Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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<3

horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:46 (twelve years ago) link

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

so solaris (Lamp), Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:47 (twelve years ago) link

endzone is better

max, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:48 (twelve years ago) link

its set at a college tho

max, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:49 (twelve years ago) link

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

so solaris (Lamp), Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:53 (twelve years ago) link

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

horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:55 (twelve years ago) link

More like THROW-Updike

max, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 17:09 (twelve years ago) link

hey now

horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 17:10 (twelve years ago) link

More like PORTA-John THROW-Updike

max, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 17:13 (twelve years ago) link

haha you're insane

horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 17:16 (twelve years ago) link

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.

plax (ico), Wednesday, 9 November 2011 17:38 (twelve years ago) link

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.

scott seward, Thursday, 10 November 2011 02:42 (twelve years ago) link

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.)

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:44 (twelve years ago) link

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.

lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:45 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:46 (twelve years ago) link

updike more like bunkdike

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:47 (twelve years ago) link

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

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:48 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link

thats how much i like updike

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link

i have pretty college-y taste, though

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link

delillo is funnier than updike

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:50 (twelve years ago) link

also less sex

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:51 (twelve years ago) link

true! lotta vaginas in updike's stuff

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:51 (twelve years ago) link

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

lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:52 (twelve years ago) link

that's why they turn to sodomy.

lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:52 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:54 (twelve years ago) link

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

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:55 (twelve years ago) link

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

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:55 (twelve years ago) link

dfw was not an old person when he wrote ij

johnny crunch, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:56 (twelve years ago) link

i missed the old person thing

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:57 (twelve years ago) link

yeah but dude was only 33 when he wrote it

xposts

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:58 (twelve years ago) link

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.

the pinefox, Thursday, 10 November 2011 15:59 (twelve years ago) link

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."

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:04 (twelve years ago) link

"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?

Ismael Klata, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:09 (twelve years ago) link

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."

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:10 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:10 (twelve years ago) link

"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."

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:13 (twelve years ago) link

so great!

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:13 (twelve years ago) link

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.

the pinefox, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:15 (twelve years ago) link

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

horseshoe, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:16 (twelve years ago) link

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.

the pinefox, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:17 (twelve years ago) link

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

the pinefox, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:18 (twelve years ago) link

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."

Mr. Que, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:18 (twelve years ago) link

"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."

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:19 (twelve years ago) link

i mean, boom.

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:19 (twelve years ago) link

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.

strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:20 (twelve years ago) link

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.

horseshoe, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:23 (twelve years ago) link

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

lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:23 (twelve years ago) link

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.

the pinefox, Thursday, 10 November 2011 16:24 (twelve years ago) link


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