement that Don DeLillo would be reading there — one of his rare public appearances — got me excited. He was one of my favorite living writers, the author of edgy and meticulous novels. Back home in Dublin, my friends and I enthused more about "White Noise" than "Ulysses." DeLillo's book was like news from another planet. Planet America.

That spring evening, I made sure to arrive early at Village Voice. The occasion was the launch of the French translation of DeLillo's latest novel, "Mao II," commissioned by the excellent Arles-based publishing house Actes Sud. The title page, one of the Actes Sud people noted, said that the novel had been "translated from the American," and the modest DeLillo looked quietly gratified. He and his translator read the same passage in their respective languages.

Then it was Q&A time. Someone asked DeLillo what he thought of the Oliver Stone film "JFK," another American narrative that had just come out in France. DeLillo's capsule review was unambiguous. He thought the movie was "a holiday for paranoids."

That's when I put up my hand. Even back then I had an awareness that during question time you should stick to questions, but I had some, eh, pertinent information to share. DeLillo called on me.

I reported that I had been in a French chain store the other day and had seen copies of "Libra," DeLillo's 1988 novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, stacked in a promotional display of products designed to "tie-in" with the newly released film.

A look of what could justifiably be described as horror crossed DeLillo's face.

I was beginning to regret speaking. With a kind of honed indignation, DeLillo repeated, for those who might not have heard, what I had said about the hijacking of his work. It seemed to confirm an unsavory suspicion he had.

Soon after, when I read "Mao II," I saw exactly what that suspicion was. DeLillo's character Bill Gray, himself a novelist, states that writers have become "incorporated." I also saw a BBC documentary in which DeLillo asks, "Is the novelist part of the background noise now, part of the buzz of celebrity and consumerism?"

DeLillo's remarks that evening were primarily about how those who write or simply love books can build a barrier against that buzz. He talked about how a writer can redeem language by taking bad faith phrases and artistically recharging them. (The "airborne toxic event" from "White Noise" is the epitome of this transformation.) He made us feel as if we were part of a Fellowship of the Word. Because we were in a Parisian attic, the atmosphere had a French Resistance quality to it. You don't quite get that on Zoom.

Village Voice closed in 2012. But its spirit lives on in the many independent bookstores that, instead of becoming corporate, build community. It takes a Village Voice to maintain a literary culture. See you at the next reading. Save me a seat.

Robert Cremins teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.