Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

yah a long time ago--it was pretty awes

I just read a summary of 'End Zone', talking about how the main character is obsessed with what he sees as imminent nuclear armageddon, which has rather swayed me towards reading it (I've liked about 2/3 of the eLillo I've read before, but was previously put off this by it being about football).

James: let me know how you go. I'm unlikely to go with End Zone next, considering I don't yet own a copy, and so am instead faced with the familiar and let's face it unpleasant task of working out which owned-but-as-yet-unread-book to choose from... Oh, I think I said recently it'd be The Assistant, so had better not make a liar of me...

i really liked endzone. i'd like to read it again someday. same with americana. i read all those books so long ago, they would seem new to me again.

A voice from the subconscious: Toyota Corola.

This is also a White Noise reference.

yeah it must be a pardoy even tho someone up above said 'it's certainly him'

Yeah, I mean, their other bloggers include "Pip Dawkins, 19th Century Street Urchin" and "Gary Brunson, 5-Week-Old Fetus."

it's certainly a 5 week old fetus

i was the one CERTAINLY HIMing all over the place. i've still only read the first entry. i think my conviction is more rooted in wondering why people make convincing hoaxes, like really authentic and not particularlt satirical april fools jokes, with author's photo etc.

i am quite keen to deflect attention back on to general don delillo affairs to distract from my potential faux pas.

just got the 9/11 book - only one i haven read

i rep for mao 2 and the names fwiw

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.

xp I was just riffing on xyzzz's "beckett not joyce" &c

philip roth on his agent's sofa, sadly watching the liver going cold for the last time

― mark s, Thursday, October 13, 2016 12:23 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(unsure why i said "for the last time" -- CLEARLY NOT FOR THE LAST TIME)

Trying to picture Martin Amis right now.

picture an entire body made of tin ear

- UNDERWORLD

Underworld was awful. The zapruder bit was awful. The bit about Edgar Hoover was awful. Some of the writing was amazingly skillful but AMERICA in all caps is such a banal subject.

jaoo-dae!

I think it was at least half a great book.

Probably never got more electrifying than the Pafko at the Wall opening unfortunately. Amazing piece of writing, that.

Any recommendations from the last decade or so of DeLillo novels?

I thought Zero K was just ok, but I read it pretty soon after Underworld so I might have just been a little overDeLilloed at that point. He has a new one out now, doesnt he?

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.