Don DeLillo Books

This is the one Delillo novel I consistently re-read. I love Bucky Wunderlick! People are rating this as a Delillo novel and not on its own merit. True, not one of Delillo's best, but, my god, look at what he's written. They can't all be the best. If this was written by any other author, this would be a cult classic. The themes of this novel - celebrity, language, artistic creation - are the foundations of all Delillo novels to come. If you want to know where the germination of his ideas come from (and you should read all his novels in order to see his ideas germinate - including Amazons for the origins of White Noise) read Great Jones Street. Read it as an exceptional novel, not an OK Delillo novel.

This is a great postmodern novel that really examines what it means to be human through the lenses of Bucky, the superstar who has chosen to withdraw himself from the public. In this novel, DeLillo brings up issues such as one's fear of being immobile, and thus objectified and dead; the question of human space; the changeability of human beings--"structural transposition"; humanness--what is "human"? To some extent we are like the grotesque, handicapped boy in this novel: we all have an animal side, and we all bite from time to time. This is the first DeLillo novel that I read, and I have to say that it really intrigued me and got me thinking about issues that I've never thought about before; issues that are wholly relevant and important to our lives in this postmodern, decadent world where nothing is definite.

General consensus has that this is one of Delillo's lesser novels and I really can't disagree. However, I don't think it's completely terrible either, it's short and has enough passages to recommend at least a quick reading of it. One of his early works from the 70s, it involves rock star Bucky who suddenly decides he doesn't want to be a rock star anymore and goes into seclusion, with all kind of rumors swirling about him. People constantly visit him and try to convince him to come back and he gives them evasive answers and flatout denials. Meanwhile, other stuff happens. And that's pretty much the plot. You can see why some people aren't exactly fond of this one. For a certified rock star, you don't really get much of a sense of Bucky as a musician, which may make sense since he's given all that up, but even when people describe what his band plays, you can't quite see how he would have become so ridiculously famous as he apparently is. It doesn't help that, as others have noted, Delillo cannot write rock lyrics to save his life at this point in time. Some chapters are comprised entirely of snippets from his songs, and it proves that Delillo was right to go into prose writing and not help out King Crimson or anything. But those don't bother me too much since I just skim the lyrics and move on to chapters with people talking. I'm not sure where Delillo was actually going with this story, he seems to be trying to do a cross-section of life in NYC, and then at other times he's attempting to satirize the culture and examine the rock and roll lifestyle. But in trying to do all of that, he really doesn't succeed in really dissecting any of them. The plot, for what it's worth, mostly consists of Bucky sitting in his apartment either talking to his neighbors, or to the people visiting him. Interesting but not terribly exciting, especially since Delillo's characters don't normally talk like real people. At his best, dialogue becomes almost a dance, as two people dart and stab at each other. In this book, it becomes one character giving a really long speech that seems almost stream of consciousness and doesn't really amount to anything. When the plot seems to pick up steam later on, you aren't exactly sure what's going on (it involves both a set of "mountain tapes" Bucky recorded and some new drug that people want) or why it's happening. About the biggest selling point is Delillo's prose, which was incisive even at this point, he's nowhere near his peak and the narration isn't consistent in that respect, but he does whip out a number of well worded paragraphs over the course of the novel. As I said, a quick read, but probably more for completists only, since he's done more memorable or interesting work elsewhere. Has anyone ever tried to set his lyrics to music, even just based on the descriptions of Bucky's band given in the novel (which was a lot of screaming, if I understand correctly?) . . . I'd be curious to hear what people come up with.

GREAT JONES STREET is a novel set in the 70's that is as relevant now as when it was first published. The main character - an AWOL rock musician - with shades of Dylan or Lennon attempts to escape the life of celebrity only to find his disappearing act, in mid tour, has made him that much more an enigma, raising the torch of his celebrity. With the much publicized saga of the late Kurt Cobain, an artist drained by commerce and ultimately destroyed by it, GREAT JONES STREET forshadows the struggle of artists within the system of commerce and capitalism of the United States. It is a novel about fame, and commerce, and the rights of the individual in society whether they be famous or not. It doesn't have the taught language of UNDERWORLD or the magnificent LIBRA but it is worth the time. A definite precursor to the grand themes of LIBRA, Delillo's finest novel.

Let's start with this: the lyrics that DeLillo writes for Bucky Wunderlich, I mean Wunderlick are just short of pathetic. But let's own up to this too: most rock 'n' roll lyrics look faintly ridiculous on the page. You can print Dylan maybe, but hardly anybody else. If you think I'm kidding, take out your liner notes from your favorite album and read them to a friend. Too embarrassed to finish? My point exactly.
I am prejudiced by my own New York history, but I think that this is a fairly successful novel about life in the city at the end of the sixties. (The sixties, you know weren't really over until the late 70's). Some of the characters-Michelle for example-are merely talky standins for the author. Globke, on the other hand may be the author in his weakest moments and that's a lot of fun to speculate upon.
Finally, the end of the book with its vague messianic suggestions is one of the finest epitaph for its era. Maybe, it says, just maybe we have all gone off to some other place to perform acts of kindness and good will. Maybe we stopped chasing and started changing.

It's a hopeful little idea and a hopeful little book.

Having recently read several of his excellent later novels ((*White Noise,* *Libra,* *Mao II,* *Cosmopolis*)), I was primed to be disappointed by this earlier DeLillo effort...and I wasn't disappointed in my expectation that I'd be disappointed.

*Running Dog* is a curious novel--a kind of metaphysical/existential detective story written in a sometimes jarringly noir style. This is the kind of novel in which the men all sound tough and jaded and so do all the women. No one actually calls anyone a `dame,' but it seems like they could at any moment. Its that kind of dialogue, especially in the early going, and it takes some time to adjust yourself to this cliché detective-fiction patois, especially if youre accustomed to the exquisite dialogue of DeLillo's later work. But you do adjust, and it does get better eventually, and by the end the novel hits its stride.

The "mystery" surrounds the legend of a film shot in Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II. There are rumors that its a Nazi porno flick starring the studly Fuhrer himself. Thats quite a juicy tidbit to build a novel around--I mean, how could anyone resist reading about that?--and DeLillo does a good job keeping one's decadent appetite `aroused' throughout although whats really on that film ends up being a shock a lot different than what you probably are imagining.

That's not a complaint, necessarily. *Running Dog* is, in the end, a `serious' novel with many of the themes that will eventually re-emerge more powerfully in DeLillo's masterworks. So, despite its detective-story trappings, you shouldnt look for the kind of neat resolution you might expect from genre detective fiction. That kind of resolution is not a part of DeLillo's world, not even this early in his writing career.

All in all, *Running Dog* is an interesting, literate, if not quite literary, thinking-man's page turner--250 pages of entertainment that doesnt insult the intelligence.

Everything I like in a novel is here - humor, darkness, and strange and lusty wounded characters with noir capabilities. DeLillo has a knack for holding your hand down into some black tunnels and just when you are beginning to wonder how solid the ground you are standing on is he lets go. A terrific piece of fiction.

Originally published in 1978, 'Running Dog' is a provocative novel of ideas brilliantly disguised as a political thriller. It's also, incidentally, a wonderful time capsule of Seventies Americana and paranoia. Reviewers who criticize the book's lack of character development or large cast are missing the point of this novel (and much of DeLillo's fiction). Don DeLillo is a hyperintelligent, hyperliterate novelist who's in the business of upsetting our expectations, not fulfilling them. Case in point: this book begins like a police procedural (two NYPD cops discover a murdered corpse); we think we know where things are going; but instead of giving us the mystery story we expect, DeLillo curveballs his readers into a seriously twisted (in all senses of the word) story of political conspiracies, pornography, the mob, a film from Hitler's bunker, and much else...And those two cops from the beginning of the book? They vanish. We never see them again...
Bottom line: 'Running Dog' is a wild ride. Hop on. You won't regret it.

I'm not a big reader of crime fiction, although I do have a stack of Raymond Chandler books that I swear I'll get to one day. It does seem to me though that a lot of writers want to write Chandler style crime stories but because they're supposed to be post-modern they have to put some kind of odd existential spin on it, as if modern audiences can't handle something straightforward, relatively speaking. Of course, the other theory is that the author is just shoehorning their typical style into a genre they don't normally write in, which may be more the case here. What you have are all the usual elements of a Deillo story but adapted into a gritty noiresque tale so that everything gets kind of tweaked, the dialogue taking being a bit sharper and tougher but still definitely his semi-ironic style where people talk past each other and treat conversations more as a game to be won. His descriptions become a bit more honed, a bit leaner while still maintaining an eye for detail, but you get the idea that if this wasn't supposed to be a detective story then it would take twice as long to get to the end. The plot revolves around people trying to secure a film of what may be an amateur adult video made in the final days of WWII in Hitler's bunker, so you have people of power manuevering for it as well as folks involved in the erotic black market (as in "selling illegal adults products", not a sexy underground) and a spunky yet hardbitten reporter trying to piece it all together. Maybe. The central plot itself doesn't really seem that important as much as an excuse for a lot of entertaining scenes of people attempting to manipulate the crap out of each other and talk tough and try to decipher what the heck else everyone is planning. You have double agents and questionable motives and twists and it actually is a lot of fun in a weary and doom-laden fashion, the book reads a lot faster than I thought it would, but once you figure out that the plot is more or less window dressing for the stylistic hijinks, it gets easier. Thus the characters are more like caricatures and no one really develops but that doesn't seem to be the point. Tellingly the most effective part of the novel is when they finally screen the film and that feels the most like a true Delillo novel in its starkness. But while it's fun and everything, there's not much in the novel to really stick with you. I'm sure Delillo was taking it all quite seriously but it basically amounts to a extremely well written genre exercise. Worth the time but don't expect your life to be altered.

The characteristic strongest in Running Dog is ominous suspense, a coming-to from any angle. While it suffers from the De Lillo style of excessive psycho-analysis/stream of consciousness association, it is made up of meetings, usually between two people, sometimes three, in varied and interesting places.
An airplane sauna, in a car heading south on a straight highway, a Nude Reading room, an art gallery/apartment, a vollyball court in Central Park where tennis is being played, a limousine with St. Bernard puppies, a fire escape, magazine offices, an abandoned espionage training facility, a motel in the woods, a minibus, Capitol Hill, a Georgetown home, an apartment roof, and more.
At these places peoples jockey for information or sexual connection, seeking the treasure which incites them all, directly and indirectly into a void of contact and codes.
I found Running Dog engrossing, and was amazed at De Lillo's capacity for langauge and image. His dialogue scenes begin without formality and are influenced as much by the memory or his characters as their present intentions.
Searching for a long lost film which may or may not come to rank as a legendary smut film, over a dozen characters cross paths in attempts toward victory and knowledge. Time and space shifts across the country, and an America of double and triple dealings, hidden collections and taboo tastes, lost and won partnerships skirts along toward understood oblivion.

Of all his earlier novels, *Players* is the one that best anticipates the mature style of DeLillo's later masterworks. All the major themes and preoccupations are here, including foreshadowing of the topics that will become central to novels like *Libra,* *White Noise,* and *Mao II.* This makes *Players* an ideal place to start your discovery of this remarkable writer.

On the surface *Players* is a spare and simple story. Lyle and Pammy, an upwardly mobile New York City couple who've reached an interminable plateau in virtually every aspect of their lives, are bored. But this is no ordinary boredom. They are culturally, existentially, epically, mythologically, terminally bored. They're not sure how they got this way, they aren't even angry about it or with each other. There's no one or anything to really blame. They're still in love with each other, in fact. It's just that everything is so...well, empty somehow, so boring. What's even worse is that together, and separately, they don't know what to do about it. How do you go about *not* being bored in this day and age?

Pammy decides to take a vacation with a co-worker and his lover to Maine. Lyle, in the meantime, remains in Manhattan and becomes involved in a terrorist plot to plant a bomb in the New York Stock Exchange. These separate "vacations" from each other both end in violence and unexpected consequences, and yet, both Pammy and Lyle remain essentially unchanged, essentially still bored. If anything, they begin, especially in Lyle's case, to vanish altogether. For as Lyle becomes a "player" in the world of international terrorism and counter-terrorism he indiscriminately "plays" both sides, or, perhaps more accurately, all three, four, five, ten sides of the game and thereby loses himself in a state of complexity where he and you ((the reader)) begin to wonder if the most harrowing truth of all is that *no one* really understands the game they're playing, who's winning, or even who's side anyone is on.

What elevates *Players,* however, from a thought-provoking thriller to the level of a small masterpiece is the effect of DeLillo's precise and poetic prose--a laser-like instrument of an intellect you can't help to observe with awe as it cuts, exposes, and illuminates even ordinary experience to reveal malignant truths one may have felt or suspected, but never seen or been able to articulate before. Don DeLillo is the rare writer who makes other writers, me included, take up woodworking or suicide in despair. He's that good, *&#@ him!

Either the print was really large in this book or I caught a second wind at some point over the weekend because I literally finished this book in a few hours. Generally Delillo books take me longer than that, since I have to slow down to make sure I absorb anything. In this case, it didn't seem as crucial. This time out, this early novel depicts a married couple (Pammy and Lyle) who are jaded by this crazy, post-modern world and just kind of float through it, doing whatever they want. Their narratives split off early on, with Lyle getting the more interesting plot of becoming tied up with a terrorist organization after seeing a man shot on the Stock Exchange floor . . . he seems to do it mostly out of boredom or vague interest and what strikes me as funny during it is how he seems to be playing triple agent, informing on the organization while telling the organization that he's talking to the authorities, and nobody seems to care either way. I don't know if it was meant to be funny but I found it hilarious. Meanwhile, Pammy gets relegated to the "B" plot, going up to Maine with a gay couple that she works with and basically exploring the nature of relationships, however Delillo seems to know that nobody really cares about this plot, as he devotes short chapters to it, while Lyle gets comparitively sprawling ones. Lyle seems to be the more compelling character, much like Updike's Rabbit, he gets a lot of mileage out of being a clueless jerk but a consistent and generally well-meaning one, even his dialogue where he sort of narrates himself ("What's going on, the guy said" is a paraphrased example) is used sparingly enough that's quirky, although when he and Pammy do it to each other it seems overtly cute. Otherwise, the scenes between the couple are well done, you get the sense that they do like each other, but it's all buried under the crushing ennui of the age. Delillo's ultimate point seems to be about how soul numbing modern life has become, that people like Pammy and Lyle can just do whatever they want and move through life without consequences because they just don't care (and while they seem oblivious to their own actions sometimes, they don't strike me as sociopaths) . . . Delillo gives us plenty of examples and his separation of the two of them is meant to juxtapose their situations and have us draw deeper meaning from said situations, but either he didn't give us reasons to connect them or I'm just dense. That goes for the whole book, I know there's a point in there somewhere but for the life of me, it's just out of my grasp. So can I recommend it? Sure, Delillo's writing is sharp as ever and generally most pages either have a scene or a line or two worth reading simply for the craft involved in putting the words together. To borrow a cliche, the man could novelize the phone book and at least make it interesting reading. And as I mentioned before, it's short. By the time you start to tire of it, it's over. Wouldn't it be better if everything was like that?

It's interesting to turn to early DeLillo and find that in more than a quarter of a century, the themes that drive his work are more contemporary than ever; as Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 1977, "This elegant, highly finished novel does not shrink from suggesting the complicity of Americans with the terrorists they deplore". The complicity is not direct, even though one of the main characters does become directly enmeshed in a terrorist conspiracy the extent of which he is (and we, the readers, are) not fully cognizant. Rather, the complicity is systemic, terrorism the shadow of the bright waves of electronic capitalism, the anti-thesis, lying only as far away as the reverse side of a thin paper page. In this, as in the sparkling quality of his prose, he resembles Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher-provocateur; both quip and incant their way towards revealing alleged secret truths about the real sources of terror and violence, secrets of systems and alienation. This sort of language I think becomes tiring once you've read more than a few of DeLillo's novels -- he is forever talking about inner meanings, hidden truths, darkly wound secrets, et cetera. It isn't the ideas that are misplaced (contemporary novels are rightfully full of conspiracy), but the language; these are the only passages where DeLillo becomes literal rather than figurative, the only places where it seems DeLillo himself comes out from beneath the narrative guise. And to say he doesn't need to is to credit the complete remainder of the text -- it races, clean and honed, from page to page, reading as quickly as ads flashing past on a subway. And as Players unwinds, it nails modern malaise and restlessness, diagnosing the moral disengagement that hasn't stemmed since it was written, and is caustically funny in a way which no-one else I have read can match. I found myself, on finishing, talking to people in the same obscure one-liners used by his characters (of course, he doesn't do character, really; that is part of the diagnosis). The whole thing is pitch-perfect and prescient; he should be compulsory.

Basically, this is the story of a couple that takes separate vacations. She goes to Maine with her friends, a gay couple, and we read about their interaction. Meanwhile, he is drawn into the political underground, where he becomes fascinated with some vague group's shadowy and violent tactics. DeLillo fans that have read "Mao II" will recognize this "two-path" structure. But this time, the juxtapositions of different family-member experiences didn't really resonate (at least with me) or seem to add up to much. Is this what he's communicating? "It occurred to her that this was the secret life of their involvement. It had always been there, needing only this period of their extended proximity to reveal itself. Disloyalty, spitefulness, petulance."

You can read the tea leaves of any DeLillo novel and see shadows of the WTC disaster, but they are more striking in this novel than any other. One of the main characters works for a grief counseling company in the WTC, her husband works on Wall Street and is casually drawn into a terrorist plot.

"Players" is heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and Dostoyevsky's "Demons", but its unmistakably DeLillo. The terrorists in this book are not drawn by religious or political zealotry, they are almost offhand about their deadly work. As he will do later in "White Noise", DeLillo places a disaster in the foreground but finds the real drama in domestic interaction, in characters so caught up in lifestyle that the world around them is dull, unimportant.

In my opinion, "Players" is the transitional book in DeLillo's body of work. It is his first book to touch on his obsessive themes in a serious, sustained manner. However, it does not match the virtuosity of his later works. Not until "The Names" did DeLillo hit his stride, so don't expect as polished a book as those written in the 80s and 90s. But for DeLillo fans who have overlooked this work through the years, "Players" is a gruesome treat.

[....]

Single Abroad: Tales of the Boyish Man is written for anyone who has ever been uncomfortable when trying to approach the opposite sex, dealing with Bike Cops in Butte County, traveling Europe or interviewing with ivy-league colleges. Covered in this book are the cheapest and most social hostels in Europe, the life of a Club Med host in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, the three features that make Mexico City unlike any other city in the world, how I managed not to get thrown out of Chico State University, the impact of the Russian Mafia in Southern Spain, the linguistic impact of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, the last 20 days of the Incan dynasty, how to live in Latin America for $25 a year, how to make the most out of a Euro Rail Pass, mastering a second language and how someone who can't even properly slice a tomato can get a job overseas in a Portuguese restaurant. This guidebook was designed for anyone wanting to explore a Latin approach to working, dating and travel.

This took me two weeks, and I wondered if it'd be worth the effort. The heft of the book had discouraged me before, but the beginning bravura panorama of the Polo Grounds game and the closing pages with a less ostentatious, but surprisingly thought-provoking scene also in a New York where crowds gather for another miracle does manage to bookend this massive work satisfactorily. The challenges lie in what comes between, seven hundred pages of characters who you constantly shuffle among, unsure often who they might be for a few pages, or how they fit into the larger plot.

De Lillo does not satisfy the reader wanting as in some Dickens novel all the characters to match up and align by the end. It's messier, and truer to life if not fictional craft of what we expect in a neat narrative. I liked this. The scope narrows and expands without warning, but by the last 100 pages, the vistas begin to enlarge and contract both. De Lillo takes on, by the conclusion, big questions, but he does not reduce them to pat answers. I almost forgot about more than one character, so attenuated might be the lapse before their earlier and later turns on stage. I wish the book came prefaced with a dramatis personae! Let the book continue, don't resist the occasionally puzzling dead end, and move on. Not all the subplots will find resolution anyway. You come away both humbled and puzzled by his conclusion, one I certainly never saw coming.

Elements never quite fit, and the baseball's trajectory into the hands of various collectors does not align with the wanderings of the main figures as I'd anticipated. After a while, I learned to put up with the languid passages, and gained patience. The iconic baseball and the nuclear core represent the key symbols, but they are not as easily pegged down or pinned for a reader's facile understanding. This is a clever, haranguing, and frustrating story, for it's both hyper-aware in its jittery prose and smarter than the usual entertaining fare. It's serious, if with lots of clever put-downs thanks to the Italian American one-upsmanship, and while you may find certain characters that you glom onto with affection, others will bore you. Like life, their permanence in the plot as you get to know them will differ, and without warning, people drop in and out of the vast events. De Lillo alternates Nick Shay's first-person voice with many other ones, and while I wish the omniscient recorder of this diverse cast sometimes registered more emphatically the necessary accents, moods, and personalities, even those (like Klara and Sister Edgar) who bored me early on turned out to be worthwhile, albeit many many chapters later. Don't give up on anybody you encounter early on in these dense pages.

The waste theme, the FBI-Hoover surveillance, the wanderings through deserts and suburbs, apocalyptic tension, and childhood wonder all emerge and overlap, again in a nearly imperceptible form for much of the time. The contrast of Nick's Italian neighborhood then vs. the Bronx today gradually assumes its symbolic significance, but very glacially. The pace has to slow often, so while the energy ebbs and flows, stick with the plot's byways and asides. The prose shimmers at times, yet more or less does not call as much attention to itself. Dependably intelligent, this book takes on enormous themes. I'm not convinced that De Lillo can not top this book. It recalls Roth, Dos Passos, Kesey, Hemingway, Updike, Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, and Barth, to name a few American peers and predecessors. He's at the top of his game here, but I think he's capable of yet another turn or two at bat that might match or surpass this game.

Don DeLilo isn't to be trifled with.

"Underworld" reads thickly and slowly, and I found it quite the challenge. Some days I could read thirty, forty pages, just go for hours and not notice the time, while other days I'd get maybe five pages read and have to quit. There is so much compressed on these pages, it feels akin to reading flourless chocolate cake; thick, slow, filling, and delicious.

While I'm not saying every new page brings new joy, I am saying that the book as a whole certainly does. Once every few pages I would find myself dog-earing the book, to return to that section later. His understanding of people and of the human soul is phenomenal, I felt like I new every one of the characters at their most intimate and essential level.

On the whole, I think this is one of the most masterful and excellent books I've read in years. A classic.

In Alice in Wonderland, the White King explains how to tell a story: "Begin at the beginning and then go on till you come to the end: then stop." If you agree, don't read this book; you will hate it. But if you like non-traditional narrative, or are curious and willing to give it a try, this is a wonderful work for you to experience. It jumps back and forth in time throughout four decades; arrays a multitude of characters and story lines, some of which open but never close; and conveys its many messages in often-unexplained oblique allusions to other parts of the account. But the writing style is funny, and lucid, and accessible, and you will find yourself drawn in to the fractured story, told in as many facets as a well-cut diamond, of a baseball that became important (or maybe not) in a moment of time which was (like all moments in time) unique and which initiates the intersection of many worlds and lives. As there should be, there is a central character -- Nick Shay, whose personal history flows backward and forward from a shattering instant that is placed at the end of the book, but that is foretold and shapes the rest of it. Nick and his mother, absent father, brother, teachers, lover, wife, wife's lover, wife's-lover's-colleagues and on through many degrees of non-separation, form a constellation of vivid personalities and lives that rivet your attention. The times (Cold War decades) and places (mostly New York City, southwest U.S.) are refracted with insight, truth and humor. The book is lengthy, but once you give yourself to the non-linear narrative, it flows engagingly and easily. James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Doris Lessing all have written non-traditional narratives of great, but sometimes deadly and tedious, weight. De Lillo's Underworld, by contrast, is as much fun, as juicy, and as readable as other great non-traditions, such as Tristram Shandy -- and Alice in Wonderland.

Nominated for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's ambitious 1997 historical novel tells the story of Nick Shay, a Phoenix waste management executive, who lives a meaningless life in late 20th Century America, a land of ever-accumulating garbage. (Phoenix becomes a microcosm of existential angst and wasteland America.) His wife, Marian, is having an affair with one of his friends. The novel spans five decades of American history, from the 1950s through the 1990s, opening on October 3, 1951, when a young man named Cotter Martin catches a ball known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," after sneaking into a New York Giants-Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lenny Bruce are also in attendance. As Bobby Thomson was hitting his pennant-winning home run, the Soviets were meanwhile detonating the atomic bomb that put 1950s America in fear of nuclear war. When the story then turns to two lovers in the Nevada desert in 1992, we learn that Shay (who now owns the baseball) served time in a juvenile detention center for murdering a man, before attending a Jesuit reform school in northern Minnesota. Underworld is fascinating look at the effect of the Cold War on the American psyche. It reveals the author of White Noise at the top of his form, and DeLillo's brilliant vision of American culture left me in awe.

G. Merritt

I believe Don Delillo is on par with other writers like Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates. This short novel is an easy read but it leaves you with more questions than answers about the plot which thinly. It's about a body artist whose husband, a film-maker, commits suicide. She was his third wife. She retreats to an undisclosed location but far away from New York City where they lived. She meets another man who appears to know more about her. I think that I will have to read it again to get the full story but I admire the author's writing style and his ability to make a breakfast scene into pure poetry. There is not much story but character driven strong characters.

It would be wrong of me to say that Don DeLillo's 'The Body Artist' is a 'bad' book. But that's precisely the problem. This novel exemplifies a middlebrow dominance in literature in which a book that really doesn't do much at all is nevertheless hard to dismiss along the traditional lines of an explicit insufficiency in talent or craft or form. Middlebrow literature is not simply a pretender literature - or, to put it another way, a discernibly 'bad' literature which attempts to present itself as something more sophisticated and erudite than it really is - but rather is the kind of writing which retains the peculiar aesthetics and epiphanies of 'good' literature even as it banalises them and tranquilises them and hands them out to us like pez pellets. From the murk of its meditative mode, the book can produce a moment or two of clever insight. At one point, it has this to say - "Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from the suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take." - and there's little doubt it's touched on something fairly extraordinary here, the unintended insulation from one another that comes parcelled inside the emotion you feel for a person you love. The book has its share of artistry too. Slight in size, it nonetheless takes time to unfurl itself, thereby performing the themes of which it speaks: the meander and slip in and out of our narrative time stream, the significance of each moment (and its proxy, each sentence) edged with unarticulated menace that gains force in a dreadful quiet way. All of this could be called the craft of the work. But the problem is that what props this 'craft' up is nothing particularly new or profound or even all that interesting. It's only when you accept the premise that this thing is deep and complex that it comes to seem so much more intimate and attuned than it really actually is. As a case in point, take one of the many moments when the main character Lauren observes something in her immediate vicinity. In this case, it's breadcrumbs. DeLillo offers this thought: "How completely strange it suddenly seemed that major corporations mass-produced bread crumbs and packaged and sold them everywhere in the world and she looked at the bread-crumb carton for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was bread crumbs." I see now. So our experience is so commodified that even breadcrumbs, truly seen, are not beyond mass-manufacture's reach and indeed come to us through a sweeping history of sameness to be to us only what they are - bread crumbs. How completely strange indeed - that this doesn't leap out at us immediately as the elaborate flab it is. Not only is there nothing particularly new in DeLillo's rumination, it is also so enamoured with its own sense of revelation as to verge on the demeaning. Though it styles itself as some incisive critique of consumer capital - a sudden estrangement from its processes - it is something far more shallow and simple, the thing one 'ought' to write at this point, the movements and performance of a critique, THE BREADCRUMBS THAT WEREN'T WHAT THEY APPEARED TO BE, signposted, with eerie acoustical accompaniment. Such pseudo-profundities envelop the book like mist or soak it like sea spray - to borrow the tropes of 'mist' and 'ocean' that run right through the novel, tirelessly, even when we tire of them. Another example early on is when Lauren sees the water from the kitchen tap move from transparent to opaque. Once more, apparently, this has much to tell us about how we perceive and apprehend things, the water here some sort of representative lucid medium that all too abruptly darkens itself to our eyes, becomes something other than itself, unfamiliar, intangible. Or maybe it's always been this way, Lauren muses, and she just can't remember it. I guess there's nothing really 'wrong' with this passage, per se, except it seems once again to rehearse some theme so well-worn (what we thought we perceive clearly we now do not and maybe never did) to see it put here so intensely falls somewhere between boring and offensive. In fact, all through the book, DeLillo uses his time slip method to entrance us in the kind of non-profundity that finds profundity in every moment. Lauren putting her sweater on backwards becomes a momentous thing full of burden and consequence, oh, and blankness too, because this book is not above acknowledging that its own experimentations arrive at the emptiness and inconsequence of every action and event it puts forward, a neat little self-exculpating escape hatch. The toaster lever springs up twice and this is so mesmerising because can't you feel how real this is, how deep and habitual, how malfunctioned and poignant, how void? And then, to top it off, there's a kind of cosy, auratic New Age feel that hangs over the whole thing lest it become too bleak or melancholy or just plain frustrating. Such as this passage from the novel's end: "Is reality too powerful for you? Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life." Here we have Don DeLillo as glib transcendental guru. Take the risk. Come on and hug the Real. Believe in yourself. Or, to put it more precisely, believe in the self that's outside your understanding, the secret sensorium of the 'you' that informs everything it is that puts you here, in this place, as yourself. Okay. Fine. Except it doesn't seem like all that much of a risk. More like exactly what we wanted to hear in the first place. Which is precisely why any engagement with 'grief' this book attempts to mount falls so flat - the hard kernel of trauma here is bequeathed the cute name 'Tuttle' (a thing the novel once more self-conciously acknowledges as part of its adroit 'art' even as it proceeds po-faced to deploy it in all its ridiculousness), Tuttle being a midgit man that drifts in and out of time and graces us with sad-chants which are supposedly meant to rock our foundations and spin our heads although we actually learn no more from them than this old chestnut: 'We all, shall all, will all be left.' Still, how sage and universal! All of us to be left, you say? And in more than one tense too? Can't you just feel how awesomely sad this is? Doesn't it send a chill down your spine or clutch your heart or something? No wonder we need a ghost or thing from beyond the known or spooky imaginative figment or whatever Tuttle actually is to deliver this tricky extraterrestial truth! We could never arrive at this understanding by ourselves! It's so beyond our normal comprehension! I could go on to say more about this book but I won't bother. It typifies all that's egregiously lacking in the big name literary marketplace and the worst thing is that it complicates this lack so well with its reliance on certain 'profound' aesthetic techniques and stylistic modes of address that make us feel - simply by virtue of their use - that we're really being admitted to something worthwhile here, something delicate and powerful and world-changing. So read the book if you want. Savour it. It's really not a bad book. Quite the reverse. The thing to watch out for is that it's actually quite 'good'.

The Body Artist is a very thin story written in dense, wandering thoughts. DeLillo's craftsmanship with prose is a redeemable quality, but due to my lack of interest in the characters or plot, it won't linger.

How a book could be both pretentious in style and so vague in its purpose is beyond me. I'd never recommend this title to anyone except those whom I wish to be distracted with absolute "nothingness" for an hour. Cutting-edge nonsense.

Don Delillo's reputation as one of our best novelists inspired me to buy this book. I had labored through the massive _Underworld_ and approached the brief _The Body Artist_ with optimism. But I cannot remember ever being more completely, hopelessly bored. After fifty pages I began praying for a faucet to drip or for paint to flake -- ANYTHING! to give me an excuse to quit reading. Finally, when the book's mysterious stranger showed up, I gave myself a good pep-talk: "Now, Tim, Mr. Delillo's forte is postmodern risk, breaking narrative, a tight focus on details, and tatters of speech. Stick with it! It will -- somehow! -- reward you!" Then, five pages and one hour later, I awoke and decided to scrape some paint.

There was a certain dissociation from life that DeLillo gets. It's not easy to read in a lot of ways. It made my own experience reverberate afresh.

I was in suspended animation having my teeth cleaned. Pricked and scrubbed with the forceful persistence of sterile steel tools and empathy from an hygenist who understood how miserable the whole experience could be.

The Pentagon already compromised.

The suction tool in my mouth. Vacuuming out the refuse of my teeth. The report came over the radio in these exact words:

"The second tower has come down. (2 long seconds) It's gone." After about 10 seconds of silence on the morning radio in New York, which is about 10 minutes in NYC time... "I don't know what to say. Could cry."

Fire, smoke, dust. Papers of careers hat no longer matter.

I went home and watched the news. I did not call in to work that day. I assumed the world was halted. All machineries of progress were stopped. The sound of F16 jets overhead.

Silence.

What just happened.

Is this reality or some bad Tom Clancy novel?

Surreal.

A plane down near Pittsburgh.

Why are they attacking every place I have ever called home? Can't they leave my home alone?

Don DeLillo captures the surreal strangeness of 9/11 in Falling Man. I am about 70 pages into it and I can take only about 5 to 10 pages in each sitting. He nailed it. As a New Yorker he knows what we were thinking at the time in such an intimate manner that it is continually mind numbing all over again.

No-one but those in NYC and those in the NYC metro area have the same sense of what occurred that day. We still are numb by it. We try to cover it with consumerism. But the memory is haunting and jarring. The city became a chapel. It was a sanctuary of mourning. It became holy in that moment. Candles burning for the memories of the lost and missing we knew were no longer going to add to our consciousness in the same way.

I have problems reading this book because no other format has revealed what that day means and what we experienced. I still see the smoke over my home. Trailing southward. Looking for a home that it will not find.

As painful as this novel is to read, I want to thank Don DeLillo. He has given us both the gift of death, and the gift of hope. I could cry with each page. Visceral memories trapped in nothingness. A hurt we need to remember each day of our God gifted lives. I don't want to finish it, but I feel like I have to. Like a faithful Catholic holding the blessed host of Christ in his hands.

Maybe it was too abstract. Maybe it was too close to home.

Here, Don strikes a chord of how a culminating event can snap one from their semi-homogenized/self-absorbed reverie and lead to an enhanced personal awareness level. Transformations of Keith, Lianne, Justin, and I supppose Hammad, are portrayed with minimal back-story. Although not as disturbing as "Libra", Delillo's characters each hit home in their own unique way.

The title "Falling Man" refers to a performance artist in the novel who appears in various venues around New York City following 9/11. His "art" or "statement" - such as it is - is to hang upside down in a harness he wears underneath a blue business suit: from highway overpasses, train trestles, building cornices, balconies, etc. His "falls" are in full view of commuters, pedestrians, concert goers, etc., he says nothing. He merely hangs upside down, silent, posed the same way, leg bent, arms at his sides, disturbing simply by being. An emblem of those who leaped or fell from the burning World Trade Center towers.

The story is itself a lot like performance art: a shaggy dog story, a drama without climax, catharsis or denouement. If this were a painting it would be an abstract still life, notwithstanding the violent events that begin and end the story. The "plot" as such, of calculated murder, of survival, of marital infidelity and reconciliation, of lives and relationships -- unraveling, reconstituting themselves, ending -- is almost incidental to the oppressive and suffocatingly intense soliloquies and focused conversations of the various characters (mostly New Yorkers), male and female, young and old. I found myself approaching nausea wading through the conversations of the self-absorbed, affected, "precious," and, frankly, unsympathetic and boring protagonists. Like listening to the guy holding forth in the line at the movies in "Annie Hall" crossed with the tape loop repetitions and disorientations of "Last Year at Marienbad". Hieroglyphs, whispers, mirrors, ephemera, navel gazing.

DeLillo writes beautifully crafted prose, and there are flashes of profound insight in this work. But, ultimately, this is an exercise in reflection, a study of memories (everyone is caught up in their memories, even the Alzheimer's patients with whom Lianne works with to help them tell their stories before they forget). Ostensibly "about" 9/11 and its aftermath, it is difficult to articulate what "moral", if any, "Falling Man" is meant to convey about ourselves or the event that has defined our lives, other than that we pass through life as though in free fall, weightless for a brief instant, and at the end of the day unremarked.

"Falling Man" has the distinction of being one of those books that pulled a great tug emotionally while I never really understood what was going on most of the time.

The characters are fragmented because their lives are fragmented. Their lives are presented as shards because the book opens with the twin tower attacks. It's hard to unravel and probably even harder to take if you were directly affected by the attacks. I was vacationing in Manhattan for the first time while reading this book and it was remarkably easy to place myself on the same paths of the characters I was reading.

To be technical, this is the first DeLillo novel I've read. I started "White Noise," twice, and couldn't get through. I got so frustrated with the brainiac narrative that I just have to shelve it. Twice! But "Falling Man" felt too somber and sincere to have any kind of elitist agenda. This had to have been a difficult book to write. It sure was a difficult read for me. But I don't regret it.

The start is simple. A businessman staggers down a New York street, bleeding and covered in ash from the World Trade Center, where he worked. Eventually a stranger offers him a ride, and takes him to the apartment where his estranged wife lives with their young son. She takes him in, and together they begin the process of knitting their lives together again. He is one of the lucky ones.

The back cover suggests that this man is only the first of several New Yorkers whose stories DeLillo tells, and indeed the book is divided into three parts, each bearing a man's name: Bill Lawton, Ernst Hechinger, and David Janiak. But these names turn out to have only an oblique significance. The fleeing businessman, a lawyer named Keith Neudecker, and his wife Lianne are the subjects of the entire novel. The main distinction between the three parts of the book is the time-scale over which they trace the aftermath: a span of days, then of months, then of years.

Standing by itself as a novella, the first part ("Bill Lawton") would make a rather beautiful story of a family coming back together after a catastrophe. As it happens, I read this book immediately after THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard, which also deals with the repair of a marriage. DeLillo's writing is tougher, his pacing has a greater urgency, his characters are surprised by emotions and compunctions that they scarcely understand, and his resolutions are less neat. Keith and Lianne are concerned, for instance, about the behavior of their son Justin, who apparently spends most of his days at the window in a friend's house, scanning the skies for more planes. But they come together in talking to him, trying to help him; there is progress, if no conclusion.

For the book does not stop there. Keith and Lianne develop their own obsessive behaviors, and must learn to deal with them. Their lives spread outward like ripples, sometimes smoothly intersecting, sometimes conflicting, moving out into the unknown even as they reflect back to redefine their separate centers. While still based in New York, Keith reaches outward to distant locations, there to create an almost hermetic bubble where he can come to terms with his inner self. Lianne, by contrast, inhabits a rich life in the city, comprising her profession as an editor, her work with Alzheimer's patients, some social activism, her mothering of her son, and her conflicted relationship with her mother and her mother's mysterious lover Martin. But she too is searching for something that will enable her to move beyond the legacy of that one dreadful day.

It is not a matter of avoiding spoilers that keeps me from saying how the novel ends; DeLillo's point seems to be that there are no neat endings. Lianne reaches a quiet interior resolution; Keith arrives at a greater understanding of who he is; but most questions concerning their marriage are still left open. Indeed, there are few dramatic events anywhere in the novel, as though there is no place for drama after that first cataclysm. Instead, DeLillo ties it all up by almost magical sleight of hand. As part of his flexible treatment of time, he had introduced a thread beginning in the months before September 2001. Now at the very end of the book, he links this thread to the plane crash that propelled Keith Neudecker into the street where we first saw him. Curiously enough, the effect is to fill an inhuman event with touching humanity. Like Joseph O'Neill in NETHERLAND, another magnificent post-9/11 novel, DeLillo's greatest gift is to show the reactions of ordinary human beings in all their fallibility and confusion. The result may be untidy, but it is full of feeling, always intelligent, occasionally spiritual, and oddly if obliquely consoling.

It took some doing to get through this novel. The main question that kept hitting me as I carefully read this book was: What kind of people actually think and speak in the kind of overdone, conflagration of semi-metaphysical adjectives that Delillo puts into his character's minds and mouths? The different threads of the story do not come together in the end, so there's a great sense of randomness in this novel. Further, Delillo repeats ideas, I assume, in order to make his point; but I felt a bit belittled intellectually by this. For example, in his brief section about how the crowds are going crazy trying to keep Khomeini's body out of the grave, Delillo keeps telling us over and over again what the purpose is for these people acting the way they do. It just seems like Delillo was trying too hard.

When I try to imagine a Delillo novel, this is the kind of thing that I envision, characters flitting through jagged set pieces like shadows, locations fraught with quivering meaning, dialogue that sounds like people talking each other and knowing that and not caring, and strings holding the pieces together so tightly and so finely that you'll have run right through before you realize you've even been cut. It's the most elusive of all of his novels, at its best when it's setting a mood and sketching out the picture, hinting that the full image may be too much for us to bear. Right from the start it sets the tone, with the mass wedding, a supposedly joyous event reduced to something mechanical and faceless, watched over with nothing more than a spiralling despair. The central focus of the novel is on reclusive writer Bill Gray, who has written well received literary fiction but like Thomas Pynchon stays out of sight. He spends most of his time endlessly tweaking a masterpiece that he really will never release and is eventually drawn out by a photographer and an offer to help out a hostage across the ocean. The plot doesn't so much move as seep, sliding from scene to scene with only bare connections, with each of the four main characters acting as ripples, and the scenes occuring when they hit each other. But the biggest ripple is Bill Gray, who acts as a rock hitting a placid lake, sending the lives of everyone else whirling out of whack simply by not being around, as everyone moves to close to hole or perhaps decide if a hole is even there. Meanwhile Gray enters a world where terrorism and mass media collide, globetrotting aimlessly of a quest that may be pointless, or perhaps worse. Delillo's writing is as sharp as ever here, each scene drawn tight, with barely a word wasted. All his usual tricks are here, but everything seems slightly more intense, even if the ultimate meaning of it all isn't exactly clear. Finding what connections there are, if any, requires more work than most of his novels, and as the characters dance about and circle and taunt each other, you may be wondering what the point of it all is. It's bleak, but in an illuminating fashion, and it seems possessed of its own internal logic. Like being immersed in a dark lake, you know you're inside but you don't know what you're even looking at. Strangely ignored out of his catalog, it has new resonance today, not simply because it deals with the facets of terrorism, but in showing how the different elements of a wider society can connect, in ways that we aren't even beginning to understand.

First of all, I've read WHITE NOISE and RATNER'S STAR. I enjoyed both because they bordered on science fiction as Delillo looked at American culture from two skewed perspectives. That said, I found MAO II a huge disappointment. (And I know I'm the only dissenting voice here. We're supposed to WORSHIP writers like Delillo, but I'm long past my idol-worshipping stage.) The fault with this book is the writing itself. It's terribly self-conscious and the dialogue is such that no human man or woman would speak it, in this world anyway. WHITE NOISE seemed utterly real to me: the industrial accident, the necessity to escape it, etc. I was completely riveted by the drama and the philosophizing WHITE NOISE. In MAO II the characters are clearly opposing voices from Delillo's artistic psyche and are used as such. But the actual, physical prose of the novel kept jumping out at me rather than settling in to tell a story. And that's quite the problem with the BIG SHOTS these days. I think many of them are writing in an attempt to outdo one another. I can see Delillo looking over his shoulder at Robert Stone, Philip Roth, John Irving, or Cormac McCarthy. There was very little in this story that I found compelling and after a while I gave up. People just do not speak the way Delillo writes them in MAO II. Or maybe I'm hanging out with a different crowd that uses a different kind of English. Except that I've taught English literature for 25 years and know a bad book when I read one. If you're in to hero worship and see writing as about _writing_ and not _story_, then Delillo is your man. If you want to read a masterpiece that says everything you might want to know about both _story_ and writing, find John Gardner's MICKELSON'S GHOSTS. Or read John Fowles THE MAGUS. Great writers will be those men and women who tell great stories. The physical writing will be the vehicle that gets them there. But it is not the be-all or end-all of literature. If you haven't read any Delillo yet, forget MAO II and find RATNER'S STAR or WHITE NOISE.

DeLillo has written another gem with MAO II: A NOVEL. Much has been said about the details of this work, but I believe the entirety can be summed up in the following quote from the book:

"When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out-of-place."

Highly recommended...

For whatever else it is, adventure story, mystery, literary political thriller, *Mao II* is basically an extended meditation on art--and, in particular, the writer's role--in articulating, interpreting, and effecting change in the world. More specifically, DeLillo raises the question of whether a writer has *any* role in these endeavors any more. It's an interesting question for writers, and so to me ((author, Hardcore Romeo)), but I wonder how interesting it is to those who think of books as little more than something to utilize while killing time between travel destinations or while getting a suntan. Brain and eyeball exercise no more relevant to shaping personal, social, and political reality than doing a crossword puzzle.

Therein lies the crux of the dilemma for reclusive writer Bill Gray, an aging author with two cult classics to his name, but who hasn't been seen or heard from in ages. He lives in seclusion with a personal assistant and a spaced-out former Moonie who they sexually share. He's been working on his "next" book for years, writing and rewriting, unable to get it right. The real problem, you sense, is that he's lost faith in "writing" as a vocation altogether. Does a lone man writing words on a page far away from the clatter and clamor of the world, the guns and the bombs, the movements and militias, have any effect on the world at all?

Enter Bill's old editor and a plan to use the mystique of Bill Gray in exchange for the freedom of an unknown poet who's been taken hostage by a charismatic terror leader somewhere in Beirut. It's a plot device that seems pretty far-fetched and out-of-place in the work of a "serious" writer like DeLillo, something you'd expect in a Robert Ludlum novel. But DeLillo is indulging in a bit of symbolism here, and, indeed, on another level, just why is such a plot point so preposterous anyway, if not precisely because it proves DeLillo's ultimate point: no one gives a damn about writers or their ideas anymore. The individual, so much as he can effect any change whatsoever, has become lost in the movement of great masses, subordinated to symbolic leaders, who lend their face to the faceless and guide them en mass to powerful, sweeping, and dramatically violent gestures that make headlines.

At the center of *Mao II* there is an exchange between Bill Gray and the terrorist go-between--a bit of literary theorizing that offers the idea that terrorism is the latest and most innovative form of the novel, or, perhaps more accurately, what has been taken up after the novel failed, the new form of expression now in currency to speak for the suffering in the world. As a writer, Bill Gray, and you'd assume DeLillo himself, reject this theory, but it's intriguing nonetheless, even if it is self-aggrandizing and egomaniacal in a way only writers can be.

In the end, it's a credit to DeLillo's power as a novelist that he makes this foray into political thriller territory believable--at least long enough to get you past it to the real, and more realistic, punch of this soul-searching book. It's amazing how prescient and prophetic DeLillo was, even back in the early 90s, with regard to the significance of terrorism in the future of geopolitics--a future that is now. From questioning the role of art to casting doubt about the value of the individual, *Mao II* is a haunting and powerful indictment of our contemporary world and our place, if any, in it.

this was the first book of his I read. It's a good novel but compard to today's world of Ellis and Palahnuik. I could see the impact it had back when is first came out, since it was a few years after "Easy rider" and has the same counter culture feel
the style and nuance of the book were greatly influtential to ninties independant cinema. the protagnist seems indifferent and at times boring. Delillos has writen fantastic novels, and this is him cutting his literary teeth

Americana is a weird and compelling novel. It focuses on the whole American culture of the time (early 1970s), the urban mass, consumer culture, hyper self awareness. Elements Delillo has weaved into his fiction with greater and greater complexity and power as his fiction has developed. In this first effort, the voice is there, but is not quite as taught or powerful as in his later works. The first third is a classic piece of office alienation literature, slick advertising executive David Bell is wealthy and successful, but feels hollow with the routine of his office life. He resorts to playing power games with his secretary and focusing on the pulses and rhythms beneath his daily existence. He considers a film project on Navaho Indians, and this leads to an escape across America with a cast of characters who are the first fictional manifestations of Delillo's American people - outside the mainstream, superbly self aware, carrying the baggage of their culture and their time with them. There is Sullivan, a beautiful avant garde sculptor, who matches David Bell intellect wise, she spots weaknesses in his desire to dominate other people with his ideas - 'Sullivan announced...that one of my main faults was a tendency to get blinded by the neon of an idea, never reaching truly inside it;'. The other characters - a blocked novelist: 'his words were the same colour as the page on which they were written,' and a crazed alcoholic serve as a foil for Delillo to excercise his writing as exposition of ideas muscle, they communicate in oddly oblique, detatched, sometimes wry, cynical and hyper intellectual dialogue.

The novel encapusalates a great deal of what America used to be - or the image of what it was. the crux of David Bell's western flight is the sight of a woman trimming a hedge in a garden in Maine - a symbol of innocence, of wholesome Americana. David seeks to find out what is missing, what he has lost. In many ways he is the paragon of sophisticated New Yorkerdom - though with a core of naiveity that Sullivan exposes in the end with her haunting tales of ghost stories from Maine. He seeks the safety and cozy shelter of a simple child's bedroom with sloping ceilings and mothering figures.

The first two thirds of the novel are great, the last third flags and descends into an intellectual babble of nonsense, influenced by jazz and European movies. Delillo writing this novel in his studio apartment in New York in the late sixties, with flies buzzing around the oven, clearly reached the end of his intellectual stretch in this novel (his second novel, End Zone, is much tighter). Some of the description and dialogue in the final third is just bizzare as Bell makes his films of a variety of Americans who are not just outlandish characters, they are not even well formed characters at all. Still, I generally concur with Joyce Carol Oates's quote on the blurb: 'Nearly every sentence of Americana rings true...Delillo is a man of frightening perception.' In Americana he traces the early danger probes and unsettling societal patterns that underpined the final decades of the American 20th Century, leading up to September 11, and beyond, into an uncertain mass consumerist future.

No need to write the great American Novel.
It has already been written.
This is it. Vonnegut
in his fiction wrote that all you
need to know how to live is in the Brother's
Karamazov, but it's not enough anymore. If you live
in America, this is the supplement. In the negative sense.
One almost should enjoy this novel one sentence at a time.
Each one is genius. I also like the way Delillo micromanages words,
and sentences. The page is extremely claustrophobic, but it is an extremely cozy nook. The vividness with which this novel comes alive is perhaps its triumph. Delillo has described the journey of David Bell so well, that one can live in it vicariously, and doesn't have to make it themselves. I do not want to make that cross country sojourn anymore to writhe the experience out of Americana, get some vital juice out of being an American. He describes the currents and undercurrents very well.

The heart of the book is, I believe, on page 130.

...Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things that people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village." [...]

I think this is what Americans are striving to ultimately do, (speaking of the general culture) and this is of course, as Delillo points out in the novel is not only destructive but impossible.

He also talks truth about the role of statistics in the national consciousness. Everyone, will, or should find a foible of Americana that they can appropriate as knowledge, something to call their own form now `till death.

One can get distracted, but the entire message for me is this: There is nothing in the American culture worth having. On the fringes, or in the mainstream. Pick your poison. A book dedicated to this is monumental. This really is, I think, the great American Novel, which is as fertile today as it was in 1971.

Don Delillo is an amazing writer. His prose, and the ideas contained in his novels, are so powerful they sometimes make me stop and catch my breath, and that's not hyperbole. I can't think of another contemporary author that moves me so much, with the possible exception of Saul Bellow. Reading his novels is pure joy, it's a wonder on every page, it's magic. I don't say that often.

I read somewhere that "The Names" was his first great novel, so I picked up "Americana" expecting to read the work of a budding author showing only flashes of brilliance. I found the writing and ideas expressed in "Americana" to be as fresh, brilliant, and moving as in any other book of his I've read. Delillo writes beautiful, highly intelligent novels that are also page-turners, and that's a rarity. He is, quite simply, a completely original American novelist, and "Americana" is a wonderful first novel.

Delillo should win the Nobel prize for literature some day, and I'd be very disappointed if he doesn't.

I've been reading Delillo's stuff out of order so I really haven't been able to get an idea of his artistic progression over the course of his novels. Which isn't key to enjoying them but it's a thing I like tracking. I'm not sure how much it matters though because this, his first novel, actually reads much better than the last one I read (Great Jones Street) that comes along later in his career. As far as I know this was his debut novel and shows that he more or less emerged fully formed from whatever writing crucible that he came from. The writing is as sharp as it ever was, the prose near flawless, each sentence effortlessly spinning out uncanny descriptions of the surroundings or a snapshot of the character's mental state that achieves a weird kind of detached beauty. If one were to go by the writing alone, the book would be brilliant because there's never a missed or wrong note at any time. However, there is a caveat and this is what proves it to be a first novel. Namely, the plot isn't all that tight. What I can tell concerns a TV executive David Bell, a man in his late twenties who is living the cynical dream of the decade. But something makes him want to get out there and see America, and so he takes on an assignment with a camera crew to go make a film, forcing him to go cross country. And that basically is what the plot entails. You can tell Delillo is attempting to make a big statement about the country, or at least the mental state of it at the time. All the characters talk in his usual half-despairing, half-humorous dialogue, like they know things are falling apart but can't help but find it funny, or are past the point of caring. But on a whole the book doesn't hold together with any strong central theme, it comes across as a bunch of detached episodes kept together purely by the strength of Delillo's writing. And if his writing wasn't as strong as it was, this book would have been terrible because a lot of scenes are aimless, or take the "look at how detached and cynical we are" motif and drive it right into the ground, or simply don't make any sense at all when connected to the larger plot. There's room for digressions (the bits about David meeting his wife are pretty good, as are the sections about his parents) and the looseness does give the story a certain charm that his tighter, more focused works don't have, the sense that he was willing to try anything. But for all the memorable moments, it doesn't really add up to anything, there's no haunting theme to stay with you after the book is done, even though you'll probably enjoy it while it's being read. That said, it does show promise, it has a strong and consistent voice and shows that right out of the starting gate he was already sorting out what his major themes would be. I found it very readable but don't expect any kind of grand statement. That's still to be found later, in more accomplished works.

First things first - this is a brilliantly-evoked account of the Giants/Dodgers playoff game that ended with the "Shot Heard Round the World". It is also the opening section of DeLillo's novel Underworld. Like most of the other reviewers of this book, my main beef is "Why should one bother to buy this extract?" In context, this is only the beginning of a long exploration of American history in the 50 years that separate us from that game - particularly the Cold War, which could be said to begin on that day with news of the Soviet Union's atomic test reaching the US. The historic baseball goes weaving from hand to hand binding the stories together. If you're a DeLillo fan, then, don't buy it for yourself. If you want a taster of his work, perhaps buy it as an entry-level sample but be prepared to fork out for it all over again if you decide you need to read the full novel. Best of all, buy it as a gift for someone who's unlikely to be a DeLillo reader, now or in future, but is a fan of baseball and/of 50s Americana. It's great stuff, but its appeal in this format is just pretty limited.

And I really believe that. This is the opening section of *Underworld* (1997), and it originally appeared in Harpers--so, when I saw it in stores, I thought "why re-release this as a BOOK?"

Then, I read it. It stands on its own as a novella--and it's not *just* about baseball, either, so don't let that mislead you or put you off. It's about *everything*. Maybe you don't wish to read the lengthy *Underworld* (though the themes and characters and plotlines here run through the entire novel)--but at LEAST read THIS.

And while I own the novel, I'm pleased to own this, too--and if you like DeLillo and wish to turn others on to his work, this is what you give them. I've given copies to several people, and use this brilliant work in my "Writing a Novella" Creative Writing class. I don't test the students, or ask them to try to emulate the work--I just ask them to read it.

Their jaws drop open every time, just as mine did--and does.

Who cares about Underworld? I didn't go near it. Separating this classic from that tome was the best marketing move anyone's ever done. This book should be in the public domain anyway. Imagine taking a baseball game, exploding it into one of the world's greatest historical events as seen from various characters' points of view, and at the same time encapsulating the dawning of a new moment in world history. Every sentence is sharp and detailed, anticipating the next. And then when Thomson hits the home run, Delillo freeze frames each second like you're in a car crash, making sure you're aware of everything that's going on. It's one of the best books ever written.

No, not really. Since this novella first appeared in Harper's some years back and then was the prologue in Underworld, this makes the third time it's appeared in print. And while it is brilliant, why buy this when you can buy Underworld for about the same price?

Well this has to be a classic, but describing it as a new 2001 novella by Delillo is a sure way to rile Delillo fans like me, who almost ordered it on reflex. It turns out to be the first part of Underworld. While Underworld is, in my view, one of the great books of this decade, the publisher should at least warn potential buyers that they may already own this book. On the other hand for those who find it hard to stick through an 800 page book, this sample delicacy might be a good introduction to the art of Delillo. As for me I prefer the original Underworld, or Body Artist, a completely mesmerizing novella about the same size as Pafko.

1) This book is very short. It's even shorter since some of it is stuff like telling you were to look on the internet for more information (so if you don't know how to use google maybe its helpful).
2) I didn't find much insight here, it's mostly showing how literary terms like "politicizing the aesthetic" and "aestheticizing the political" relate to the book. I don't find it added to my understanding of Underworld.
3) There are tons of typos in this book.
It basically reads like some college student's senior thesis that they turned in without even proofreading. Don't buy it. It exists for one purpose only - to get your money. Just my opinion, the other reviewers seemed to think it was good, but that wasn't my experience.

An excellent explication of DeLillo's most massive, sprawling fustercluck of brilliance. Along with DeLillo's White Noise, Underworld will still be read when we're all dead, and Duvall concisely crystallizes many of the reasons why. Underworld burrows beneath the sometimes shiny, sometimes scary surfaces of an enormous range of seemingly disparate Cold War territory, and Duvall goes a very long way (in a remarkably short space) toward putting together its pieces, and illuminating its insights. I read this reader's guide after reading Underworld, and it made me want to read the novel again. Bravo!!

How do you even begin to analyze the magnitude of DeLillo's achievement in 'Underworld'? This little book is a good place to start. Professor Duvall gives a brief and informative sketch of DeLillo's life and career to date and then dives into the meat of his book, wrestling with some of the themes - it would be impossible to do them all - of the novel. He comes over as well-informed, sharp and widely read, without ever being pretentious about it. And the book is even up-to-date enough to discuss the post 9/11 resonance of the novel's cover image.

At times a little dry for my taste, but that is a minor quibble. Duvall has packed a lot of thought into a nicely packaged book.