Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

x-post, IK:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i mean, boom.

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

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

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

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

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

i love you pinefox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This might suggest that literary effect is mysteriously cumulative.

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

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

xpersht.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amis on DeLillo:

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

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

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

That first paragraph is beautifully written and 100% OTM

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

humor doesn't age well tho

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

lol amis would make such a good ilm poster

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

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

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

What was the first thing?

draft suicide note

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

fwiw i think m.amis is a half decent critic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*daps*

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

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

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

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

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

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

i finished it today too!

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

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

i think u rc

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

i love his voice, yeah