Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

lol amis would make such a good ilm poster

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

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

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

What was the first thing?

draft suicide note

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

fwiw i think m.amis is a half decent critic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*daps*

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

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

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

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

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

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

i finished it today too!

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

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

i think u rc

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

i love his voice, yeah

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

A good read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cosmopolis

cronenberg v delillo WOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did love the Hoover-Tolson bits though.

where should I start with the pre-WN ones?

i kind of like 'running dog'

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

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

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

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

'americana' has some really cool stuff in it iirc

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

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

americana was very readable but i remember almost nothing about it

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

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

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

Tom Petty?

toilet paper

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

i should rescreen underworld maybe some day

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

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

'don delillo: dud or topiary-spanking DUD'

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