Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

I'd been looking for the 9/11 book in secondhand shops. I saw a reviewers' pre-copy, but didn't buy it because I wanted the nice cover with the vertical subway train (I think). I finally found a copy the other day and was very pleased with myself - until Mrs K pointed out that the cover is just a picture of clouds, and not the one I wanted at all :o(

Ones I really, really did dig by him: Mao II, Running Dog, Libra, Ratner's Star (with reservations)

rad covers for the new book:

http://www.perival.com/delillo/pointomega_graphic.jpg

http://www.perival.com/delillo/pointomega_small.jpg

hrhmmm

DON DELILLO HAS BEEN "WEIRDLY PROPHETIC about twenty-first-century America" (The New York Times Book Review). In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a "defense intellectual," one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine.

Richard Elster was a scholar -- an outsider -- when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency."

We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere," in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character -- "Just a man and a wall."

Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits -- an "otherworldly" woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.

In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

surprising that there's no love for great jones street on this thread - haven't read it in years but it cracked me up circa '96

I've been avoiding it, actually, for fear it'd be dreadful.

Though when I reread Cosmopolis I was surprised how the rave and hip-hop stuff manages to not be dreadful — like sure it's kind of lol old but that's the perspective the narrative's aiming for anyway

I don't know, I wasn't in many loops when I read it so maybe now I'd be all "you dumbass the rock world is nothing like that" but I loved the fake album descriptions, something which as a young (13/14 years old mind so the story was doubtless awful) aspiring writer years ago I had also tried to do: a story that had a bunch of vividly described imagined albums, and their critical responses, at its center

i'll have to get around to it. it's kind of a bugbear of mine, i have a thread about it somewhere — narratives which turn around particular cultural artifacts, records or books or paintings or something, and how incredibly rare it is that anyone's bothered to make a believable context in which they can function

great jones street was the only one i didn't like when i was reading his books in the 80's. probably because of the rock stuff in it. i don't remember now. but it didn't hit me nearly as hard as the names. i'm thinking the names might be an underrated book cuz i never hear anyone say good stuff about it, but i thought it was great back then.

i loved the day room too. his play. i wonder what i'd think now. i just sold a copy at my store. i really tired of sll the shadowy conspiracy stuff, i gotta say. i have no desire to read his new stuff. which is sad, i guess. i thought he was the coolest way back when. mao 2 was the end of the line for me.

this book sort of sounds like a mash-up of "ratner's star" and "mao 2"

$24.00 ($16.20 w/ amazon discount) for a 128 page book? NO THANKS!

libraries!

reading this thread makes me realise i've read/love all the wrong delillos. seems like the names might be OOP but it's top of my list

i don't think any of his books are out of print except for the Cleo Birdwell one

The only novel I love with only a few reservations is Libra, but in essence he's an essayist stuck as a novelist (White Noise). I don't know what he was trying to do in Mao. Never finished Underworld. A friend to whom I said this also recommended The Names, so I'll give it a go.

i breezed through a lot of his books ten years ago, and not a lot of them stuck with me except Libra and maybe parts of Underworld, White Noise, and Mao II. I don't get the whole essayist stuck as a novelist--he doesn't seem like an essayist at all!

An essentially discursive talent creating characters, and scenarios for them.

i don't know many essayists who create characters and scenarios

u should talk to my 10th grade history teacher

i feel like mb that joke doesnt work the way i want it to

Que's misreading me.

i don't see how he writes like an essayist

is there a DeLillo for people who have only read White Noise and hated it?

white noise owns, but whenever i try to read underworld i am just like i want to fart on this book

totally understandable

underworld is really the most spotted delillo now, which i find kind of weird

underworld is all about the first 50 pages

those first 50 pages are boring as hecku

never read delillo, where 2 start

The only book of his I've really liked is White Noise. Not sure how I would feel about it today though. Read about five others for some reason, even though I've only got a so-so feeling (at best) off them. A good friend of mine with pretty good taste swears by The Names. I remember liking parts of Underworld (when it was new), but big sections that just left me cold - definitely couldn't imagine putting the effort into reading something like that these days...

gbx i would try White Noise or Libra or End Zone.

i have only read libra but it's fucking awesome

It's interesting that after the bloated Underworld his books have gotten shorter and shorter. Has he ever addressed that?

I think Underworld is magnificent - so many great images, and at least two-thirds of it has people you'd care about. Libra looks great too, and I liked White Noise well enough. But everything since has seemed inconsequential. It never even crossed my mind that he could make the ILX book of the 00s nominations thread. Excuse me.

GBX def try White Noise first.

thx dudes and dudettes

gbx i would recommend running dog or end zone i think - white noise has some weight-of-seriousness issues. or mb i have some w.-of-s. issues with it.

ppl who have read white noise: do you know there is a band called The Airborne Toxic Event? isn't that peculiar? i wonder if they are any good. i sort of doubt it, though.

Yeah, I thought that was quite cool. I imagine them as a lite-industrial combo.

that is horrible

xpost lol

I sure did not like The Body Artists. Still waiting to have a good experience with this dude.

i have now listened to the airborne toxic event, they were sort of too-snide-to-be-twee american indie thing

i quite like the body artist, though the ending is unsatisfying

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-mTuzE8-xIs/SrBRd-oU9LI/AAAAAAAAAzw/sshwgGXajUI/s400/whitenoise-front-cover.jpg

nice cover.
i haven't quite finished because i got distracted but am loving the new yorker story from a couple of weeks ago.

Like it. Four kids in the back though - is that right?

I really liked "Point Omega."
Anyone else read it yet?

that cover is some terrible twee-ass bullshit

Someone at Penguin design is causing havoc. Check out the one for Wuthering Heights.

i seem to be starting to reread 'underworld'—i'm not sure how far i'll get. but since it's been a long time since i first read it, i've been exposed to all sorts of other things in the meantime that help me to better understand what i'm reading. or, help me better understand things that i was able to perceive the first time through.

alfred's remark above about delillo as an essayist creating novelistic materials strikes me as off base. i think because it ignores the point of delillo's prose style (including paragraph-level stuff like scene-setting, interventions from the narratorial voice, free indirect style effects, and so on, but all the way down to the ways individual sentences can be formed). the effect i care about there is his way of putting into words the multi-aspected sense of self, and sense of what's going on around you (in the social, institutional, ritual world), that is probably part of what earns dlillo the praise / criticism of being 'antihumanist'.

that might come out more unequivocally in other books (maybe 'white noise', from what i recall from my one, even earlier read of it), but my sense is that two important, and certainly 'novelistic', further purposes this part of delillo's style serves are a) to express a kind of emersonian sense that the significance of ordinary life surpasses what we take it to be in our ordinary business of living—which is sometimes expressed in a very emersonian way by juxtaposing forms of description appropriate to the ordinary, everyday self, with forms appropriate to grand world-historical processes and concepts (which will make delillo look anti-humanist, in some moods);

and b) to do something like the same, but in a different register that pertains to threatening impersonal aspects of ordinary life that usually pertain to the historical state of society, development of technology and media and the role they play in our lives, etc. etc.

it seems like different ways of taking note of, or being aware of, or giving prominence to, these two aspects of how we see ourselves and the positions of our everyday lives in the greater sweep of life, are laid out pretty distinctly for the different characters in the 'pafko' sequence at the beginning. but not in the manner of an essay. they're each depicted in ways that are just as perceptible by readers as those of any novel.

i googled and found that tony tanner wrote a book called 'the american mystery: american literature from emerson to delillo'. anyone ever looked at it? is it any good?

relevant inasmuch as it touches on emerson:

Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there's no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. "I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne." Instead, he listens to jazz: "Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20."

there's an okay interview with delillo in today's observer. it's frustrating for cutting off just before the writer, delillo and paul auster head to carnegie deli to bullshit about typewriters, which sounds more interesting than standard q-and-a stuff.

I liked that, he talks seriously about complexity but comes across well. That usually makes writers seem like complete douches.

Not read a novel by DeLillo however I think the novel-essay has probably to some of the my favourite fiction that I've read in the last 18 months and Point Omega does look like its in that vein? Might chase that up.

it was disappointing imo

last decade? nah

im gonna read the new one anyway. i liked point omega (maybe his most straightforwardly pretentious novel) but zero k not so much, felt very conventional and really just a rehash of earlier stuff that he's rehashed enough at this point (without the elliptical refinement of his more severely minimal stuff post underworld). looking down through his list of novels im less convinced he had a 'classic' period and the ones that really stand out for me ('the names,' 'libra' and 'falling man') are not come before and after much less interesting ones. (i do tend to find his most ambitious stuff fairly tedious. Ratners star is not as clever as it thinks it is and Underworld is infuriating.)

Also there's a review in the most recent LRB of the new one that i haven't read in case spoilers and also bc its by andrew o hagan but it might helpful?

I've only read Great Jones Street. I had two problems with it:

- the main character was a cipher, and since he's also the narrator it left the book bloodless. He has elements of Dylan/Jagger/Lennon as convenient from moment to moment, but I never felt DeLillo actually got into the character.
- like J. G. Ballard, the story was more a scenario being explained than a plot that we see working out. That's perhaps an obvious pitfall when the whole book takes place (as I recall) in one apartment.

I did walk past the actual Great Jones Street in New York, it's about as wide as it is long and only has a handful of buildings on it.