On Joining Oulipo by Accident
I’ve been going back through DeLillo’s books for an assignment, and the thing that strikes me is that the more and more I look at his work, the less and less clear it becomes that the man has written a single weak book.
I know with an author as multi-faceted as DeLillo there are inevitably going to be books that certain people feel closer to than others, but taking each book as it wants to be read, is there one that actually fails as a novel?
Here’s a list, if you’d like to try and suggest one.
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The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Amazons is pretty terrible, if you’re going to count that – there’s a reason he didn’t publish that under his own name. Even as a joke it’s not very funny.
I found Cosmopolis almost unreadable. I was just thankful it was so short.
Great Jones Street isn’t very good.
White Noise is overrated. It’s dated, gets the culture wrong, and annoyingly written at the sentence level. It’s a display of intellect without any ideas. It pretends to be satirical but bears little relation to any world I can recognize.
I didn’t like Players at all, and quit halfway through Falling Man.
Meanwhile, I know people who hate White Noise, but those people are clearly defective.
I’m tending to agree with you completely, Scott. I’m always a bit dismayed at people who think any of the recent novels are “failures” or “just not very good”–there are sentences in Cosmopolis, in The Body Artist, in Falling Man, that I find so arresting they take my breath way and stop my heart, and I love the individual shape that each of those books takes as much as I love the intense maximalism and brilliant sentences of Underworld or Ratner’s Star or The Names or Libra…though of course I understand that some people just don’t like certain Delillo books (and some people just don’t like him at all). A good friend, who I thought would LOVE Great Jones Street as I do, hated it–couldn’t force himself past page 30, which just completely dismayed me (it still does, in fact, but he now lives in San Francisco, so it no longer pops up in my head every time I see him…not to sound like a fanatic or anything…).
Anyway, if I were to be forced at gunpoint by, say, Benno Levin to have to choose a “weakest” Delillo novel, I might just turn around and jump off the building before he could shoot me.
I’ve only read six of his books and haven’t found any of them week. I noticed that somebody wasn’t taken with The Great Jones Street, which I finished last week and loved. Some of the funniest dialogue scenes I’ve read by him were in that book.
I’d say that the first parts of Mao II and Omega Point overshadowed the rest of the their respective books, but I wouldn’t call either weak.
I didn’t like Players either, and I found Americana incomprehensible. The problem could easily be me in both cases. There is, however, a tendency for Delillo to descend into vagueness.
I haven’t read anything since The Body Artist, which I actually thought was underappreciated.
(not the same Richard as above)
I did not like “Great Jones Street.” I recognize that it’s not a “bad” novel, but I couldn’t connect to the text in the same way that I could with “White Noise” or “Mao II.”
I didn’t like Players either, and I found Americana incomprehensible. The problem could easily be me in both cases. There is, however, a tendency for Delillo to descend into vagueness.
I haven’t read anything since The Body Artist, which I actually thought was underappreciated.
(different Richard than above)
I’ll probably be the odd man out on this one, but I found Mao II to be, not weak exactly, but underwhelming.
It felt old-fashioned despite its infatuation with terrorism, conspiracies and celebrity. Old-fashioned isn’t always bad, of course, but in this case it felt familiar…conventional…even predictable to some extent.
Still some great sentences and images, but overall it was a letdown for me.
First I read “White Noise” and thought is was good, but not great. But very good, and I liked it. Then I read “Endzone” and I didn’t like it–not in a totally negative visceral way, but in a “ehhhh” sort of way. After that, I decided that I guess I don’t like Delillo. Then, years later, I read “Falling Man” and didn’t care for it either. I have “Libra” and “Underworld” on my shelf unread and will probably read them at some point, but I am not in a hurry.
So I guess I am one of those people who do not like Delillo, which is weird and sad becuase I like other authors that people who like Delillo like–Pynchon, DFW, etc.
I generally like to back my opinions up with concrete examples, but it has been so long since I’ve read Delillo, I can’t remember specific things that I disliked or that didn’t move me. As best as I can remember, the writing is unfailingly “great writing,” that is, sort of a Patonic ideal of what good prose writing should read like, but I usually like great writing to be great in ways that I don’t expect it to be. Does that make sense?
But I don’t like Cormac McCarthy either, so perhaps I have a syndrome of some sort.
“Cosmopolis”. I was shocked. It’s like a DeLillo parody. It’s the reason why I haven’t read Falling Man yet. It’s to DeLillo’s work what “Fury” is to Rushdie’s. The one book that exposes some of the weaknesses in others. It’s not just a parody, but a mean-spirited parody at that. A very weak book.
i found The Body Artist to be very weak. it was like a bad Paul Auster story.
I agree with Tom’s thoughts on Mao II, underwhelming is the only way to put it, especially since thats right in the wheelhouse of what many consider to be DeLillo’s creative prime. The first DeLillo I read was White Noise, and I was taken aback at how well done it was, such a skewering take on all things “American”. However, that was by far the high point of the DeLillo Ive read since. I have to say Ive been a bit disappointed with what Ive read after the initial excitement of reading such excellent work. I still have Underworld sitting on the shelf, unread, and its possible that that tome will refill the reservoir of goodwill.
End Zone (the 30 pages of the football game are interminable)
Great Jones Street (except for the ‘childrens pornography’ joke)
Players is mediocre at best, despite it being the first time he examined the language of intimacy in depth. Although, why not just read Wittgenstein. That advise applies to a lot of DeLillo novels (and the fun, but incredibly pretentious Broom of the System).
Running Dog is mediocre, but a nice departure from the rest of his oeuvre
Every other novel I stand by (except for Omega Point, which I haven’t read).
advice rather.
i loved End Zone which I read many many years ago. THe lead character was a total American original and the interplay between football and nuclear politics worked quite well. At the time I thought it was uniquely brilliant but a couple of years ago I sent my treasured pocketbook edition to a good friend who told me he was “dissappointed”. perhaps this book is not timeless.
my favorite DeLillo remains LIBRA.
Whew! I’m SO glad these comments tended toward spotting the weak DeLillo novels, rather than seconding and thirding your HUGELY optimistic opening claim that the man’s never written a weak book! I love optimism as much as the next person, and I’ve dutifully read every DeLillo book as it’s come out, almost always with disappointment and certainly with increasing disappointment as time’s gone on. He’s a writer who started out with some genuine talent (I tend to agree with the point the first Richard was inadvertently making: he’s strongest at the sentence level) and has shown absolutely zero interest in broadening, deepening, or strengthening that talent in the DECADES since then. True, “Underworld” is something of a masterpiece (it’s also weirdly different from all his other books – don’t know what happened there), but how he kept ANY loyal readers after “Falling Man” is beyond me.
To paraphrase Dickens, DeLillo is the best of writers, the worst of writers. I’m afraid I never leave any book of his without some level of frustration. I thought Falling Man was really weak. Yes, there were great passages in it, especially the opening section, which is brilliant. But the conversation is stilted and the utterly stupid inclusion of a “mysterious” performance artist called “the falling man” was an insult to the reader. All in all I thought the book took a self-indulgent turn that seems more common in first novels.
I find Underworld’s grand reputation totally mystifying, personally. Such a snooze.
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