Don Dellilo's works have been described as novels of ideas and I agree with that. Several of his novels have an idea/concept/contemporary social more as the base and the characters in the novel serve as props for that. (It could be consumerism/threat of nuclear warfare in 'White Noise', power of the mob/television in 'Mao II'. )However this is not to give an impression that Dellilo is trying to shove things down the readers throat, not at all. On the other hand, it seems to me like he has something to say and instead of using the non-fiction format he is writing novels. I don't claim to understand his novels fully (can we claim that of any work of art at all?) nor can I say that I enjoy reading this works (enjoy as in it's most basic meaning). But he engages me, I feel he has something to say to me, something which I have not noticed, something that I may have noticed but cannot articulate it in the way he does. That's why I keep going back to his works. I see that I am writing more about the man than about the novel which the post is about. That's because as I have said in the beginning his novels are in several cases novels of ideas and so an introduction into the author is as needed as about the work. Another thing that I noticed is that his works are sometimes rooted to America or a particular time period in America, so it could be a bit off putting to readers. For example 'Libra' is about Harvey Lee Oswald. The reader has to have some basic information on the Kennedy assassination and probably some interest in it to read it. Else it would probably not have the same impact. Or, the prologue in 'Underworld' which is a 60 page description of a baseball playoff game set in the 50's. I had to slog through it, not knowing about the base ball rules and also the context of the game which is apparently a part of American sporting folklore. (Let me put it this way, an American would have felt the same had he read a novel in which the prologue is about India's 83 world cup final match and winning it. He would be completely out of the loop isn't it).But by and large his novels address a bigger world view and we can relate to it from anywhere. Again you need to be in a certain mindset to read him (from my personal experience). If you are in no mood to read about the television images and it's impact you would probably miss the point of Mao II. (like what happened to me first time round). Considering all this, Americana Dellilo's first novel, published in 1971 is the best place to start him off. It also conforms the most to what could be termed as a conventional novel. The novel is split into 2 parts, the first part is of the office novel genre and the second part is of the road novel genre.

The protagonist of the novel is 'David Bell' who is also the narrator of the novel. A film student and an executive at a television studio. He is young, highly successful with the possibility of going given higher in his profession and the future looking rosy. With all the success he has, he is looking over his shoulder to see if any younger guy is on the horizon who could overtake him and at the same time looking forward to see the persons whom he has to overtake. Like Janus of the myths, he is looking both ways. He seems to be living in a vacuum. The beginning of the novel itself tells us about his current mindset 'Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.' (P.S Joshua Ferris's first novel is named from the first part of this line 'Then we came to end'). As the novel progresses, David settles into a sort of ennui. He sort of loses interest in his work, does not care about the ratings and generally settles down into a stupor of blank emptiness. He knows that he is ignoring his work and it would have serious ramifications, but he is beyond caring. It's like sitting on a ticking bomb or going at great speed in car towards the mountain cliff. You know you are going to crash, but are so beyond caring about what is going to happen. (Shades of this mood could be seen in Eric Packer of Dellilo published in 2003, somethings don't seem to change over the years isn't it). This part of the novel is funny at times with lots of black humor, but nothing really new if you have read other novels in the office novel genre ('Something happened' comes to mind). At the end of the first part, David finally loses wakes up from his ennui goes on a road trip with a video camera, officially to work on his job, but on a personal quest in reality. This is the second part of the novel.

Armed with his camera, David sets out to the heart land of America, to basically a nowhere land. He meets various people. As his trip progresses, David starts using his camera becomes a voyeuristic tool capturing people at a most primitive level with all their defenses down . People are willing to bare their most inner most thoughts on families, friends, relationships in front of the camera. They are ready to perform sexual acts in front of the camera. It's not just about voyeurism but also says something about the willingness of people to be the object of the voyeurism. This is something that is very related in today's times of reality shows, mms scandals et all. In some ways Dellilo seems to have prefigured in the 70's ,what's happening today. David becomes more and more distanced from the reality of his professional life which is spiraling towards disaster and becomes more and more obsessed with the trip and camera itself, capturing not only people, but also the american landscape and having reminiscences about his childhood. The novel runs all over the place (much like the protagonist) and ends with David going off to Dallas to the place of Kennedy's assassination. (again a more American
pre-occupation from the 60's and 70's about Kennedy's assassination).

Check out this link (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/feat...) of a Dellilo short story.

I’ve now completed the set, read all DeLillo’s books. This is his first novel and though impressive as a first novel doesn’t really have much to recommend it in my eyes. It’s narrated by an obnoxious filmmaker who heads West to find his creative soul, sort of like a literary road movie. We get lots of snapshots of American life; we also get quite a lot of overwriting and a fair smattering of pretentiousness.

A fascinating feature of his books is that they often begin on a more inspired plane than they end. DeLillo loves writing; but he loves writing sentences rather than stories. He’s like Nabokov in the delight he takes in crafting individual sentences. I don’t think any living writer is better at individual sentence writing. I can think of at least four of his novels that begin with stunningly beautiful prose but eventually peter out as if he runs out of that magic elixir, inspiration. At the point where he tries to forge into shape what he’s previously written. DeLillo doesn’t do plots. You could say plot is the discipline at the heart of any novel. It’s probably frustrating at times, like the rules of any game. And it seems to curb DeLillo’s flow. The alternative to plotting a novel is to theme it. Which is what he does but has a tendency to become a bit too esoteric and ambitious, to lose focus. Zero K was probably better unified in terms of theme than some of his earlier novels but the inspired writing was missing. The Names has the inspired writing but the theme becomes ever more oblique and elusive.

To be honest I can’t think of much to say about Americana except if you fancy reading him make sure you avoid this one. It was a bit like listening to an early demo recorded in a garage by a band you love.

Don DeLillo’s first novel is something of a mixed bag and will not be to everyone’s taste. Clearly brimming with talent, DeLillo seems to have a hard time focusing on exactly what he wants the novel to be. Seen through the troubled eyes of young New York television executive David Bell, DeLillo first immerses us in a ‘Mad Men’ style comic portrait of high rise office life, before flashing back to David’s childhood, before finally taking us out on a long distance road trip. So far, so appealing. In the hands of Richard Yates, this would have had the potential to be one of my favourite novels of all time. But DeLillo has bigger fish to fry. He wants to show us the fragmentation of an individual’s identity against the backdrop of a country mired in the dog days of the Vietnam war experiencing an identity crisis of its own. Ultimately, for me, the fragmentation, the varying literary styles, the endless cycling and recycling around formative events became too much. One characteristic of truly great writers is the tendency for their ambitious reach to sometimes exceed their grasp. For me, ‘Americana’ is the Great White Whale that DeLillo doesn’t quite catch. Nice try though...

This is the first book I have given 1 star to since 2019. I negative recommend it, and if I see you pick it up I will swat it out of your hands. I don’t care if it’s ‘literature’; I do not have the capacity to read something this awful for ~cRaFt~ alone.

Not enough white men were told nobody cares about their dumb, terrible protagonists when this was published in 1971, but better late than never!


nobody cares

It seems that this has only entered the pop culture discourse as a sort of proto-American Psycho, based around the idea that its first segment is about the shallow nature of corporate America and the personality-free drones that make their fortunes within the confines of that system. I don't quite agree with that, because I think it ignores two key interlocking facets of this novel. For one, the "office politics" segment only lasts about a hundred pages, before David Bell (who most would hold as this novel's Bateman) hits the road. Secondly, Bell hits the fucking road. Bateman is content to ride the wave, to keep up with his double-life as corporate executive and mass murderer. Bell wants more than Bateman, wants more than to be a shallow, personality-free drone, and I think that makes him a more complex and therefore interesting character than Bateman. Then again, I prefer DeLillo to Ellis by a long shot, so what're you gonna do.

Anyway, Americana is DeLillo's first novel, and it's astounding how much of his act he had figured out from the beginning. Like the man's more famous later works, it's haunted by the idea of death, features mass media heavily, and is full of deliberately awkward exchanges that might be off-putting to some but are hilarious and endearing to me. It's also more of a "concept novel," per se, than a "plot novel." DeLillo is that sort of author, after all. It also introduces his idea of using childhood events as motivators for later actions, a concept explored to its fullest in his two best novels, Libra and Underworld, and even has a bit of White Noise's suburban satire and Mao II's crowd dynamics. Granted, Ratner's Star also tried to do a lot of these things, but this book seems either more confident, more within DeLillo's early abilities, or both.

Of course, there are downsides. Bell still isn't as terrific of a character as some of the fascinating people DeLillo would go onto develop, the desert island subplot is sort of useless, and the whole last act could probably have been done without. Despite all that, it's still a fine first novel that deserves to be remembered on its own steam and not just in relation to another, more famous book. I'm now a little more excited about early DeLillo than I was when I read Ratner's Star.

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 just as much or more so 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, sort of 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 sort of 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. 4.5 stars rounded up since it's his first novel and 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!

Що таке Америка? - це країна, яку кожен бачить по-своєму. Це люди (робота та знайомі), це спогади (дитинство), це простір (подорож) та пейзажі (фільм). Все це формує сприйняття країни та людини в ній.
А Девід, ідентифікуючи себе з країною на одному рівні, оце все ще й зафільмовує.

Роман, де формується стиль автора. Дебют (який називають деякі проблемним), що міг би стати кульмінацією творчості для когось слабшого за Дона. Книга, де сплітаються у тугий вузол теми смерті, війни, реклами, свободи, сім'ї та загалом місце творчості в тогочасній сучасності. І він досі є актуальним.

Режисер, письменник, скульпторка та навіть Навіжений цитатник - це люди світу, де мистецтво стоїть над звичайним життям. Присутнє явно виражене бажання спіймати реальність (навіть через спогади) та зафіксувати її. Бо ж без фіксації не існує безсмертя. Як у важливій для роману (та й загалом для усієї творчості Делілло) цитаті Святого Августина "І ніколи не буде для людини чого-небудь гіршого в смерті, аніж коли смерть буде безсмертна"

Загалом це роман про все, що робить людину не пустим місцем.
Головне розуміти та знати для чого те все, тому що інакше нащо те все..

Mi sono stufata. E molto anche. Questo era il mio primo approccio a DeLillo. Ed è andato decisamente male. Ci riproverò in futuro, con un altro libro. Sperando che, col tempo, come scrittore sia migliorato. Perché qui, in questo suo primo romanzo, fa veramente venire il latte alle ginocchia.

AmericanaI’ve had mixed success with award-winning American author Don DeLillo. I abandoned the first one I tried (The Body Artist) but I was very impressed by Falling Man (see my review) even though it’s a challenging book to read. I picked up Americana (1971) when I stumbled on it at the library because I have just bought a copy of award-winning Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah from the Africa Book Club - and I wanted to see if she drew at all on DeLillo’s novel with a similar sounding name…

DeLillo’s Americana is his first novel, and it’s one of those subversion of the ‘American dream’ novels. But it also subverts genre: in Part 1 it subverts the workplace satire, and in Part 2 the road novel genre. DeLillo says himself that it’s a ‘shaggy’ novel - and it is, but it’s still interesting to read.

It begins with a portrait of office life which presents the intensely competitive male employees endlessly trying to analyse office politics to identify the real hierarchy which lies beneath the veneer of equality. All things have significance in this hothouse: even the type and colour of office furniture and doors and other symbols which denote who’s who. The men pump the secretaries for information about plots and counter-plots, and they all covertly watch each other at the drone-fests which achieve nothing at all.

The style of Part 1 is very familiar to 21st century readers but the sardonic wit still works. Through his narcissistic narrator David Bell, DeLillo captures the irony of opinion-makers in a TV network themselves having no idea about the current affairs docos that they’re supposed to be producing. David’s project about the Navaho Indians is predicated on breath-taking ignorance, and their stance on China shows that they are focussed only on the visuals and the logistics of producing it, not the content.

A great poke at Madison Avenue!

From the beginning of DeLillo's career and a must read for his fans.

I was thinking about which authors have been with me during the whole of my adult reading life. There aren’t many: some do not write for that long (we are talking 40+ years) and in some cases my reading tastes simply changed over the years and we drifted apart. But Don Delillo is one such writer. My memory is that I “discovered” Delillo in 1982 when I picked up a copy of his then just published book, The Names (I was just 21 and the proud owner of a shiny new university degree). And I have stuck with him ever since: I have read everything he has published since then and nearly all of his books from before that date.

For my tastes, 1982 was the perfect time to engage with Delillo. The period from 1982-1997 is what I regard as Delillo’s “purple patch” (I notice that I have used that phrase in reviews of several of his books from that period). If there was a competition for “best five consecutive novels from an author” then it would be hard to beat The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld. Again purely for my own taste, Delillo’s output either side of these five is rather more variable. But I can feel a project coming on where I read them all again chronologically and fill in the one or two remaining gaps.

Americana is Delillo’s debut novel, originally published in 1971. The edition I have is the 1990 paperback and I mention this because Delillo edited the book in preparation for this edition: he removed several passages. I should probably research this to find out where they were taken from.

The Wikipedia entry for the book is a useful summary:

The book is narrated by David Bell, a former television executive turned avant-garde filmmaker. Beginning with an exploration of the malaise of the modern corporate man, the novel turns into an interrogation of film's power to misrepresent reality as Bell creates an autobiographical road-movie. The story addresses roots of American pathology and introduces themes DeLillo expanded upon in The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and Libra (1988). The first half of the novel can be viewed as a critique of the corporate world while the second half articulates the fears and dilemmas of contemporary American life.

Overall, I think this is probably a book for Delillo completists. It certainly doesn’t have the power of the Big 5 I mentioned earlier, but it does show how themes that Delillo would return to again and again were there from the very beginning of his writing, along with elements of his style.

"Tutti al mondo desiderano rassicurazione. E' la monetina che infilano nel distributore di realtà. Non importa se dal distributore esce qualcosa o meno, purché la monetina venga restituita."

"L'America può essere salvata solo da ciò che cerca di distruggere"

"Diosalvi i poveri stronzi che stanno dalla nostra parte solo per finire ubiquizzati in frattaglie onnipervasive dalle buone intenzioni delle nostre bombe"

"L'inattività è il preludio a quel genere di consapevolezza che sfocia nella presa di coscienza finale dell'inutilità di qualsiasi azione"