Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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!!

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)