Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

you're conceptually empty!

it's been a while since i've read white noise, but that's not what i took away from it.

like my favorite thing about delillo in endzone and white noise is that as seriously as he takes his craft and his ideas, he also doesnt take them seriously. and that ability to joke about himself got lost somewhere around, i dont know, mao ii? or underworld i guess (havent read it). like the main professor character in point omega is pretty similar to murray in white noise--but the guy is deadly serious instead of being a figure of fun

has anyone read 'amazons'

love the idea of outgrowing writers, tho. like you can read salinger's long/short stories after you graduate from college and you'll be okay, but don't try to re-read catcher in the rye* or it will destroy you forever.

* i realize that some people can re-read catcher with no problem, but i think you catch my drift.

parts of underworld are jokey but there is a sort of ponderousness to it, i see what you mean

haha book threads exist just to piss me off i will have you know i reread catcher last year and it destroyed me. maybe i'm a case of arrested development.

'amazons' is p fun iirc

ooo i want to read amazons. how would one read it though? it's long out of print, right?

i think it's weird to pin the idea of him being less appealing somehow on his moment having faded; i know there was def a time when he was v zeitgeisty - there is that quote where he's talking about the fading relevance of linear narratives, which i'm sure he wasn't alone in recognising, or nec a pioneer of but which he does sorta epitomise, i think - but i feel like the change in context for readers can just make the books a different thing, portraying the beginning of an era rather than capturing the present moment.

i think i get the idea that he's college-y because there's a looseness to those early novels that is very invested in the poetry of how everything fits together, flitting between the beauty of the language to the new, cold landscape he's drawing. & maybe you have to 'buy into' that, have romantic faith in it the way you do at 20.

& idk, i like those last few novels, though i guess they're operating within his parameters, yeah, & the digressions of point omega aren't as shocking or absorbing as the earlier novels. but then we're onto some joseph heller shit about not transcending a framework that you drew the lines of.

xp, this is true, about the humourlessness, but i feel like that's more a thing of the austerity & anomie of the newer books, and the hyperactivity of white noise, &c. he's almost like love & death era woody allen in that, providing an additional sheen of absurdity to the very thing he's discussing.

i reread catcher last year and it destroyed me.

that's why i added the disclaimer--i bet you could read any book at the right time and place for you to read the book and it would wipe you out.

re amazons: think i bought the paperback off amazon p cheaply but a while ago. then lent it to someone & never got it back :\

okay but i also want to make the point that you are rong about catcher in the rye >:[

oh yah never mind you can get it on amazon.

okay but i also want to make the point that you are rong about catcher in the rye >:[

we're just talking about tastes here though! both of us are right, both of us are rong, even tho you are rong.

it's been a while since i've read white noise, but that's not what i took away from it.

yeah i cld be mistaken, or reading things that max is taking as lighthearted to be moralizing, i just strongly remember the whole 'here they are right back at the supermarket' stuff as being really hectoring/overbearing and theres lots of good writing in white noise

xps - haha naw i like salinger a lot

i love salinger! just don't think catcher would "resonate" with me like it once did

i think part of the reason i remain so attached to don delillo even though i haven't read him in a while is that he seems like such a lovely person, at least the notion of him you get through his work, as opposed to basically every other writer i like. i don't want to be disabused of this notion so don't tell me if he's a wifebeater or something.

but isn't the deal w/salinger that he captures a point in *your* life, being young & romantic, & w/delillo that he captured a moment in the twentieth century

if you read catcher as an adult it's all about wanting to protect holden and phoebe and it's a whole nother intense experience.

i mean maybe i misread white noise! or thought that delillo was "in on the joke" when he wasnt--but one thing that kept/keeps WN from feeling "collegey" to me is that it doesnt take its 'moralizing' or 'pondering' too seriously in general (there are obviously places where it does) and this keeps it from being unbearably 'MODERNITY DO U SEE.'

he is in on the joke; that book is hilarious

meanwhile falling man and point omega are both VIOLENCE AND WAR DO U SEE non-stop

not that i didnt enjoy them

catcher is wonderful but i hated it as a teenager.

i liked it as a kid but reading it now i don't think i got it at all. it's way better than i realized, for sure.

yeah i think regardless of how much you like it as a kid you don't get it until you're an adult. i dunno i guess there are some smart kids out there.

sorry i derailed delillo thread

are you going to reread catcher in the rye or what

don derail

are you going to reread catcher in the rye or what

already told you i was reading suttree! guess i'm going to have to.

<3

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

endzone is better

its set at a college tho

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

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

More like THROW-Updike

hey now

More like PORTA-John THROW-Updike

haha you're insane

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.

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.

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.)

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!!