Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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.