Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

i too have problems with the whole you know pomo anti-humanism, but his heart's in the right the place you know.

My favorite DeLillo is actually The Names, which almost no one else likes.

all his books have like 50 pages of good writing in between smug, tedious shit.

I continue to recommend The Names; it's diverting and cool and full of ideas.

Understated, affectless, drab, stilted, guarded, clunky, grey, colorless, boring.

i don't know, i think he's bleak, but not 'cold' or unemotional, as some would have it.

TP is a great stylist, I suppose, flawed by his excess of hippy wank imagination. DD is a good stylist too: I guess I agree with the baseballizer.

White Noise I find beautifully lyrical as well as effectively satirical; Libra is a monument on quiet fire. The Body Artist maybe melts too much into mere vapour. I'm disappointed to realize that I've read no further. Conversations With Don DeLillo is good, though.

Sorry, I somewhat belatedly realized that my commments above probably come across as more negative about DeLillo's prose than I actually feel. I was just trying to flesh out the connotation of "flat" that I had in mind. By listing all those negative words, I think I greatly exaggerated my distaste for DeLillo's writing. I still think he's a good writer - I'm just trying to imagine how he could be better - to me at least.

I don't think of him who writes about characters that stuff happens to, ie., in terms of using that kind of a structural layout. For me, his books are important for the sense in which they hold together like paintings, or something, in that the characters exist alongside descriptions of the environment, and the dialogue, ie., all of these things have a kind of equivalent status in his books. And all of these equal things' existence, and the structured whole, stand in some special relationship to D's sensibility.

i also ended up engrossed in the body artist despite the probably purposefully elicited misgivings i had at the beginning (this is so slight, etc.). so far i've decided to suppose that white noise is the odd one out.

it occurs to me now, having recently been reading two books ('berlin alexanderplatz' and natsuo kirino's 'out') that one might describe as in some way 'social novels', or, better, as having elements of the social novel to them - despite my not really having any actual acquaintance with the books properly called 'social novels' like, i don't know, 'germinal' or 'an american tragedy' or 'cannery row' or whatever they really are - that while i am often more bored by this kind of book, 'the social novel', partly because of its narrative or psychological or etc. focus on things that i personally am bored by, partly because of its tendency to a programmatic interest in 'realistic' prose - while i'm often more bored by it, perhaps one could say that one of the interesting things about delillo's novels is that they have a broader scope for what counts as 'social' while still maintaining some of that old interest in 'the social' of 'the social novel'. this is all basically baseless speculation, though. an idea to throw out.

'broader' is a poor way of putting it.

blogging for the onion

woah

surely not real right

why not? i guess the arguments here are that it-sounds-so-much-like-him that it can only be a parody, versus it can only be him. but it's like chunks of the campus establishment writingin white noise. it's certainly him.

well that bit 'he speaks in your voice, american' is the first line of underworld so i would have thought it's a parody

That's great. It's a pretty obscure thing to joke about, though

Libra is pretty great, though it starts slow. Americana also OK. Rest of it I can do without.

americana's amazing! white noise is a better novel, but americana's just so lyrical, such a distinct voice, so many offhand lines. i remember reading the joshua ferris novel and being amazed at how derivative it was. this is more likely my ignorance, but i can't really trace back the topical writing style of short declarative sentences, of that mild deadpan typified by eggers, july &c, any further than americana. it's like he created the current american narrative voice.

libra starts slow? ach, i guess, compared to how riveting it becomes

Read Running Dog, based on being interested in a 2 sentence precis somewhere (something about Hitler and pornography); actually found this to be about his dullest book, which is really a special achievement.

Apart from the The Names, which a few have recommended here (& which I haven't read), has anyone read End Zone?

yah a long time ago--it was pretty awes

I just read a summary of 'End Zone', talking about how the main character is obsessed with what he sees as imminent nuclear armageddon, which has rather swayed me towards reading it (I've liked about 2/3 of the eLillo I've read before, but was previously put off this by it being about football).

James: let me know how you go. I'm unlikely to go with End Zone next, considering I don't yet own a copy, and so am instead faced with the familiar and let's face it unpleasant task of working out which owned-but-as-yet-unread-book to choose from... Oh, I think I said recently it'd be The Assistant, so had better not make a liar of me...

i really liked endzone. i'd like to read it again someday. same with americana. i read all those books so long ago, they would seem new to me again.

A voice from the subconscious: Toyota Corola.

This is also a White Noise reference.

yeah it must be a pardoy even tho someone up above said 'it's certainly him'

Yeah, I mean, their other bloggers include "Pip Dawkins, 19th Century Street Urchin" and "Gary Brunson, 5-Week-Old Fetus."

it's certainly a 5 week old fetus

i was the one CERTAINLY HIMing all over the place. i've still only read the first entry. i think my conviction is more rooted in wondering why people make convincing hoaxes, like really authentic and not particularlt satirical april fools jokes, with author's photo etc.

i am quite keen to deflect attention back on to general don delillo affairs to distract from my potential faux pas.

just got the 9/11 book - only one i haven read

i rep for mao 2 and the names fwiw

I'd been looking for the 9/11 book in secondhand shops. I saw a reviewers' pre-copy, but didn't buy it because I wanted the nice cover with the vertical subway train (I think). I finally found a copy the other day and was very pleased with myself - until Mrs K pointed out that the cover is just a picture of clouds, and not the one I wanted at all :o(

Ones I really, really did dig by him: Mao II, Running Dog, Libra, Ratner's Star (with reservations)

rad covers for the new book:

http://www.perival.com/delillo/pointomega_graphic.jpg

http://www.perival.com/delillo/pointomega_small.jpg

hrhmmm

DON DELILLO HAS BEEN "WEIRDLY PROPHETIC about twenty-first-century America" (The New York Times Book Review). In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a "defense intellectual," one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine.

Richard Elster was a scholar -- an outsider -- when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency."

We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere," in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character -- "Just a man and a wall."

Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits -- an "otherworldly" woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.

In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

surprising that there's no love for great jones street on this thread - haven't read it in years but it cracked me up circa '96

I've been avoiding it, actually, for fear it'd be dreadful.

Though when I reread Cosmopolis I was surprised how the rave and hip-hop stuff manages to not be dreadful — like sure it's kind of lol old but that's the perspective the narrative's aiming for anyway

I don't know, I wasn't in many loops when I read it so maybe now I'd be all "you dumbass the rock world is nothing like that" but I loved the fake album descriptions, something which as a young (13/14 years old mind so the story was doubtless awful) aspiring writer years ago I had also tried to do: a story that had a bunch of vividly described imagined albums, and their critical responses, at its center

i'll have to get around to it. it's kind of a bugbear of mine, i have a thread about it somewhere — narratives which turn around particular cultural artifacts, records or books or paintings or something, and how incredibly rare it is that anyone's bothered to make a believable context in which they can function

great jones street was the only one i didn't like when i was reading his books in the 80's. probably because of the rock stuff in it. i don't remember now. but it didn't hit me nearly as hard as the names. i'm thinking the names might be an underrated book cuz i never hear anyone say good stuff about it, but i thought it was great back then.

i loved the day room too. his play. i wonder what i'd think now. i just sold a copy at my store. i really tired of sll the shadowy conspiracy stuff, i gotta say. i have no desire to read his new stuff. which is sad, i guess. i thought he was the coolest way back when. mao 2 was the end of the line for me.

this book sort of sounds like a mash-up of "ratner's star" and "mao 2"

$24.00 ($16.20 w/ amazon discount) for a 128 page book? NO THANKS!

libraries!

reading this thread makes me realise i've read/love all the wrong delillos. seems like the names might be OOP but it's top of my list

i don't think any of his books are out of print except for the Cleo Birdwell one

The only novel I love with only a few reservations is Libra, but in essence he's an essayist stuck as a novelist (White Noise). I don't know what he was trying to do in Mao. Never finished Underworld. A friend to whom I said this also recommended The Names, so I'll give it a go.

i breezed through a lot of his books ten years ago, and not a lot of them stuck with me except Libra and maybe parts of Underworld, White Noise, and Mao II. I don't get the whole essayist stuck as a novelist--he doesn't seem like an essayist at all!

An essentially discursive talent creating characters, and scenarios for them.

i don't know many essayists who create characters and scenarios

u should talk to my 10th grade history teacher

i feel like mb that joke doesnt work the way i want it to

Que's misreading me.

i don't see how he writes like an essayist

is there a DeLillo for people who have only read White Noise and hated it?

white noise owns, but whenever i try to read underworld i am just like i want to fart on this book

totally understandable

underworld is really the most spotted delillo now, which i find kind of weird

underworld is all about the first 50 pages

those first 50 pages are boring as hecku

never read delillo, where 2 start

The only book of his I've really liked is White Noise. Not sure how I would feel about it today though. Read about five others for some reason, even though I've only got a so-so feeling (at best) off them. A good friend of mine with pretty good taste swears by The Names. I remember liking parts of Underworld (when it was new), but big sections that just left me cold - definitely couldn't imagine putting the effort into reading something like that these days...

gbx i would try White Noise or Libra or End Zone.

i have only read libra but it's fucking awesome

It's interesting that after the bloated Underworld his books have gotten shorter and shorter. Has he ever addressed that?

I think Underworld is magnificent - so many great images, and at least two-thirds of it has people you'd care about. Libra looks great too, and I liked White Noise well enough. But everything since has seemed inconsequential. It never even crossed my mind that he could make the ILX book of the 00s nominations thread. Excuse me.

GBX def try White Noise first.

thx dudes and dudettes

gbx i would recommend running dog or end zone i think - white noise has some weight-of-seriousness issues. or mb i have some w.-of-s. issues with it.

ppl who have read white noise: do you know there is a band called The Airborne Toxic Event? isn't that peculiar? i wonder if they are any good. i sort of doubt it, though.

Yeah, I thought that was quite cool. I imagine them as a lite-industrial combo.

that is horrible

xpost lol

I sure did not like The Body Artists. Still waiting to have a good experience with this dude.

i have now listened to the airborne toxic event, they were sort of too-snide-to-be-twee american indie thing

i quite like the body artist, though the ending is unsatisfying

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-mTuzE8-xIs/SrBRd-oU9LI/AAAAAAAAAzw/sshwgGXajUI/s400/whitenoise-front-cover.jpg

nice cover.
i haven't quite finished because i got distracted but am loving the new yorker story from a couple of weeks ago.

Like it. Four kids in the back though - is that right?

I really liked "Point Omega."
Anyone else read it yet?

that cover is some terrible twee-ass bullshit

Someone at Penguin design is causing havoc. Check out the one for Wuthering Heights.

i seem to be starting to reread 'underworld'—i'm not sure how far i'll get. but since it's been a long time since i first read it, i've been exposed to all sorts of other things in the meantime that help me to better understand what i'm reading. or, help me better understand things that i was able to perceive the first time through.

alfred's remark above about delillo as an essayist creating novelistic materials strikes me as off base. i think because it ignores the point of delillo's prose style (including paragraph-level stuff like scene-setting, interventions from the narratorial voice, free indirect style effects, and so on, but all the way down to the ways individual sentences can be formed). the effect i care about there is his way of putting into words the multi-aspected sense of self, and sense of what's going on around you (in the social, institutional, ritual world), that is probably part of what earns dlillo the praise / criticism of being 'antihumanist'.

that might come out more unequivocally in other books (maybe 'white noise', from what i recall from my one, even earlier read of it), but my sense is that two important, and certainly 'novelistic', further purposes this part of delillo's style serves are a) to express a kind of emersonian sense that the significance of ordinary life surpasses what we take it to be in our ordinary business of living—which is sometimes expressed in a very emersonian way by juxtaposing forms of description appropriate to the ordinary, everyday self, with forms appropriate to grand world-historical processes and concepts (which will make delillo look anti-humanist, in some moods);

and b) to do something like the same, but in a different register that pertains to threatening impersonal aspects of ordinary life that usually pertain to the historical state of society, development of technology and media and the role they play in our lives, etc. etc.

it seems like different ways of taking note of, or being aware of, or giving prominence to, these two aspects of how we see ourselves and the positions of our everyday lives in the greater sweep of life, are laid out pretty distinctly for the different characters in the 'pafko' sequence at the beginning. but not in the manner of an essay. they're each depicted in ways that are just as perceptible by readers as those of any novel.

i googled and found that tony tanner wrote a book called 'the american mystery: american literature from emerson to delillo'. anyone ever looked at it? is it any good?

relevant inasmuch as it touches on emerson:

Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there's no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. "I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne." Instead, he listens to jazz: "Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20."

there's an okay interview with delillo in today's observer. it's frustrating for cutting off just before the writer, delillo and paul auster head to carnegie deli to bullshit about typewriters, which sounds more interesting than standard q-and-a stuff.

I liked that, he talks seriously about complexity but comes across well. That usually makes writers seem like complete douches.

Not read a novel by DeLillo however I think the novel-essay has probably to some of the my favourite fiction that I've read in the last 18 months and Point Omega does look like its in that vein? Might chase that up.

i quite liked point omega but its very... delillo. obtuse and distant and kind of bullshitty but very smart. its only like 120 pages itll take you less than an afternoon. and yes it is very very essay like. it wouldnt be much of a stretch to call it a book length essay on douglas gordon's '24 hour psycho'

It's double-spaced as well! You wouldn't mind 112 pages of dense text (which to be fair it might be in the non-literal sense), but it does look like taking the piss a bit.

q:

does delillo's prose read as 'fast' or 'slow' to you?

Does anyone's?

Good question, possibly.

i googled and found that tony tanner wrote a book called 'the american mystery: american literature from emerson to delillo'. anyone ever looked at it? is it any good?

I read it (several years ago) and can't remember a huge amount about it, although he wasn't very complimentary about Underworld iirc.

A friend once wrote a paper in which he proposed first that Molly Bloom's monologue was fast; then, alternatively, that it was slow. Both seemed quite plausible.

“Slow films in which everyone gallops and
gesticulates; quick films in which people hardly move” - Robert Bresson

Rhythmically slow, if only because of my compulsion to narrate the next few hours of my day in his voice after I've read a section of his books - it seems slow in my head.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/sports/baseball/for-branca-an-asterisk-of-a-different-kind.html?hp

The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories

I found out by accident that this is out this week. I'm not sure I've ever read any short stuff by him, except Pafko At The Wall by default I suppose. I find him quite hard to imagine in short format, actually.

the recent new yorker one - midnight in dostoyevsky - is one of my fav things i've read in the magazine. & i like the harper's one also. am psyched to pick this up, though postponing to get the one w/the photographic (blue?) cover rather than the 'neat' new black illustrative edition thing.

is it that he's kinda...college-y? i'm trying to be tactful. its just strange how much i was into him in my 20s, and i mention on this thread that i want to go back and re-read, but in the end...i don't really want to. tactful, cuz there are younger people than me on here who might feel what i felt way back when. when i read his stuff. i'm sure i'd still like some of the books. or it could be that he just lost the plot and me circa underworld.

i also feel like critically he is no longer the BIG DEAL he was circa underworld. always feels strange to think of writers in rock band terms. people really wanted other people to know that cormac was the genius of the century back then too. not so much now. not that people don't still dig both of them, but they don't have that distant mystique that they once had. writing zombie books will do that to a guy.

woah, had no idea this thing existed! thanks y'all

is it that he's kinda...college-y? i'm trying to be tactful

Not sure if you're addressing the new book or the thread title, Scott, but I don't know if I'm picking you up right. I'm quite encouraged by the little I've been able to find out about this new collection, especially that a lot of it's older stuff, because it gives me hope that it'll be about real people in real situations rather than the literary theory side of the guy.

If that makes sense. By way of explanation I adore Underworld and Libra, but now maybe mostly for their treatment of domestic concerns - LHO's marriage, say, or the adultery or NY Italian sections in Underworld. The meta bits (I'm sure they're there) hold no interest for me; so eg White Noise, while wryly amusing and all, feels more like an exercise I don't need to be a part of.

Maybe that's the 'college-y' you're talking about? For me that sort of thing is a layer of meaning I don't need, I'm already working hard enough to follow the real story underneath. Writers who prioritise the metalayer and forget the other bit are the worst imo - DeLillo can do both ime so yeah, I'm intrigued by this new collection.

oh yeah i was just thinking of delillo in general. not the new collection.

see, i had no interest in libra, but i'm not a huge fan of fictionalized/alternate history fiction. and the same can be said about underworld. the original pafko intro turned me off so much when i read it that i didn't want to read the book. but i most definitely WAS inspired by his earlier stuff in a big way. i thought he was kinda brilliant! my tastes did change over time though. i don't really have anything BAD to say about him now. and i mention the rock band thing just cuz i was thinking about the earlier/better cliche and how unfair it can be. i dunno. i REALLY should pick up some of the old stuff and see how i feel about it.

i haven't liked anything that i've read post-underworld. i think that's more it than that he's college-y. i still love him, though. i should pick up some of the old stuff, i guess, though i don't want to find out i don't like him as much!

by "that's more it" i mean, i think it's more that he's kind of lost the plot a little.

hes kind of too serious now! i liked point omega but its not funny at all, and without the humor he ends up sounding sort of like a parody of himself

hes certainly not writing anything now that would win over skeptics

yeah i feel like his reputation has faded a bit. haven't read anything after underworld, tho maybe i read the body artist? don't remember much about it. funny scott mentions cormac. . . reading and loving suttree right now, though it's still early. and i finally finished blood meridian! loved it once i realized it was meant to be boring in the middle.

i think he writes/wrote amazing sentences, but they don't always add up to a novel that would sustain my interest anymore, i'd suspect. i should reread end zone, that book was kind of crazy!

yeah that's even true of underworld. i like that book more than a lot of people i think, but a lot of it was me getting mesmerized by it on a sentence level.

everything ive read except 'libra' seemed sorta conceptually empty and i get what scott means abt 'college-y'. i mean white noise is abt a college professor but i think the whole 'consumerism is the governing ideology of late 20th c. america/life is a meaningless charade ordered by ad jingles' is a p... undergraduate sentiment.

you're conceptually empty!

it's been a while since i've read white noise, but that's not what i took away from it.

like my favorite thing about delillo in endzone and white noise is that as seriously as he takes his craft and his ideas, he also doesnt take them seriously. and that ability to joke about himself got lost somewhere around, i dont know, mao ii? or underworld i guess (havent read it). like the main professor character in point omega is pretty similar to murray in white noise--but the guy is deadly serious instead of being a figure of fun

has anyone read 'amazons'

love the idea of outgrowing writers, tho. like you can read salinger's long/short stories after you graduate from college and you'll be okay, but don't try to re-read catcher in the rye* or it will destroy you forever.

* i realize that some people can re-read catcher with no problem, but i think you catch my drift.

parts of underworld are jokey but there is a sort of ponderousness to it, i see what you mean

haha book threads exist just to piss me off i will have you know i reread catcher last year and it destroyed me. maybe i'm a case of arrested development.

'amazons' is p fun iirc

ooo i want to read amazons. how would one read it though? it's long out of print, right?

i think it's weird to pin the idea of him being less appealing somehow on his moment having faded; i know there was def a time when he was v zeitgeisty - there is that quote where he's talking about the fading relevance of linear narratives, which i'm sure he wasn't alone in recognising, or nec a pioneer of but which he does sorta epitomise, i think - but i feel like the change in context for readers can just make the books a different thing, portraying the beginning of an era rather than capturing the present moment.

i think i get the idea that he's college-y because there's a looseness to those early novels that is very invested in the poetry of how everything fits together, flitting between the beauty of the language to the new, cold landscape he's drawing. & maybe you have to 'buy into' that, have romantic faith in it the way you do at 20.

& idk, i like those last few novels, though i guess they're operating within his parameters, yeah, & the digressions of point omega aren't as shocking or absorbing as the earlier novels. but then we're onto some joseph heller shit about not transcending a framework that you drew the lines of.

xp, this is true, about the humourlessness, but i feel like that's more a thing of the austerity & anomie of the newer books, and the hyperactivity of white noise, &c. he's almost like love & death era woody allen in that, providing an additional sheen of absurdity to the very thing he's discussing.

i reread catcher last year and it destroyed me.

that's why i added the disclaimer--i bet you could read any book at the right time and place for you to read the book and it would wipe you out.

re amazons: think i bought the paperback off amazon p cheaply but a while ago. then lent it to someone & never got it back :\

okay but i also want to make the point that you are rong about catcher in the rye >:[

oh yah never mind you can get it on amazon.

okay but i also want to make the point that you are rong about catcher in the rye >:[

we're just talking about tastes here though! both of us are right, both of us are rong, even tho you are rong.

it's been a while since i've read white noise, but that's not what i took away from it.

yeah i cld be mistaken, or reading things that max is taking as lighthearted to be moralizing, i just strongly remember the whole 'here they are right back at the supermarket' stuff as being really hectoring/overbearing and theres lots of good writing in white noise

xps - haha naw i like salinger a lot

i love salinger! just don't think catcher would "resonate" with me like it once did

i think part of the reason i remain so attached to don delillo even though i haven't read him in a while is that he seems like such a lovely person, at least the notion of him you get through his work, as opposed to basically every other writer i like. i don't want to be disabused of this notion so don't tell me if he's a wifebeater or something.

but isn't the deal w/salinger that he captures a point in *your* life, being young & romantic, & w/delillo that he captured a moment in the twentieth century

if you read catcher as an adult it's all about wanting to protect holden and phoebe and it's a whole nother intense experience.

i mean maybe i misread white noise! or thought that delillo was "in on the joke" when he wasnt--but one thing that kept/keeps WN from feeling "collegey" to me is that it doesnt take its 'moralizing' or 'pondering' too seriously in general (there are obviously places where it does) and this keeps it from being unbearably 'MODERNITY DO U SEE.'

he is in on the joke; that book is hilarious

meanwhile falling man and point omega are both VIOLENCE AND WAR DO U SEE non-stop

not that i didnt enjoy them

catcher is wonderful but i hated it as a teenager.

i liked it as a kid but reading it now i don't think i got it at all. it's way better than i realized, for sure.

yeah i think regardless of how much you like it as a kid you don't get it until you're an adult. i dunno i guess there are some smart kids out there.

sorry i derailed delillo thread

are you going to reread catcher in the rye or what

don derail

are you going to reread catcher in the rye or what

already told you i was reading suttree! guess i'm going to have to.

<3

yeah i didnt really like salinger as a teenager either but i enjoyed him a lot in my early 20s. whereas i think i might have really liked delillo in my teens but was p cold to him in early 20s. idk if that really means anything tho

to atone for my part in this don derailo i will pick up 'mao ii' again, which i have a mostly unread copy of in my apt

endzone is better

its set at a college tho

i dont think i have a copy of endzone unfortunately and i already bought like six books this month so

i am supposed to be reading couples by updike but maybe i will read endzone instead.

More like THROW-Updike

hey now

More like PORTA-John THROW-Updike

haha you're insane

i sortof like his later stuff more? like the names is my favourite but falling man, the body artist and point omega are all amazing. they kindof hover enigmatically in and out of intelligibility. i think point omega has a certain sense of humour, sort of parodic and sly but yeah fundamentally different from the kind of ribbing he would have given the main characters a decade ago. there's less commentary, he kindof lets the dude in point omega's terribleness manifest itself, ridicule itself. its not outright funny or anything though, its irony is something more distant. also the way the book is the man against a white wall telling his story, the textual layers are always collapsing on each other or something. it made me feel funny for days.

my college-y remark might have come about because i first experienced delillo at college. i only went to college for a year and it was a really sad experience. but one bright spot of my year - there were two. i had a radio show on the college station and i enjoyed that. - was my english class where my professor - Dr. Herbert S. Guggenheim! - had us read Great Jones Street and The Names. Actually, the books he taught in my class were those two and The Slaves Of New York and Goodnight Moon! Ah, the 80's. Anyway, his class was great and he was really smart - and a good poet and he told me that he wanted to write a biography of Delillo someday - and he got me high on Don. When i moved to Philly the next year, I gobbled up all the stuff I hadn't read. So, Delillo was mixed in with all the other late-80's stuff i dug when i was 19/20. Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, etc. and I kinda thought he would be someone who I would follow for as long as he wrote. kinda like a new Bellow for me to worship. it didn't turn out that way, but he was an inspiration at the time, and, like catcher in the rye or any other formative reading experience, certainly memorable and an important part of my development as a reader.

cosmopolis is very, very funny but it's played so straight-faced (like everything else he's written after underworld) that it's pretty easy to read as a Serious Commentary on Our Money Mad World or wtfever.

i'll admit four books into the new millennium that i think dude pretty much shot his final big shot with underworld and all we're getting are echoes from the impact now.

americana through running dog are all varying degrees of hilarious and/or self-mocking, though. players is the only one that's completely dry (even though there's jokes in there of a particularly sour sort) and sort of a trial run at the seriousness of stuff like the names and mao ii. (players is also his worst, in my opinion, by a wide margin.)

I've read all of Cheever several times except for the insignificant final novella yet have barely finished one Updike novel.

DeLillo leaves me cold too. Libra is my favorite because I love Stone's JFK.

just to be clear, i like john updike's books

updike more like bunkdike

love cheever (stories mostly) and updike a whole bunch.

when john updike died i got in a fight with the table is the table

thats how much i like updike

i like delillo more though. i like delillo more than most writers!!

i have pretty college-y taste, though

delillo is funnier than updike

also less sex

true! lotta vaginas in updike's stuff

Like many northeastern writers, he doesn't know what to do about them in fiction.

that's why they turn to sodomy.

things that old people should never do in books 1) predict the future 2) describe sex

agree, kind of on 2, as for 1, i dunno Infinite Jest has some hilarious and accurate future prediction stuff

the way people watch tv, with the streaming and stuff--not the joke about the Limbaugh administration

dfw was not an old person when he wrote ij

i missed the old person thing

yeah but dude was only 33 when he wrote it

xposts

I don't think that the word 'college-y' has been helpful here.
I don't think I know what it means, in relation to literary form or style.
I think It might be better to have one or two other, clearer adjectives instead of it.

It does seem that DD went off form - certainly from reading Body Artist and Cosmopolis.

People say 'DD is great at a sentence level' and I always thought or wanted to think that. But can anyone quote actual sentences from DD that are great, esp eg on their own?

If they are sentences that say things like 'This is how it is going to be, this world, this late in the century, this crazed network of waste and defiled remains' then I am not sure I will agree that they're great

Admittedly that's not much of a DD pastiche as I haven't really read his prose for a year.

But can anyone quote actual sentences from DD that are great, esp eg on their own?

"The sky is low and gray, the roily gray of sliding surf."

"that was the year he rodethe subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track."

"Here they come, marching into American sunlight."

"The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years."

They're all great. Why would you want to read them individually though?

just opening up white noise to random pages--

"Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers—immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass."

"A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first, began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, a living person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence, a little amazed."

(that last one is great AND the setup to a joke, too)

"Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There's no end in sight."

and then

"Branch hasn't met the current Curator and doubts if he ever will. They talk on the telephone, terse as snowbirds but unfailingly polite, fellow bookmen after all."

so great!

x-post, IK:

I don't know whether one would want to read them individually (one might), but I think this is arguably implied by the very idea of 'he's good sentence by sentence'. It's clearly an analytical and logical question that we can't and needn't solve here (but it might, in theory, be interesting to work out): ie if a sentence is considered good, should it stand up on its own right, or does 'good' here really mean 'good in the context of other things', 'good as a link between A and B' etc.

I'm afraid I think those 3 that Mr Que quotes are not very good; they get worse as they go. The first could be from Elizabeth Bishop, is OK and quite rhythmic and juicy; the second is pretty bare and not special; the third seems actively portentous or relying on an unearned / corny effect. I prefer Klata's example but still don't think it's brilliant.

i also like delillo more than updike. updike does not come across as a lovely person in his work.

I honestly don't think those other examples (xposts) are great either - not trying to be contrarian here - they tend to show DD's penchant for portentousness. The 'bookmen' one seems a bit better to me.

overall these examples are making me think DD seems windy and empty, more so than I would like to hope he really is

I'm afraid I think those 3 that Mr Que quotes are not very good;

does it matter that you think they are "good" or do they make you want to keep reading? every sentence quoted here makes me want to read more.

t's clearly an analytical and logical question that we can't and needn't solve here

it's not really that complicated to me. it's like "do you get pleasure from reading this sentence."

"There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons to be pondered, solved, ignored. It had to be this way, Win admitted to himself. The men at his level were spawning secrets that quivered like reptile eggs."

i mean, boom.

libra is the high point of "serious" delillo for me because in every way it works as a good thriller but the language, the language.

i love you pinefox but quoting from books you're inclined to think ill of is a trap! iirc the only person who passes this test for you is james joyce.

Couldn't help but imagine Ed Asner and Jack Lemmon either.

I'm happy for it not to be complicated, I was trying to respond to what I thought was Mr Klata's possibly plausible sense that sentences shouldn't be assessed in isolation. But if they can be, good.

How about the plays? I was flipping through one at someone's house the other day and it seemed sort of good.

i love you pinefox

I'm not very inclined to think ill of White Noise and Libra - I think they are two of the best American or modern novels I have ever read.

I'm just a bit suspicious of what I am coming to see (more and more as I see these lines quoted) as a DD schtick (heavy, abstract, ominous) that no longer feels so convincing as I may have thought in the past.

But in WN I think it's just as convincing as it needs to be because the book is pretty thoroughly a comedy.

I guess it's possible that the whole schtick tends to comedy at some level.

Stevie T told me Underworld was a waste of time, as he gave me his copy, and I admit that I have always implicitly trusted him on this point.

I think there is a general thing, related to what Mr Klata said: that you can read a book and think 'that was beautifully written' and then not be able to locate why, in any one place, though you thought the achievement could be found in individual sentences in that way.

I was stunned by how Gatsby was written but I'm not sure whether I could identify why if I looked now.

This might suggest that literary effect is mysteriously cumulative.

arguably a large part of the point of joyce is that no sentence taken out of context is any good at all. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

okay but that's all mr. que was saying about delillo. within the context of the larger literary experience, there is a lot of pleasure sentence-by-sentence. a lot like Gatsby, really. i remember this particularly wrt Underworld because it was hard for me to hold onto anything macro about that giant book as i was reading it.

xpersht.

the question of cumulative value is interesting, though: i think we're used to talking about it in relation to the 'ideas' in play in novels (like enh in 'middlemarch' the very wide-focus stuff about how the scenario is set up is less interesting than the series of iterations of the town vs the country, the working vs the leisure class); and, too at a higher structural level than that of the sentence (the way that that last plays out in the way the individual books of the novel are put together, the way they find ways to transition between the two to begin with and by the end don't have to); but as for how any particular eliotic sentence finds its way in the overall schema it's hard to come to a conclusive answer

partly, i guess, there's an implied belief that it will take care of itself, which to be fair is probably nine-tenths of how nine-tenths of novels are written

i suspect that there are limit cases where sentence by sentence structure could be looked at which might or might not fail to be elusive in the end. cf. the thread on whatsisname, javier marias.

i think delillo DOES have sentences where you can isolate them and go "wow" but mostly i think he works in the paragraph as the main structuring form.

not to liken them all to jokes, or entirely so, but there's a certain build to the grafs when he's really on. the last fragment i posted above from libra is from the middle of that paragraph so there's multiple builds going on. there's a real (thriller-like?) controlled momentum from peak to peak or insight to insight or whatever thing happening when he's working at his peak.

Those "great" sentences are what I soured on in underworld and after, I think. I agree with pinefox about the "penchant for portentousness." Eventually I just felt like there's all this stuff that isn't that important and here delillo is with not much to really say about it, but saying it really purple and really strongly and I just start to get this suspicion that I'm being put on. Individual sentences quoted here or that I could look up are really great. But when that's all you have, with little movement, little point, but just lots of windy greatness, it's like the horror movie effect -- you can build up anticipation for the mystery, but once folks see the monster then it never lives up to expectations. So you just keep delaying and promising, but...

It could be fond memories and little else, but I seem to remember his earlier books suffered from this much less.

Amis on DeLillo:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/11/21/111121crbo_books_amis

Martin no doubt chuckled as he typed that first paragraph dismissing chunks of Shakespeare and George Eliot. "Ain't this a corker?" he said, slapping his knee.

That line of thinking may clear his conscience about Yellow Dog as well.

That first paragraph is beautifully written and 100% OTM

Knowing Mahr-tin, I'm surprised he doesn't prefer Shakespeare's comedies.

humor doesn't age well tho

As You Like It is more a showcase for a fantastic character than a collection of zings though.

lol amis would make such a good ilm poster

"Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee."

man this is the second thing by amis i read this year i don't dislike

Yeah that's great. For someone I hate, I do agree with him quite a lot.

What was the first thing?

draft suicide note

mao II is p rough going atm but its... i guess interesting is the word i mean but that sounds more superior than i feel

fwiw i think m.amis is a half decent critic

i think delillo DOES have sentences where you can isolate them and go "wow" but mostly i think he works in the paragraph as the main structuring form.

Part of what's great about DeLillo's sentences, I think, is the rhythm -- so his paragraphs allow for some nice momentum to accumulate.

Or you have sentences like this, which is literally the first thing I just opened up to in Underworld:

"Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport -- how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fist-balled in their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in minutes, bags dragging on the shiny floor."

Sort of cliche DeLillo, with all those "crowd"s and "crowded"s!

But man, that beautifully spilling prose is part of what enraptured me when I read that book in college.

Also re "college-y": I totally did my English-major oral exams on White Noise and was like, "It's fiction but it's also cultural criticism!!! @$&Q(#*&Q%" and referenced, like, Baudrillard.

*daps*

delillo was on some npr program today that i caught the tailend of - i don't think i've heard his speaking voice before. it was old school noo yawk, but a bit more subtle than the most lol-worthy examples. totally makes sense as he is as old as my mother(!). grew up near arthur ave. i don't see him in that tradition of ethnic immigrant writers like henry roth, james farrell etc. he is a bit later, maybe that's why he seems so much more "assimilated"

haha, delillo writing some sentimental immigrant enclave coming of age tale would be the funniest thing i can imagine

Haha yeah that sentence is consummate delillio. There's a whole bunch right with it -- the shape, basically, the momentum and sound and the build of the crowdedness and the neat way it elides into the image of a shiny, underpopulated, floor. But also the way it gets lost briefly in the individuals and their stories, and then the type of thing that gets me frustrated with "the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments" which is evocative but only in a vague way and promises that it *would* be interesting to explore that sort of microhistory, when, if you really think about it a moment, it actually seems sort of boring and same-y. And take that over and over for page after page and I start to feel very much "who cares."

just finished angel esmeralda. thought the middle section was the best, though there was a lot of great stuff in the last few stories too. didnt much like the first two. mostly just wanted to post the author photo which i love

http://www.guernicamag.com/incl/img/upl/2007/07/DeLillo_Don3.jpg

probably reading too much into it but that "look" seems so delillo to me: grave and joking and slightly confused all at once

i finished it today too!

the last 3 all feel v much in the same mold & i love them to varying degrees. most of the others left me cold. ive def read the title story before, also

yeah id read a few of them before too. midnight in dostoevsky was in the nyer a couple years ago iirc?

i think u rc

delillo is one of the authors i'd like to see read just bc he seems interesting. he has a slight lisp, & an old new york accent.

i love his voice, yeah

I mentioned it in either the reading or DeLillo sandbox thread, but after finding Underworld a major disappointment over the holiday break I turned to these stories with relief. I was struck mostly by "Midnight in Dostoevsky," a lovely depiction of how friendship and fiction make life bearable in a college town.

A good read:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/different-kind-delirium/

Yes, that's excellent. It does make me wonder, though, whether his stories would be enhanced or diminished by characters with will and force. Some of them do have those qualities, and as the article notes they're the most memorable ones.

I can't remember whether it was itt that there was a discussion of DD's writing & how much of it was excerptable or quotable or memorable in bitesize chunks, rather than as undulating waves, but (reading the stories right now):

They gathered after dusk at a windy place between bridge approaches, seven or eight people drawn by the word of one or two, then thirty people drawn by the seven, then a tight silent crowd that grew bigger but no less respectful, two hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that industrial desolation that breaks your heart with its fretful Depression beauty - the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.

Wedged, they came and park their cars if they had cars, six or seven to a car, parking tilted on a high shoulder or in the factory side streets, and they wedged themselves onto the concrete island between the expressway and the pocked boulevard, feeling the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of madcap traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom - an advertising sign scaffolded high above the river-bank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that run incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut.

Edgar sat across from Gracie in the refectory. She ate her food without tasting it because she'd decided years ago that taste was not the point. The point was to clean the plate.

Cosmopolis

cronenberg v delillo WOW

Didn't love the book, but this looks like it might be pretty good!

i saw some newspaper thing about this that was all "and teenage heartthrob bob pattinson gets his wanger out maybe as much as three times" and didn't mention that it was cronenberg

the book grew on me. had i not bought it for full price the week it came out (whyyy) i would probably have liked it more, definitely liked it more the second time

how old is eric parker (this may be the main dude's name and may be a name i just invented)? i don't remember if it is specified but for some reason i always pictured him at the very least a jowly forty-something, this may have been deliberately ignoring where it is specified he is young and hott though. either way i think it's an interesting project for pattinson to do (makes sense too considering his kvetching about the whole vampire thing)

just read Cosmopolis... Eric Packer is sposed to be 28 and buff ("6% body fat" he tells his female bodyguard in mid-coitus).

I hadn't read anything of DD's since White Noise; liked a lot of the writing but the two-sides-of-the-sociopathic-coin thing with the anomic ex-employee didn't really work for me. Lotsa Occupy-ish/civic rebellion notes that will be nicely timed if Cronenberg went that route.

Libra excepted, everything I've read by this man has disappointed me somehow. I finished the uneven-by-definition Harlot's Ghost and it covers much of the thematic and chronological terrain as Underworld but with more panache; it doesn't have that sense of turning the page and finding yourself in another ho-hum scenario.

I did love the Hoover-Tolson bits though.

where should I start with the pre-WN ones?

i kind of like 'running dog'

mainly for the big reveal though. actually it has the thing where i like one strand and not the other. 'end zone' sort of succeeds at what it wants to do, i guess; 'americana' passes by sort of pleasurably. 'ratner's star' is a stanislaw lem novel. i keep meaning to read the rest of these, though i'm not really sure why.

oh thanks morbs btw, saved me rereading that, i guess i can go and read gt. jones st. now or smth

that's weird. i feel like libra is patchy. the first fifty or so pages is all stage setting. not even exposition. and then its starts to bleed into memories you don't remember having. all these intimations of themes. the way it fleshes itself out into corporeality. its almost over when the shots ring and history finally becomes something with a physical presence, not these endless ghosts of history. i think the names is the most satisfying.

huh i am giving 'underworld' a go and right there in the opening pages he claims that 'longing on a large scale is what makes history' and it made me think of libra, all that yearning

'americana' has some really cool stuff in it iirc

i need to remind myself to get a copy of 'the names' to reread

i think i am going to get the new volume of caro's johnson when it comes out and read libra after this

americana was very readable but i remember almost nothing about it

it is that kind of book, i think. meant to just flow through you, condition your thoughts a little. it's indexed on google books, sometimes i remember a snippet and look it up.

reading 'underworld' i feel like how i felt when i was seven and would get lego sets for my birthday. like just opening them up and holding a couple of blocks in my hand and toying with them and understanding how one or two fit together but just being completely incapable of connecting these single blocks to the race car on the cover of the box, that these were somehow constituent parts of the whole

Ha, Lamp that is a good description. I also feel that way about the other guy whose initials are TP

Tom Petty?

toilet paper

btw this thread title is so gruesomely ilx, really just unbearable

i should rescreen underworld maybe some day

btw when it came out my sister gave me a signed copy, but its a galley not a 1st edish hardcover the jerk

lol i think this thread title is abominable but is it particularly ilx-ish?

'don delillo: dud or topiary-spanking DUD'

its this pernicious tactic of implicating everyone in the most banal challop

also like weirdly passive agressive defensive thread titles 'dont read if you dont like...' 'is there a thread for X yet'

i quite like 'is there a thread for x yet' but it seems like a device whose time is past

i was looking at these two posts:

http://www.guernicamag.com/incl/img/upl/2007/07/DeLillo_Don3.jpg

― max, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 00:59 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

probably reading too much into it but that "look" seems so delillo to me: grave and joking and slightly confused all at once

― max, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 01:00 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

& for a good ten seconds i was trying to work out how a windcheater and buttondown could be grave and joking and slightly confused

when i worked in a photo lab that picture was on the bulletin board in my darkroom

how were you able to see it?

man u can feel those eyes on u

i enjoy this thread titles qn mark

I am so sick of this 'challops' word.

think it's used rather indiscriminately.

just like yr mom

lamp's mom.... a disappointment?

When it got cold they banged the pipes to let the super know. They had a right to decent heat.

beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VGtUrVOz8o&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9uojwaN7E

'save the rosenbergs':

http://www.apimages.com/OneUp.aspx?st=k&kw=rosenberg%20leaflets&showact=results&sort=relevance&intv=None&sh=10&kwstyle=or&adte=1339582174&pagez=60&cfasstyle=AND&rids=70e2e64fb75044a6be919c6a4dc0951f&dbm=PY2000&page=1&xslt=1&mediatype=Photo

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CEkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvault.fbi.gov%2Frosenberg-case%2Frosenberg-referrals%2Frosenberg-referrals-part-89-of%2Fat_download%2Ffile&ei=oGXYT-yZKOGW2QX43ayADw&usg=AFQjCNGHAPoMY3UjCMKDw6O9Hs61Doajiw&sig2=Y9LDHQHyoI8KPb9SFATvSQ

i got to that 'nature spelled backwards' sentence and looked at it for a while going : serutan? what? huh?

what was with the american fifties and laxatives, by the way, i don't understand that either

another thing i don't understand, the kid making fun of little lee harvey oswald repeating "i say all right"

basically i don't understand this book/america very much

i kind of assumed it was a foghorn leghorn thing cuz little lee was from the south? as this was when they were in new york.

ha, i started looking up foghorn leghorn catchphrases when i read it. was that actually a thing that he said? i have not actually seen a foghorn leghorn cartoon for a decade and a half.

i did too, to go with my other videos, but i couldn't find any of him saying that. still i am convinced that that is what the kids' teasing is meant to allude to. i dunno. maybe it's some other southernism.

in that picture above he looks like an ex-cia agent going to seed.

i wish that the rest of libra were as on-all-cylinders as the first couple chapters.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/16/Don_delillo_nyc_02.jpg/800px-Don_delillo_nyc_02.jpg

I think it is. What's lacking for you?

an investment in voice? i don't know. maybe it was a bad book to be picking up and putting down.

huh, that's about where i'm paused at the moment. lee in the army.

you know, i do not understand your reading habits

so i am making a conscious effort to barrel through the second half and it is working a lot better, i like the jack ruby sections a lot

Tony Astorina walked in, doing a friendly little boxer's bob and weave. It looked like all the motion he was capable of. He had that expression of where's the coffee. Jack had coffee right here.

i gotcher…

my reading habits = get pulled into the wake of something else, go with it. and now i have a course to prep so all other reading is effectively dropped.

i started rereading white noise the day after i finished this and that i finished in a day. to be fair i didn't have anything else to do that day. to be fair i did but i didn't do it.

reading the names now. delillo sort of rewards this kind of thing. after coming off libra's conspiracies-and-death bit there's the narrator in noise talking about how plots are an attempt to stave off death. and murray jay siskind's "two kinds of people in the world: killers and diers."

there was something in the first couple dozen pages of the names that seemed retrospectively redolent of the succeeding novel, too, but i forgot to mark the page, so nevermind.

and there's more ordinary train-spotting like Running Dog (the magazine) in one of the books before Running Dog (the book), and Murray Jay Siskind is apparently in his pseudonym sports novel

i wasn't sure how i felt about libra in the end. i found myself wondering how i would feel about it if JFK's death had some significance for me as an originary event of whatever. ('the society i lived in', enh.) i read stephen king's jfk-dies! novel recently and i found it much easier to triangulate where i stood on that one, on how-i-feel-about-this vs how-this-novel's-implied-author-does vs its-implied-reader. w/r/t libra i am adrift.

i don't know that i care so much about that - seems too old - but it does perhaps have some kind of 'lyfe in america' resonance that it wouldn't for you. i like delillo, of course, but i got interested in libra lately because i was thinking about why the creators/writers of 'homicide' chose to link the atmosphere of paranoia/conspiracy on the show to the lincoln assassination rather than kennedy.

with delillo it seems you're supposed to do that triangulation partly as mediated by what you think abt History, which i think fuck all about, so yeah i dunno. did you ever read that berube (?) essay on marvin lundy in underworld?

i did not. should i? i don't actually like underworld very much. homicide as in the show with munch? where does lincoln come into it?

i dunno about History as such -- seems like that's only really a concern of the two big ones -- but there's this longstanding fascination with recent events, recent developments, whatever's-in-the-culture. this is sort of a nascent thought but i feel like he's starting to date in this really interesting way, that white noise in depicting a society we've recognisably moved in from has this whole extra patina of interest. in terms of content and in terms of affect.

i only ever read white noise in college, don't remember if it was my first delillo or after/during underworld, but i found it pretty lame, i think partly because of that. it seemed WAY moved-on-from. maybe that's just the way 80s novels work though. or it's a 'late academia' thing. from what i recall my impression of white noise was vaguely like the one recently to chris kraus' 'i love dick'. like, god, nobody wants to read about academics being themselves. or academics made grotesque.

i don't know, i thought the berube was good. yeah, homicide. crosetti is always going around reading about lincoln, obsessed with figuring out whether some different way it went down could plausibly have been covered up all these years. (he sounds basically like the kennedy assassination obsessives that are familiar to us, except about lincoln.) it really sets the tone, but it's not a feature of the show they take much care to thematize / explain.

white noise is probably his most "obvious" novel, at least of what i've read.

Reading Underworld was one of the more dispiriting experiences with a book in recent years. I wanted more Sinatra and Jackie Gleason telling bad jokes and crunching on popcorn.

or at the very least, it is hard to get past how primitive the technology he is freaking out about now seems.

Libra as a Novel About History is significantly more interesting to me than Libra as a book about the Kennedy assassination. In purely formal terms it's one of my favourite novels, its construction is ingenious. I love the way the internal narrative lags behind the external one and gradually catches up until they're running in tandem.

i enjoyed that david ferrie points out to the reader that that's happening

how many of you imagined Oliver Stone's JFK actors saying these lines?

why on earth would anyone actually have seen oliver stone's jfk i don't understand

because it's awesome...?

i think i tried to watch it once when it was on tv and i was doing other things, all i remember is kevin costner sitting on a succession of park benches

i only ever read white noise in college, don't remember if it was my first delillo or after/during underworld, but i found it pretty lame, i think partly because of that. it seemed WAY moved-on-from. maybe that's just the way 80s novels work though. or it's a 'late academia' thing. from what i recall my impression of white noise was vaguely like the one recently to chris kraus' 'i love dick'. like, god, nobody wants to read about academics being themselves. or academics made grotesque.

(...)

― j., Friday, 10 August 2012 02:18 (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

white noise is probably his most "obvious" novel, at least of what i've read.

(...)

or at the very least, it is hard to get past how primitive the technology he is freaking out about now seems.

― judith, Friday, 10 August 2012 02:23 (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is one section where he dumps in the blurb from a credit card PIN leaflet and you're like err

okay so i think i. white noise needs all the obvious stuff to set up more interesting things. -- that the various overblown sillinesses of the narrator's death-obsession lend a weight to not-quite-entirely-ironisable statements like the one about how watching children sleep is a secular equivalent to stained glass windows.

ii. that the stuff has been way dated in some dull ways for a while, and is starting to become interestingly dated. that he tries to seem up to the moment in particular ways, that the moments he has been up to are a series of moments we have moved on from, but that there's an interesting lag in the way we think we've moved on from the ways he tried to seem up-to-the-moment in those particular moments.

i don't know. a couple weeks ago i picked up briefly, of all things, d. coupland's 'microserfs' recently. there's a tonal glibness in there that's one of the resources delillo taps into all through the early stuff and at intervals later. (i think, more in white noise than in any of the other acknowledged big hitters.) the ways in white noise that delillo is glib about things get a lot more mileage out of being glib about things than the ways in microserfs in which coupland is glib about things. -- but he seems to originate a particular mode of urbanity re: 'modern life' 'the capitalist economy' 'the postmodern capitalist economy' that seems pretty huge in american fiction through, like, '89-'04.

but it seems like this interacts in weird ways with his earnest attempts to bring in the immediate matter of the time -- that someone in the body artist stays up one night watching a webcam feed. the ways the characters talk about iran in the names. (in underworld: the condom store? the riff on buying the rothko chapel? the planes in the desert?) -- that held against the obsessive nature of his writing adds up to something weird i can't nail down yet -- that for all his flaws, for all the moments it doesn't come off, these are not the failures of someone attempting to write a state-of-the-nation novel, that these attempts to capture the now are through a moving eye, an acknowledged observer -- that he doesn't seem ever to be simply nostalgic for the 19th-c novelist's authority or the modernist artist's authority, nor is he ever simply a negative image of it

which probably comes back to 'History' more than i think it does. anyway after all that i don't know if i actually think white noise is very good (i think everything he has written is a total mess, structure-wise, and white noise has a pretty good penultimate fifty pages and then an awful last fifty pages, which really doesn't help it) but it seemed like it had rewards, i don't know.

-

also i should watch more of homicide. i watched the first series, once, it was weird recognising about 50-60% of the material from the book and from later use in the wire.

"If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forwards or backwards, it means he went to Yale."

http://perival.com/delillo/amazons.html

this book is certainly something, i'll give it that

there are lots of sex scenes. some of them are 'comic'. there is a character called 'Hughes Tool'.

chauncey worthington

I am partial to DeLillo but everyone I've ever talked to has some problem with his style. I always recommend the more entertaining stuff - Underworld, even though it's long - is fun. Maybe that's trite to say, but the set pieces really are that. It helps to be in the right mood to read him. He seems to me to channel things going on in our culture. A channel is a just a vehicle for communicating something and maybe that's why his prose feels empty.

it's weird that you've only ever talked to people who are rong

Yes. Or they lack good taste in writers.

j. is so confident of winning this case, he can waste the jury's time by reading to them from this article: Rate the Super Hunks.

no jury in the world, man

Running Dog is a treat, certainly, and a good cure for reader's block. I've breezed through the first eighty-five pages; decent action and no haterbait in sight - well there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.") but I can live with that. And I'm still guessing where it's going.

ha, i found running dog kind of a slog but loved what it pulled out of its hat in the last reel

there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.")

this is all of his novels!!

the sorta ... distance between participants in conversation in DD's books is one of his strong suits imo

Great Jones Street is pretty cool too. I really don't think any writer has the kind of voice DeLillo has. Maybe I haven't read enough, but the way his dialogue works, the humor, and many other things - he seems singular to me. Oh, how I love the man.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/27/luca_zanier_photographs_the_energy_industry_in_his_series_space_and_energy.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

White Noise is hilarious. I should read more of this guy

Libra is hilarious

Body Artist, not hilarious.

also no good.

pro body artist

interested in inverse proportion to square root of length really

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/garbage-everywhere/373118/

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/137755/heres-fun-rumor-nobel-prize-literature

^^^the *only* reason to share it between DL and PR is to troll PR one last vast time

per the thread: pynchon rocks and delillo sucks

The kind of writer that Pynchon is has never won a Nobel so yeah Delillo (by himself) is a good bet

Well, then it's about time! Oh, if Pynchon wins, I will be dancing all day. And then get astonishingly drunk. Fucking hell, I want Pynchon to win so bad.

Oh, just read the article, it's about Philip Roth instead... I think an expert article on the Nobel would know that the prize has actually been split four times (Danes Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan split in 1917) and wouldn't mix up Migeul Asturias with Nelly Sachs. So in conclusion, the article is wrong, therefore Pynchon is destined to win.

👍

btw I only said that bcz -- when I last looked at the list of winners -- it seemed that the really great writers of a particular movement or undercurrent or scene seldom win: Beckett not Joyce, Kawabata not Mishima, Simon not Duras, Marquez not Borges. So the winner of er American encyclopedic novel should be Pynchon but it'll be Delillo.

dude beckett >>>>> joyce

i am not looking forward to the pinefox's return to this thread :)

xp. borges is not a boom writer. marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

I know but I think its fair to say that in people's minds Borges is the father of modern Latin American fiction and a precursor of the boom. I know it doesn't stick.

beckett >>>>> joyce

Flann O'Brien ftw

(Would've agreed, have been off Joyce till I started reading parts of the Wake via that twitter account. But again they aren't like one another anyway, just seen as part of the same 'scene')

LOL now looking at that list on wiki and more exampels: Mann not Rilke, Jelinek not Bernhard, Gide not Proust, Seferis not Cavafy, Canetti not Musil, Pasternak not Tsvetaeva, Saramago not Pessoa.

Even if I like quite a few of the writers that have won its such a load of rub!

marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

― ælərdaɪs (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, October 12, 2016 2:47 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except neruda was not a better writer than borges, but you can argue that borges didn't win it for political reasons, sure

i always thought cortazar was a better writer than marquez. llosa wrote maybe one decent book. yet the writer who encompasses all the boom's qualities is the one who did it the worse in my opinion -- marquez

neruda and borges is the right generation but very different writers. i expect it was more the great mass popularity of neruda that probably swung the judges.

vargas llosa's first three novels are all great imo, and several of his later works are decent

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

A lot of time the best die young. But Marquez was pretty clearly the right boom winner, if only for Autumn of the Patriarch. I used to love Cortazar, but the latest short story collection I tried and make my way through was severely disappointing. I'd take Juan Rulfo every day of the week instead.

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?

*starts busily reading all the winners in order*

if you listen to old peruvian dudes tell stories, you'll be reminded of vargas llosa, because he just formalized a type of popular storytelling from peru. his works do get more academic, because i guess he was a fan of russian formalism

i kind of got tired of it because i heard a bunch of old peruvian dudes tell stories in the same fashion

weirdly la catedral is the one i think is his only decent book

Neruda not Vallejo!!

I really liked One Hundred Years of Solitude when I read it a few years ago. Wonder how it stands up today. Pedro Paramo is really good.

Actually I don't know if Latin American existentialism has ever won the Nobel

juan rulfo is good stuff too

when i was a kid and into socialism, vallejo really spoke to me, as did all his melancholic verses

neruda always sounded cheesy to me, but i've grown to like a few of his poems

Yeah I like Neruda but Vallejo is all-time (esp the Spain take this cup away from me cycle) (Ok I suppose Vallejo would've been not that well-known in the 30s but I like to think there is some kind of guilt involved, like lets give Beckett the prize because its safe to do so now Modernism is accepted)

Nobel def go for kinda boring literary careerism if anything: Mann is like the perfect caricature of a Nobel winner. I think Borges didn't win, not bcz of politics (look at Mann's nationalism, Llosa is dodgy isn't he?) but because he wasn't that industrious and way past his best. His repute is based on a dozen short stories and a handful of essays. More than enough given what he wrote but these people are idiots.

it's worth looking through the blurbs they give winners, the phrase "lofty idealism" crops up a LOT :D

kipling and hamsun had *way* dodgier politics than borges or llosa (tho hamsun's turn to the dark side may have been after his prize)

It was after yeah (and it was given for Growth of the Soil which no one gives a shit about)

More dodgy pols: Eliot and LOL Churchill

oh man llosa is super dodgy, flip flopping. he wanted to run for president in the 90s but he's definitely not a politician and if memory serves, he was considered way too intellectual and not practical enough

you're right about borges, but it seems to me neruda's popularity increased because he was riding the socialist wave that was so big in south america. maybe i'm being cynical but he seemed to play his cards right, whereas borges took a huge gamble speaking out against the atrocities peron committed, but this is the machiavellic attitude of latin american politics that so many leftists are comfortable with

borges was a small c conservative who backed the dictatorship in argentina in the 70s - for a while, was later bit put off by the body count. neruda was a stalinist.

with all the promises that the peron gov't had made, who wouldn't support it? the difference is when the "body count" was released, borges had the decency to come to his senses

borges never supported peron, but he was p happy with regular old military dictatorship.

neruda never voiced support, or criticism, of peron.

exactly, which is why i said "he played his cards right"

as they say in spanish, "se hizo el tonto"

Neruda was Chilean.

lol they speak spanish there buddy

and jim is referring to borges's meeting with pinochet, but that's a separate argument, and borges said that he had no idea what pinochet was involved in

neruda wasn't political opportunist, he was generally very true to his stalinism. criticizing peron wouldn't have been controversial, and in fact the communists in argentina weren't huge fans.

borges is no angel, as most latin american conservatives of his time he was quite happy for liberal democracy to be overturned if it helped keep the status quo - which in latin america was massive inequality and quasi-feudalism.

he was a bit squeamish when the bodies started to pile up, which makes him more empathetic than many, but hardly unblemished.

gotta take off from work, but ya, i don't wholly agree with you

will try to reply later

we really took our eye off the ball in THIS thread

took yr 'troll PR one last vast time' line and ran wild

ya i'd love to discuss this further with jim but this is not the thread (it involves a lot of political understanding of latin american "left" and "right" and how they're not equal to left and rigth concepts as say americans or canadians think of them)

sorry

we really took our eye off the ball in THIS thread

― mark s, Thursday, 13 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A beat writer won it. My theory holds.

What do I win?

dylan not cohen

Sorry I just read James Morrison on the other thread. He wins.

ginsberg is considered dylan's life long mentor though and has pretty openly said he is influenced by him

xp

cohen more of a traditional beat poet, though, you're right

ok to bring this back to don delillo: really liked underworld but do you not feel he maybe goes too far with tying everything together with the idea of underworld. like there's some mafia dudes - UNDERWORLD - there's a guy doing graffiti in subway tunnels - UNDERWORLD - there's some nuclear waste being buried in Kazakhstan - UNDERWORLD, etc.

xp I was just riffing on xyzzz's "beckett not joyce" &c

philip roth on his agent's sofa, sadly watching the liver going cold for the last time

― mark s, Thursday, October 13, 2016 12:23 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(unsure why i said "for the last time" -- CLEARLY NOT FOR THE LAST TIME)

Trying to picture Martin Amis right now.

picture an entire body made of tin ear

- UNDERWORLD

Underworld was awful. The zapruder bit was awful. The bit about Edgar Hoover was awful. Some of the writing was amazingly skillful but AMERICA in all caps is such a banal subject.

jaoo-dae!

I think it was at least half a great book.

Probably never got more electrifying than the Pafko at the Wall opening unfortunately. Amazing piece of writing, that.

Any recommendations from the last decade or so of DeLillo novels?

I thought Zero K was just ok, but I read it pretty soon after Underworld so I might have just been a little overDeLilloed at that point. He has a new one out now, doesnt he?

it was disappointing imo

last decade? nah

im gonna read the new one anyway. i liked point omega (maybe his most straightforwardly pretentious novel) but zero k not so much, felt very conventional and really just a rehash of earlier stuff that he's rehashed enough at this point (without the elliptical refinement of his more severely minimal stuff post underworld). looking down through his list of novels im less convinced he had a 'classic' period and the ones that really stand out for me ('the names,' 'libra' and 'falling man') are not come before and after much less interesting ones. (i do tend to find his most ambitious stuff fairly tedious. Ratners star is not as clever as it thinks it is and Underworld is infuriating.)

Also there's a review in the most recent LRB of the new one that i haven't read in case spoilers and also bc its by andrew o hagan but it might helpful?

I've only read Great Jones Street. I had two problems with it:

- the main character was a cipher, and since he's also the narrator it left the book bloodless. He has elements of Dylan/Jagger/Lennon as convenient from moment to moment, but I never felt DeLillo actually got into the character.
- like J. G. Ballard, the story was more a scenario being explained than a plot that we see working out. That's perhaps an obvious pitfall when the whole book takes place (as I recall) in one apartment.

I did walk past the actual Great Jones Street in New York, it's about as wide as it is long and only has a handful of buildings on it.

“Your wife’s hair is a living wonder,” Murray said, looking closely into my face as if to communicate a deepening respect for me based on this new information.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“She has important hair.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“I hope you appreciate that woman.”
“Absolutely.”
“Because a woman like that doesn’t just happen.”
“I know it.”
“She must be good with children. More than that, I’ll bet she’s great to have around in a family tragedy. She’d be the type to take control, show strength and affirmation.”
“Actually she falls apart. She fell apart when her mother died.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“She fell apart when Steffie called from camp with a broken bone in her hand. We had to drive all night. I found myself on a lumber company road. Babette weeping.”
“Her daughter, far away, among strangers, in pain. Who wouldn’t?”
“Not her daughter. My daughter.”
“Not even her own daughter.”
“No.”
“Extraordinary. I have to love it.”