Characters and readers, confronted with the mysteries of existence and the mysteries of the text, search for meaning, pattern, logic, resolution, and this search for the code that reveals a system in what otherwise appears as a void is, in itself, the resolution of the mystery, the star code to the void core.
That’s my attempt to reduce DeLillo’s novels to a few phrases, or better yet, a few words: code, void, system.
For some reason I decided in June 2020 to read and re-read DeLillo’s novels, mostly sequentially, in order of publication, intending at first to re-read the six or so I’d previously read but more interested in reading for the first time the “lesser” earlier and later novels, that is, those that came before and after the masterpieces I’d already read: White Noise, Libra, and Underworld.
Below are my impressions, quick notes typed out soon after finishing. I’ll add to this over time I’m sure.
Americana (1971)
Alert! Attention! This is not “a road novel”! It’s marketed as that, like that Kerouac scroll from sea to shining sea, but this is not that. It’s more of an office novel and a coming-of-age/emerging artistic sensibility/search-for-meaning novel. Disregard all commentary that doesn’t acknowledge that this is a triptych. The third section takes place to a degree on the road but for the most part they’re stalled out in Fort Curtis, maybe in Illinois or Missouri, filming an artsy experimental film, where the novel dissolves, the way that similarly titled young man’s novel (Amerika) by Kafka dissolves too.
This is a fantastic late-’60s zeitgeist core sample of a novel, an unparalleled performance in prose for a first novel, although the style and especially the dialogue aren’t yet totally individuated. It feels like Roth, Salinger, Cheever, sort of, after they’ve taken psychedelics, aerodynamic and aerated in terms of unreliance on plot, more imagistic, clever, shit-talky, rangy.
It’s very necessary to mention that on page 370 (of 377) the narrator makes a phone call asking who the third-baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies was at some random point in time related to something about Judy Garland, which is notable because when I first moved to Philadelphia in 2006, the third-baseman for the Phillies was David Bell, who later turned out to achieve his middling level of play with the help of steroids, which is notable because the narrator’s name is David Bell, who is an “extremely handsome young man,” a 28-year-old employee of a NYC TV network, son of an ad man, mother died when he was 20, from Westchester County.
The opening section is a sort of raucous depiction of a young man working at a time when men smoked and drank in their offices and casually made out with their secretaries (most interactions among colleagues, especially men and women, would result in HR reports these days). He’s longing for more to life though and ultimately hits the road after a section depicting life at home when he was young, age eleven, I think, wonderfully depicting a party his family throws. Knowing that DeLillo is from the Bronx, too, you know it all slyly satirizes conventional commuter culture, suburban ennui etc, just the way the first section slyly satirizes the office novel and the last section slyly satirizes the road novel, always jocoserious, amusing yet detailed, reverential, and aware of the enormities and complexities of existence. “. . . once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery.”
Also great occasional writing about baseball. His first novel: the first two sections I really enjoyed before the third section that, like parts of Underworld and Ratner’s Star, opts for dissolution over conventional expected resolution, and there were a few stretches of dense overindulgent borderline incomprehensible all-out art writing usually relating madmen on the radio. A fantastic period piece with top-notch prose. A young writer to watch!
End Zone (1973)
Loved re-reading this after 25 years or so. Had nearly no memory of it. Finished it the day after the first NBA playoff games, mid-August in a “bubble,” the court and jerseys emblazoned with social justice slogans, all of which relates in a way to this unique, accessible, totally enjoyable distillation of DeLillo’s typical themes and approaches.
It’s a systems novel (collegiate football program) largely about death, spirituality, manliness, language (and the unspeakable), and global thermonuclear war. It’s dated to a degree, seeming very late ’60s/early ’70s, but still feels contemporary and relevant. The characters are mostly surnames, other than the narrator and his picnic-partner girlfriend and co-running back Taft Robinson and a few other players and coaches, teachers, a major in the ROTC.
It’s difficult to summarize other than simply saying that to a degree it’s a perfect novel, maybe overlong by thirty pages, the language honed, surprising, meaningful, beautiful but not pretty or lyrical; the themes always explicitly in play but never excessive or totally tied up; the setting of a desolate West Texas campus consistently reinforced and represented as a blast zone; the characters physical and palpable, even when it’s a person reduced to number 77 on the opposing team’s defense.
It has some good narrative drive, too, as the Logos College Screaming Eagles gear up to take on Centrex, the first real challenge on their schedule after a series of initial cakewalks. The game itself is described play by play in detail over maybe forty pages. And then it decays and resolves, the last section climaxing in an extracurricular snow football game, a simulated nuclear war game, and a quiet conversation with the star running back, the sole black player on the team. Later elaborated in Underworld with its focus on baseball and the bomb, this is the earlier incarnation, the proto-masterpiece, tighter than Americana or Ratner’s Star but hitting the same high points — and maybe better for its concision and humor throughout. Definitely recommended as a DeLillo entryway or the second step after White Noise. Fans of Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. will love this too.
Great Jones Street (1973)
Didn’t re-read this one this summer. Here are some notes from when I read it ten years ago: ” “. . . permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language.” Presages Cobain, or more so Yorke’s “how to disappear completely.” Fantastic sentences. Chicks don’t dig it because it’s ultra a-emotional, but dudes dig it for the cool response in the face of very good reasons for paranoia re: the system. Worth it if you’ve read Underworld and Libra, but probably not so hot if you haven’t and therefore don’t recognize nascent expressions of Donny D.’s later awesomeness.
Ratner’s Star (1976)
Four-hundred thirty-eight pages of pinned, maxed, honed, redolent, amusing, inventive, insane, intelligent, wise, perfectly phrased, flowing, individuated, ribald prose. It’s mid-’70s meta maximalism, for sure, its density eased by stretches of typically DeLillo-n dialogue in which characters speak past one another, but also I read it as a major source of inspiration for Infinite Jest, a sort of unfulfilled precedent that DFW pounced on, filling this one’s “void core” with at least a semblance of emotion/sadness.
Billy, fourteen-year-old from the Bronx, Nobel Prize-winning math genius for his work on zorgs, presages Hal in IJ, and instead of the tennis academy it’s a think tank with a long name, the acronym for which spells CHRIS. In IJ, they play “Eschaton,” and in RS there’s halfball, a similar wholly complicated stickball-like game that DFW elevated and extended to fulfill in reality the fictionalized description of the work of the Great Writer in RS, Chester Greylag Dent, who lives in a submarine tens of thousands of feet under the sea, awarded the Nobel Prize for:
“epic, piquant disquisitions on the philosophy of logic, the logic of games, the gamesmanship of fiction and prehistory . . . ethereally select realms of abstract mathematics and the more palpable subheights of history and biography, every published work of this humanist and polymath reflective of an incessant concern for man’s standing in the biosphere and handblocked in a style best described as undiscourageably diffuse.” (pg 307).
Chester Greyleg Dent, himself, is a great addition to the list of great authors in great novels: Benno von Archimboldi/Hans Reiter in 2666, Bergotte in Proust, Paul Arnheim in Musil, et al.
And the more I think about this one the more I consider my reading experience “great” in that I read it daily and happily, walking and reading again at lunch for a couple miles, rediscovering again how effective that technique is for me, how it helps me concentrate, particularly when reading dense, mostly plotless, hyperbolic, hyperattentive prose. Reading this while walking I rediscovered my love for reading, which had lapsed post-pandemic, in part because the time I had to read on the train was gone with commute-less WFH-ing.
But mostly the prose is so compelling, amusing in its awesomeness, from the first page, which introduces a “somnolent horizon” as a fiction that leads to fresh dimensions. Very quickly into this my metafictional sensors engaged, on the lookout for commentary on the book itself (“content isn’t the issue”), which was easy enough when it centered around cracking “the star code,” a series of pulses from a distant star, possibly a binary star (binaries are a thematic key), or a transmission warped by dark matter (moholes) sent from some other region of the galaxy, or a transmission actually from ancient humans on earth — like all great literature, the search for the meaning is the meaning itself, the interpretation. What I’m doing now is what it’s about, making sense of the mess(age), not so much character or plot or emotional catharsis, rising action, climax, denouement, etc — instead it’s about Billy’s father hauling the ungainly TV set around the apartment to get a moment of clear signal. Metaphors for reading and meaning and interpretation like that abound, like the old guy going on and on about the ein sof and sefirot and other kabbalistic ideas, an ancient religious mystical search in a way to break the star code to fill the void core, or the whirling aborigine no one sees, or any number of oddball scientists and astrophysicists etc, all trying to figure it all out, man.
It’s a mid-’70s novel, and the second section involves characters that didn’t cohere as well for me as some in the first section, lots of amusingly described intercourse between Softly (DFW’s inspiration for the name Steeply), a very pale child-size man, and a woman who’s ultimately writing a novel filled with blank pages, beyond interpretation, as they all work on a super-logical content-less language any reasonably advanced intelligent alien society would be able to understand.
Ultimately, I looked forward to reading this when I wasn’t reading this, in part maybe because its total commitment to “undiscourageably diffuse” language and all the various searches for meaning felt meaningful to me after months of being otherwise exposed to signals coming in maybe a little too clearly and insistently delivering warnings about worldwide health and sociopolitical relevance. Like all great literature, it offered an escape into the utopian realm of language in which instruction and the general fabric of reality are abstract and ambiguous, a blast from the past I found for the most part fun to read, although I agree with DFW that its void core could use filling with a semblance of emotion.
Players (1977)
My paperback had 212 pages — on page 200 there appeared these potentially representative sentences:
“He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.”
A beguiling mid-’70s NYC novel, chaotic and divergent more than surreal, tormentous, or aberrant, its spiritual side quasi-mystical at best, abstractly expressed by its lack, by a desire not quite stated as such for immersion in sex, violence, the master plan, the ambition as simple as the idea of “Maine,” something to say so people know what you’re about for a time. A super-subtle ambiguous moral tale in a way.
Three sections (a seven-page intro frame, a 195-page central story, and a four-page coda) — the first short one takes place on an airplane, a bar area with a piano player having fun playing dramatic music along with an in-flight movie he can’t hear involving white male golfers getting gunned down by charismatic revolutionaries/terrorists. Seven passengers are noted, four men and three women, including a gay male couple, who to a degree appear in the main section of the novel, which mostly follows a hetero couple as they break apart, Lyle, who works on the New York Stock Exchange, and Pammy, who works in the World Trade Center with Ethan, who’s always with Jack, who he supports, a guy mostly characterized by a white patch of hair on the back of his head. Lyle likes sitting in front of the television and turning the channels more than watching, his perception and consciousness expressed in traditional DeLillo prose, phrases modulated, extended, and repositioned by secondary and tertiary clauses, always balanced, solid, sonic, sculpted, hewn.
A man is gunned down on the floor of the Exchange, Lyle gleamingly pursues a tall blond bland woman, his boredom giving way to involvement in a plot to detonate a device on the floor of the Stock Exchange at night, but it’s not totally clear, the currents are streaked with counter-plot currents, disinformation, two guys named Berks, the whole thing seemingly no more real or urgent than Pamela’s trip to Maine with Ethan and Jack, lounging around on the deck, cold at night, drinking, ordering escargot ice cream as a joke, always joking, not catching the references to Pull My Daisy and Lord Buckley (says Ethan), until something drastic happens (won’t spoil it).
The four-page coda at the end is set in a motel room in which the tall blond bland woman, who had recently emerged from the bathroom wearing a strap-on, lounges in bed as Lyle dissolves into light?
Five or six sex scenes, all interesting primarily as sex scenes written by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, I suppose Roth and Updike were bearing the literary soft-porn standard and DeLillo wanted to put in his bid?
As in all DeLillo, the characters talk past each other, never responding to questions, as though he writes ten pages of ordinary dialogue and then deletes nine pages of stray lines and phrases until it’s a variety of poetry or comedy routine punctuated by associative punchlines, like Beat (Pull My Daisy) or crazy hip Lord Buckley rap, albeit refined and literary and “contemporary.”
Eerie line early on about how the World Trade Center seems somehow temporary.
Overall I enjoyed reading this, the prose, the phrases, laughing at them when it gets almost too DeLillo-ish, builds up into something like a self-parody of individuated style, like Bernhard at his most Bernhardian. That’s something: the amusement a reader experiences when exposed to passages wholly a writer’s own in form and content. This novel is filled with that, almost to the point of parody, but it never gets to be too much, thanks in part to regular chapter breaks and changes of scene and character.
When the story switches perspective from Pammy to Lyle there’s no space break, nothing more than a hard return, giving the impression of chaos, easily losing me for a moment unless I cautioned myself to read more slowly and be careful for sudden changes.
Also, very importantly, I pictured the tall bland blond woman as Nick Torelli’s wife Loretta on Cheers:
What’s it about? It’s not easy to say in a sentence or two — it’s more like a core sample of mid-’70s NYC, a poem built on association, playing with language, jokes that aren’t funny so much as they maintain a level of clever, the glow of the TV, the allure of the guy behind the guy, of doing something for real for once, of experiencing something “metaphysical” instead of repeating the word as part of a pickup, crying for once without thinking one’s become too complex to cry?
It’s a period piece, overall, an intuitive zeitgeist register, streaked with obtuse political thriller. Not quite another systems novel but Lyle exists inside the system of the Stock Exchange, all those numbers meaning something. But mainly for me at least it was about the prose, the language, semi-perceptual atmospheric crosscurrents, urban emanations, understood as premonitions, that typical DeLillo extra-sensory static, evocation of the city I first encountered as I came into consciousness as a kid (see pic below, maybe on West Broadway in SoHo, circa ’77), a sense of psychosocialgeographic time, place, and space now past.
Need to think about this more to make sense of it, maybe even check out some reviews/essays about it.
The original NYT review: http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/0…
DFW’s handwritten notes inside his copy — mostly what looks like notes for The Pale King (IRS/boredom): https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2016/01/29/fellows-find_stephenburn/
Glad he didn’t call it “Foes of God.”
Running Dog (1978)
A confounded thriller that seems conceived by the same writer as the other novels but not quite carried out by the guy who usually delivers page after page of perfectly attuned phrases. Seems rushed, simply. Could be rewritten and rock: an old porn film shot in Hitler’s bunker right before his end might be available; a Senator’s proxy, a former Vietnam POW it turns out, is after it; a journalist for a middling radical magazine is on the case; shadowy forces not so well characterized are giving chase. In the end the film shows a human form who may be Hitler impersonating Charlie Chaplin, who famously impersonated Hitler, to entertain children. There’s something to work with there, but in this version, it’s too muddled for me, things throughout suffering from disbelief because the art — as it is in everything else DeLillo’s written for the most part — isn’t irrefutable.
DeLillo is always a hyper-reliable author, presenting a more real version of reality rendered in his absolutely particular, superhumanly attentive prose, even if his characters, scenarios, stories might be a little implausible. In this, the prose rarely achieves that level; the dialogue is difficult to follow but not as stylized, honed, musical, funny, and therefore not just forgiven but savored; the characters don’t often animate beyond their name, usually just a surname here; and there are few thematic balls in the air, as usual elsewhere.
Some phrases on page 208 (of 246 total) — “Vietnam, in more ways than one, was a war based on hybrid gibberish . . . where technical idiom was often the only element of precision, the only true beauty, he could take with him into realms of ambiguity” — almost make all this seem intentional (hybrid gibberish evoking realms of ambiguity) but not enough to make this one seem like more than connective tissue among the major muscle groups of Libra (shadowy conspiracy) and White Noise (Hitler Studies) to come? Might try to read it more slowly, carefully, patiently at some point once I’ve read everything else and re-read a few others too.
Amazons (1980) by Cleo Birdwell
In the late ’70s, after writing a nearly perfect early masterpiece/distillation of his sensibility and style in End Zone, and then the amusing maximalist funhouse of Ratner’s Star, which he considered his favorite novel and hardest to write, and then Players, probably his most formally unconventional/artsy early novel, it seems like DeLillo wanted to sell-out and make some money and so there’s a half-baked yet still pretty silly thriller (Running Dog), and then this one under a pseudonym after his primary publisher essentially rejected it, a novel that’s really straightforward, mostly linear and episodic, following the narrator’s first season as the first woman in the NHL with the New York Rangers, interspersed with occasional descriptions of the good simple life growing up in small-town Ohio.
The title relates to a TV commercial the narrator agrees to appear in but then quits on as filming begins, thinking it too stupid, which jibes with the idea that this is DeLillo’s comic commercial sellout, something he ultimately believed too silly and stupid to publish under his own name. But I think this one is pivotal for DeLillo in that it leads to White Noise, wherein he ultimately fuses (and refines) conflicting sensibilities — the silly and the serious (“the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints,” per the end of White Noise‘s first paragraph). This is DeLillo putting all his weight on the sillier sensibility, having fun, not worrying too much about the language (few to no weighty sentence fragments and/or short phrases and single words strung along at the end of sentences; the general RPM, the energy and pace of the sentences, is also higher than usual — feels quickly handwritten like one of Cleo’s letters instead of typed?) but also incapable of writing weak or shaggy or unclear sentences, unable to write poorly but also unwilling in this case to let his competing dominant instinct for headiness gain much ground either.
In this one, there’s no attempt at grand statement or metaphysics, there’s a ton of conventional dialogue that’s usually engaging, rangy, playful, uncharacteristically intelligible for DeLillo (characters don’t speak past each other as in Players) and usually it’s just two characters together talking since most scenes are intimate encounters between the narrator and her many suitors so it’s clear most of the time who’s speaking. Since this is essentially a comic novel, some of the underbaked characters are more forgivable than in his more serious novels, but this one also has some of DeLillo’s most thorough and memorable characterization. The scene in Glenway’s tiny spartan apartment is probably one of the funniest, clearest I’ve read by DD, as well as the seduction by the smoking French Canadian coach speaking French to her.
In the context of the late ’70s, you also have to consider how this emerges from a decade of sexual liberation and the rise of feminism, not to mention the mainstream popularity of men’s mags like Playboy and Penthouse (with its famous “Forum”). And this came out in January 1980, the year the US hockey team beat the CCCP in the winter Olympics, in my life the highpoint of interest in the sport. But I would definitely avoid this if you’re just looking for a good hockey book.
So: a pivotal DeLillo novel in a way, in that it’s a distillation of one side of his instinct, the accessible, silly, bawdy, rangy, playful, zany, outrageous side, descriptive and well-phrased language but not pared down with every sentence perfect, hefty, honed. He must have been working on this at the same time as The Names (1982), which to me seems like everything this novel isn’t. Comparatively The Names seems totally pretentious, intentionally opaque, signaling but not really signifying, excessively concerned with identifying the pattern and discerning its meaning (DeLillo’s thesis?), just as much pathological apophenia (“seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”) as salubrious literary association, insightful assembly and interweaving of disparate everything into a text unified by a single sensitive consciousness uniquely (and often deftly) able to approximate in language the true complexity of existence.
The Names is a realist(ic) elaboration of the exaggerated, playful, maximalist silliness of deciphering the star code to fill the void core in Ratner’s Star. There’s mention of meaning in this one’s brief intro section but it comes with a funny acknowledgment that this memoir propagates less meaning than life itself.
Some random notes: the first sentence in this is straight outta End Zone. It’s a dig on Yalies, and since my wife is a Yalie, I read it to her when I first read it in End Zone and so immediately recognized it when it reappeared here. Also, at one point a cabbie lights up a joint at 4:20 am — this could be a coincidence or DD could’ve been aware of 4:20 way before mainstream America. Per the internet, High Times didn’t note 4:20 until the early ’90s and I don’t remember hearing it until around then either. And then there’s also an exchange early on that seems like it may have influenced DFW’s “This Is Water” speech (his copy of Amazons at the UT Austin archive is apparently highly annotated). Also DFW-related: this is a parade of aggressive, amorous, albeit not totally hideous men, possibly inspiring Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? Unrelated to DFW, it’s funny that the novel’s ideal man is asleep for months in stain-colored jumpsuit-like pajamas, recovering from a wicked case of Jumping Frenchman (a chronic tic expressed as random sudden exaggerated movement as though leaping away from a non-existent donkey kick).
If you’re a DeLillo fan, it’s worth trying to find a relatively inexpensive copy online. I found a first-edition hardcover with a dust jacket in good shape for $45 and consider myself pretty lucky.
The Names (1982)
I understand how this is probably an essential step en route to Libra and Underworld but it’s overlong and diffuse, a failed marriage novel among Americans in Athens that edges into a thriller (an obscure murder in the hills!), that devolves into some shadowy CIA conspiracy, the narrator falling apart in a way along with his marriage and the novel itself, subsumed by interest in a language-obsessed death cult whose victims’ initials match the initials of the crime’s location, hippie-ish devouts who speak Aramaic and Sanskrit, a cult with the same name as the novel albeit in Greek, suggestive of the ninety-nine names of God, among other shadowy obscure diffuse associations of meaning, like the really poorly characterized characters who all speak the same sans dialogue tags so you have no idea most of the time who’s speaking, although the dialogue isn’t as honed and fun as in Players.
It seems like DeLillo with this one is trying to be more serious, take on international politics, heavy shit like the Middle East, Pakistan, death cults, the CIA, extending his ambition from Running Dog, his rushed thriller attempt that retained some of the humor and zaniness of his earlier novels. These thrillers aren’t in any way thrilling but they’re serviceable as transitions to Libra and Underworld when DeLillo finds the right focus with the JFK conspiracies and hones his diffusion techniques (Underworld‘s mushroom cloud structure).
This has its moments — the writing really clarifies and is charged as the narrator attempts to seduce an American woman and then essentially forces himself on her; there are some solid parts relating the breakup of the narrator’s marriage too — but it also SWITCHES POV on page 276 (of 340), something that really almost had me quitting the novel, especially as the third-person story about Owen seemed overburdened by description of rural India and related vocabulary.
Also, I felt like this one suffered from excessive religiosity, never really DD’s strong suit. The language, too, wasn’t as honed as in Americana or Ratner’s Star or even Players. More “worked” than Running Dog but inconsistently individuated — that is, when he’s on, every single sentence is absolutely DeLillo-ean. The percentage of such sentences/passages in this is higher but at times the language felt more rushed, somewhat ironic in a novel so much about language itself. Anyway, glad I read it but also very glad it’s over.
White Noise (1985)
First read this in 1997 while temping in the copy center of an architectural firm near the Princeton Junction train station. I remember loving it, giddy at J. A. K. Gladney’s extraneous initial, Hitler Studies, the most photographed barn in America, the Airborne Toxic Event, the regular high-falutin dialogues in the supermarket aisles, less impressed from what I remember with the second half’s emphasis on death. I remember reading at lunch outside in October, eating a sandwich I’d made with good bread, good hard cheese, and wasabi. I recommended it (the book, not the sandwich, although wasabi on sandwiches is great) to students when I taught at the college level seven and eight years after first reading it. I remembered it as funny, extraordinarily well-written, insightful into the real ways of the world.
Just finished a second read 23 years later, six months into Pandemic 2020, nearly done with this little self-directed immersion in the complete works of the author, as election anxiety rises, as the Northwest burns, as the NFL restarts in empty stadiums, as baseball and basketball games are played to cardboard cutout and digital fans, their murmurs and cheers simulated, nearly 200K dead so far in the US (“it is what it is,” says the president).
This time around, as always when re-reading, I marveled mostly at how much seemed new, as though reading for the first time. Some of it seemed so familiar but the ending with Wilder powering his tricycle across the highway after the showdown with Willie Mink in the motel room, somehow I totally forgot, as though I never even finished the book the first time around. This time I was immediately struck by the appearance of Murray Jay Siskind, subcharacter journalist cook in Amazons, which I read before re-reading this. He felt like an old friend, with his little beard, round spectacles, intellectualizing. The chapters are shorter than in most of his other novels. The pace of the prose a little slower too, a little steadier, certainly than in Amazons (the fastest, other than the first third of Americana and End Zone). The approach generally seems like it’s more refined, its idiosyncrasies of syntax, focus, dialogue, irony, insight, controlled nearly to the point of shtick.
The consistent focus on the theme of death differentiates this from his previous novels. (2024 note: my first read on lunch breaks temping at that architectural firm near the Princeton Junction train station occurred within a quarter mile of the “memory care facility” where my father would ultimately die 27 years later.) This one is about death to such a degree that it detracts, almost to the point that I questioned my long-held highest-possible regard. I also felt less absorbed in the text, more likely to zone out, put it down, read in spurts, in part because every time I tried to read I was interrupted by wife or child, almost to the point of farce. But when I did successfully commit most of a Saturday to powering through the last third I understood that my lack of absorption, distraction, zoning out at times had more to do with my reading experience than the book itself, although I am getting a little tired of DeLillo honestly and look forward to reading someone else in about a month.
So it seems the great White Noise has fallen somewhat in my estimation after reading so much else I’d consider better these past 23 years, at least in terms of my reading experience, including the author’s own Americana (the first half at least), End Zone (all of it), Ratner’s Star (the first two thirds), and Amazons (most of it), plus of course his masterpieces Libra and Underworld.
White Noise seemed to me interesting in terms of where it appears in DeLillo’s bibliography, after The Names (my least favorite by far, a departure for DeLillo in many ways, his loosest, most opaque thematically, most reliant on non-meaningful description of distant lands — his only novel set outside the United States) and Amazons, published under a pseudonym, looser, rangier, yet straightforward, silly, funny, narrated by a woman, no dominant theme. He easily could’ve fallen apart as a writer — in fact it seems like he had been falling apart in the late ’70s after Ratner’s Star, with Players and Running Dog seemingly less honed and “good” than his previous work, followed by his minor crisis of the early ’80s (The Names, Amazons). But thankfully it seems like he decided to err on the side of the most serious theme available (death) but maintain the accessible, humorous (if not necessarily LOL) exaggeration of Amazons, all while doubling-down on his code, void, system thesis.
“Every word and thing a bright bead-work of creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person’s study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.”
And later:
“Know your code. Reveal your code to no one. Only your code allows you to enter the system.”
If you could reduce DeLillo to three words I’d choose “code, void, system.”
At the end, shoppers in the rearranged supermarket are “trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic.”
And that’s essentially the answer to the question DeLillo asks and what makes him a great writer — characters and readers, confronted with the mysteries of existence and the mysteries of the text, search for meaning, pattern, logic, resolution, and this search for the code that reveals a system in what otherwise appears as a void is, in itself, the resolution of the mystery, the star code to the void core.
Libra (1988)
Didn’t re-read this summer but intend to re-read soon. Read it about ten years ago. All I can really say is that on every page the writing reeks of literature, but rarely is it literary. What I mean is that DeLillo’s sentences always seem to have an eye on a subtextual prize, that is, they always seem like an updated, abstract response to that question posed long ago by some cavedweller about the meaning of life, as opposed to turns of phrase for the sake of well-crafted whateverness. Any given paragraph is obviously DeLillo. His style is absolutely particularly his, but also it’s readable and clear, with lyrical potential, too, but never romantic, or sensory solely for the sake of activating the reader’s senses. All characters are part of the whole (society, history, the universe), and all characters have been brought to life solely to speak DeLillo’s words. This would annoy if DeLillo had nothing to say, but he has some serious things to say, and so his characters say them, then conspire to kill the president. A particular brand of American anxiety is represented here. This is a difficult review to write. What I should just say is that several times while reading this while walking to work I would laugh out loud at awesome language or a turn or development or insight (rarely at something funny, though humor exists if not necessarily abounds) and sometimes I’d even say out loud that this dude is a freakin’ great writer. I should be better able to articulate why I’d say this aloud while walking/reading, but I think it has to do with his authority, ambition, dry-eyed humanity, intelligence/wisdom, scope/range, humor, boldness, the beautifully honed/hefty sentences of course, and also something to do with the structure, how scenes emerge and dissolve (“boldly” as Ethan Canin says) without much helpful orientation from the author, and it all seems held together loosely, artfully, in a way that seems like it wants to very carefully, very gently create in the reader a state similar to what’s being experienced by the characters? Something like that? It’s real good. Maybe his masterpiece, even more so than Underworld? — it definitely feels longer (maybe ’cause it’s denser?) and goes slower than Underworld . . . Also, plot-wise, the whole time you know how this one ends, but such knowledge is hardly an annoyance, the opposite in fact, same as with re-reading Hamlet etc.
Mao II (1991)
Didn’t re-read this summer and don’t really intend to re-read. Read it after 9/11 due to 9/11-related prophecy. Wasn’t particularly struck by it then.
Underworld (1997)
Structured in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the shot heard round the world to ultimate dissolution. Follow the bouncing baseball . . . Didn’t re-read this summer but intend to re-read soon.
The Body Artist (2001)
Didn’t re-read this summer. Read it when it came out. Not much of a memory of it. Will update if I re-read.
Cosmopolis (2003)
DeLillo’s take on Cheever’s story “The Swimmer,” a mythic trip through midtown gridlock for a haircut, a 28-year-old master of the digitized finance universe right around the time of the dot-com collapse. Easy reading, orderly, clean compared to Players or Ratner’s Star (the last two DeLillo novels I read). Worth it for quick observations about ATMs and the like. An unreal ghost trip in a white stretch limo, hopping on and off for meals, sex (at least four sessions with four different women), a riot protest in Times Square reminiscent of recent events, a film shoot featuring a crowd of naked people playing dead. Interestingly interspersed with two sections of the confession of our Bret Easton Ellis-like anti-hero’s eventual killer, providing just enough narrative drive. An ironically audacious scene of touchless empathy intercourse to completion while a doctor palpates Eric’s asymmetrical prostate. Loved that he incorporated a common line of criticism – “his best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good.” This isn’t his best but it’s still good, or at least easy, thoughtful, fun, and filled with perceptions rendered with total attention to the sound and vision of every phrase.
Falling Man (2007)
Didn’t re-read this, summer 2020. Read it around the time it was published. Here are those notes: Organic shrapnel = undeniably awesome. Strong opening, riveting end. Otherwise, muddling through 245 pages of middling DeLillo isn’t the worst way to pass some time. This one reminded me a lot of Roth’s Everyman, in that they both seemed like worked-up sketches compared to their more developed, “great” books. Also, these characters (other than the token terrorist) don’t really exist in systems — like the academy (White Noise), the football program (End Zone), the music industry (Great Jones Street), the plot to kill JFK (Libra), those touched by a particular baseball (Underworld) — and so the characters hardly seem to exist (maybe that’s the point of the unoccupied floating shirt at the end?). When the terrorist’s plane goes into the building the POV switches in the middle of a paragraph to Keith, suggesting that the terrorist’s intentionally voided humanity is transferred from Jihadist to an American office worker? But maybe that transfer comes too late? Or maybe it’s too convenient and way too subtle a suggestion — but if true to the author’s intention, that transfer parries critiques that all characters seem like particularly DeLillo-brand semi-unhuman humans, mainly because everyone speaks the same suggestively clipped DeLillon English — this doesn’t bother me when the exposition throughout is high-art fireworks and we’re happily immersed in DeLillo World, but here the prose is not so rockin’ on every page, we’re not exactly immersed, or more so we’re skimming the surface? Plus, because these unrealish, not particularly particular characters aren’t necessarily cast as “cogs in a machine,” volitionless servants of fatality, their inhumanity doesn’t suggest some hefty theme related to contemporary humanity? A “survivors of the stairwells” system isn’t worked up well enough, same with “terrorized citizens of the NYC grid” system, again, compared to systems in the other books. Not that DD always needs to deal with these systems, just that it seems like that’s the territory he’s claimed, it’s where he’s planted his flag — and it seems like if he worked another two or three years on this one, he’d more clearly squeeze some complexities out of the current draft and reveal a couple of hermaneutically bad-ass, heretofore-concealed matrices? Not sure I’m making sense. What I mean is: this one isn’t as spare as The Body Artist — its body actually has all sorts of stubby thematic limbs growing from it, and it’d’ve been awesome if these limbs evolved and grew hands and took hold of other hands so it could hug itself tight. Or, alternately, if the stubs were severed and sanded clean.
Point Omega (2010)
The “omega point” mentioned maybe two or three times is sort of (its meaning is self-consciously identified as maybe not meaning this) an accretion of consciousness that requires a reversal, a dissolution of self, a “paroxysm,” Elster calls it, liking the sound of the word. There are two images in this novella, set in a gallery at MoMA and out west in the middle of nowhere near an impact area, a former blast zone, that struck me: the first is a stray perception that I’ve also experienced that MoMA seems further down the block every time you go, and the second involved two friends deciding to walk the streets where the Chelsea galleries are but not visit the galleries as usual, walk one block west to its end, cross the street, walk one block back east, walk one block south to the next street down, walk one block west to its end, cross the street, walk one block east, etc, ie, reaching the end point and reversing course, the pattern of movement significant in itself, a sort of art.
It struck me too that it’s late-stage, end-point DeLillo, airily formatted, shorter, sparer, older like later Philip Roth (the sense that this is the kind of work that can be done at this point in life, in part due to reduced ambition, memory, energy, but also evolved sensibility, needing to prove nothing to no one), slower, open (reliant on suggestion), ambiguous, softly/organically honed, almost delicately insightful, poetic without being lyrical, and for some reason sans contractions pretty much. Like Players, there’s a frame involving a movie, 24-Hour Psycho in this case. Most of the book, the bulk of the middle section, seemed like a reversal/return to the latter half of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, all grown up, out in the middle of nowhere, idiosyncratic dialogue (reliant on repetition) and drink. But then there’s a suggestion of some innocent amorous activity, a semi-shocking/inappropriate paragraph of imagined intercourse, unsweaty holding of hands, a minor transgression of peeking in on someone sleeping, followed by a disappearance. Narrator looks for woman in “the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment.” (Patterns is a DeLillo keyword.) And then: “It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry and furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer.”
That seems to jibe with the writer’s overall thesis: attentive, floored observation of the vast, awesome, ambiguous, unreal, mysterious, and possibly meaningless universe. Spoiler alert: the mystery introduced midway through this that drives the story forward isn’t resolved, or it resolves ambiguously in the narrator asking a woman for her number after they comment on some of 24-Hour Psycho they watch together (at one point saying to the woman that he was a “pseudo-genius” as a kid, capable of multiplying five digit numbers in his head, redounding to the teen Nobel mathematics laureate Billy Twillig of Ratner’s Star, before admitting in the narration that this was a lie), or it resolves structurally, since the narrator reaches the endpoint, point of reversal, point omega, nearly lost in the desert, near the former blast zone, and then returns to the opening scene watching the famous movie slowed down to a day, realizing its real version. The main subject Elster who had something to do with Iraq, the Pentagon, seems more like an enigmatic, artsy, gnomic conceptual artist than elder military/political advisor. The Wikipedia, which at one point included debatable unsubstantiated claims (“the central metaphor is autism”) that seem like they’ve been deleted, makes Elster’s deal clear, whereas I didn’t exactly find it so cut/dry what he’d done. A novel that presents something like a mini-system of subtle associations and that pretty much demands re-reading, although I don’t think I’ll re-read it right away. Worthwhile, sure. Glad I’ve read it once for now.
Zero K (2016)
This is the first DeLillo I’ve started that I didn’t bother finishing, reading about 125 pages and then skimming to the end, not so engaged, not at all believing the narrator, characters, even the language, which is like what I imagine a program might emit if fed his other novels and this one’s conceit and told to delete the characteristic humor and randiness in favor of an opaque, sci-fi, retrospective, maybe quasi-autobiographical (in terms of stray minor moments only, like a fake limp), maybe quasi-Kafkan (but not as precise or persistent/driving ahead, mostly suggests Kafka in terms of long branching hallways with lots of different doors) story with sentences that seem inflated with effort and wafted onto the pages instead of, as in most of his writing (at least in his best stuff), embedded, energetic, honed, inevitable? A late-stage departure for him, mostly in terms of my perception of its quality, but also in affect, tone. Is it possible that DeLillo, whose novels so often involve film, never saw “Sleeper”?
The Angel Esmeralda: Stories (2018)
Haven’t read yet. Started it but just couldn’t do it now. Will try again later and update.
The Silence (2020)
“Too much of everything from too narrow a source code.”
There’s no All Quiet on the Western Front about the 1919 Spanish Flu and I doubt the current situation will yield more than evocative slivers like this, or Intimations, suggestive shards reflective of surely temporarily shattered “normalcy.” The first thing about this, most likely DeLillo’s last but who knows, is the font: maybe Courier New? It suggests the typewriter, the time before serifs became primarily sans curlicues and feet. Em dashes look like en dashes, without spaces on either sides. Double Fs raise the second F a bit. There’s an atavistic typographical suggestion that syncs with the story but also makes you more conscious of how the language looks to the writer, as though we see the page through Don DeLillo’s eyes, which as ever are on the same exact prize expressed in the same clipped, attentive, honed phrases, fragments sometimes, strung out toward the end of sentences, connected by commas.
Technology goes kaput at once on Super Bowl Sunday during the goddamn game. It opens on a flight from Paris to NYC (Newark really) on game day — and it occurs to me I flew from London to LaGuardia on Super Bowl Sunday and learned from a cabbie that the Ravens beat the Giants (Feb 2001). Which doesn’t matter at all, except I was on a plane on Super Sunday once, and we all can imagine any plane we’ve been on crash landing. Planes, football, the sudden unexpected event leading to an unspecified crisis. Intelligent anonymous white people differentiated by names and maybe the length of their hands speaking in identical sentence fragments that achieve a sort of poetry, this time with a non-white woman too, a poet, a writer, tons of personal journals, reminding me of the writer woman who writes blank novels in Ratner’s Star. Reminiscent of Players at times, the prominence of the TV, White Noise (obvs), End Zone (obvs), Cosmopolis (teeming city). But oh so spare, open (thanks to the font and dialogue, lack of characterization or history, elaboration and depth), a bit of bawdiness, some humor.
Counting down by sevens is the serial sevens test for dementia, suggestive of counting an NFL score in reverse, retreating, progressing in the opposite direction, all the way down to deep shared memory we call on to endure times like these, not that we’ll remember much of this anyway, sort of like the 1919 pandemic . . . A spare summation, ultimately, that almost suffices, not that it should really — the current situation (alt title?) doesn’t really call for more than silence since we all know well enough what it’s like.
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please consider acquiring a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse Books). Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).
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