Ο Ντελίλλο στο πρώτο του μυθιστόρημα εκπλήσσει με την ωριμότητα που καταπιάνεται με τη θεματολογία του και θέτει από την αρχή το προσωπικό του ύφος σε πολύ υψηλό επίπεδο. Ακόμα και ως πρωτόλειο κείμενο ενός πρωτοεμφανιζόμενου συγγ��αφέα που πρωταγωνιστεί στη μεταπολεμική αμερικάνικη λογοτεχνία, καταφέρνει να έχει ένα συγκεκριμένο εκτόπισμα, το οποίο και θα αποτελέσει το έναυσμα για τα μεταγενέστερα έργα του που θα τον καταξιώσουν. Τολμά να καταπιαστεί, σε μια εποχή που η τηλεόραση και η επιρροή της αρχίζουν να διαμορφώνουν συνειδήσεις σε παγκόσμια εμβέλεια, με την κριτική ενός συστήματος που επιβάλλει τη διαφήμιση ως είδος ανάγκης σε μια Αμερική που βαδίζει στη μετανεωτερικότητα με μια ειρωνική, ψυχροπολεμική εμμονή. Σατιρίζει με οξυδέρκεια, χιούμορ και με μια δική του γλώσσα αυτή την εμμονή και προσφέρει μια αντισυμβατική προσέγγιση που προσπαθεί να κατανοήσει τα όρια ενός επίπλαστου, προσποιητού κόσμου, μέσα από την υπαρξιακή περιήγηση ενός διαφημιστή σε αναζήτηση της πραγματικής Αμερικής, πίσω από την κατασκευασμένη της εικόνα. Και το κάνει δημιουργώντας μια προσωπική, ψυχεδελική κινηματογραφική ταινία “στο δρόμο”, ανασυνθέτοντας κομμάτια της αμερικάνικης ενδοχώρας .

«Η συσκευή της τηλεόρασης είναι ένα πακέτο κι είναι γεμάτη προϊόντα. Μέσα υπάρχουν απορρυπαντικά, αυτοκίνητα, κάμερες, δημητριακά για το πρόγευμα, άλλες οθόνες τηλεόρασης. Δεν διακόπτονται τα προγράμματα από διαφημίσεις· συμβαίνει ακριβώς το αντίθετο. Η τηλεόραση είναι μια ηλεκτρονική μορφή συσκευασίας.»

DeLillo's debut contains the seeds of his better future novels and the remnants of typical American fiction that he would forever leave behind. The first section is an absurdist office comedy that's eerily close to "Mad Men." The second section reads like a remix of Updike or Cheever. The third is an examination of stasis and begins DeLillo's ongoing fascination with artists, representations of reality, and extreme works of art. The final section reads like "Two Lane Blacktop" scripted by Robert Stone - i.e., a last hard look at the '60s. The story doesn't really hold together, but the finely tuned sentences and observations are already here in abundance.

Americana is a story of existential emptiness…

The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies. Soon most of the movies began to look alike and we went into dim rooms and turned on or off, or watched others turn on or off, or burned joss sticks and listened to tapes of near silence.

Emptiness is universal, it is all around and there are all modifications of it: spiritual, cultural, intellectual, societal… So one has nothing to do but to obey one’s basic instincts…

…the girls were hammering at their little oval keys. I went for a walk. Everybody was busy. All the phones seemed to be ringing. Some of the girls talked to themselves while typing, muttering shit whenever they made a mistake. I went around to the supply area. The cabinets were the same color as troops in the field. Hallie Lewin was in there, leaning over a bottom drawer. There is no place in the world more sexually exciting than a large office. It is like a fantasy of some elaborate woman-maze; wherever you go, around corners, into cubicles, up or down the stairwells, you are greeted by an almost lewd tableau. There are women standing, sitting, kneeling, crouching, all in attitudes that seem designed to stun you. It is like a dream of jubilant gardens in which every tree contains a milky nymph.

Don DeLillo’s visions of the present and the future are bleak and he is full of bitterness:

“What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It’s what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose…”

And the main character decides to run away and he embarks on his own existential journey… But there is nowhere to run.
Life seems to be full of events but it all is but froth… Just a light blow of the wind and there will be nothing left but emptiness… “We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we’ve forgotten that darkness means death.” And the yawning emptiness will devour you.

I once saw this book referenced (I no longer recall by who) as an example of the First Novels Are Most Quintessential principle. Not necessarily best, but just the most like the body of work they open. The idea has some merit, especially in this case: DeLillo has always grappled with the meaning of modernity in American life, through any number of lenses, but only in this first and aptly named version did he just plunge in head-on, laying out thematic territory we would return to again and again. As with a lot of DeLillo, the opening chapter hits a level of precision and refinement the rest can't quite keep up with but that's more due to the surpassing excellent of the beginning rather than any failing of the rest, though the novel loses some momentum in the long, dreamlike middle-third memory montage.

So I'd read some of DeLillo before he was properly DeLillo before -- End Zone -- but Americana seems to be the point where he realized his potential and began realizing the canvas-like possibilities of American landscape. You see the rumblings of Underworld and White Noise in here, the aerodynamic prose that would define his later career, but it only approaches those heights, it does not transcend. If you're a confirmed fan, Americana will show you how the master developed his style. If you're not, this isn't necessarily going to be a good entry point.

4.5

Artfully rendered, uniquely voiced, masturbatory horseshit.

Don DeLillo is wonderful writer. I love his prose style. This book, which was his first novel, is not in the same class as Underworld, but it is still quite good. Dave Bell, the protagonist, is a typical Master of the Universe -- smart, handsome, ambitious, observant, articulate and successful as a network television executive in the Newton Minnow "wasteland" era, but perhaps not too different from the Masters of the Universe who I have known as agents, managers, lawyers and executives in the following generations of the entertainment business. Dave has enough self awareness to realize that his life is empty, but the very qualities that make his life empty doom him to be stuck in an infinite cavern of emptiness from which there is no escape. He sets off on a fruitless quest across America, in search of .... something, and predictably doesn't find it. On his quest for meaning, he turns back to his first love -- filmmaking, and his film actually seems good. He is able to construct an interesting semi-autobiographical world and get performances out of his actors by maintaining a certain distance from his subjects that I think is good for his art but bad for his soul. The qualities that made Dave successful as a network executive would also make him successful as a film director or in any endeavor that puts a premium on detached observation and uncaring powermongering. In the end, Dave is a complete jerk. He is a sociopath, incapable of empathy. Unable to connect with the people around him, he spins out of control to a place where he becomes merely pathetic and will be that forever, even if he somehow digs himself out of his hole and becomes successful again as an executive, a filmmaker, or whatever. Other readers have criticized this book for going nowhere, but I think that going nowhere is precisely the point and is actually a strength, rather than a failing.

This novel initiates a number of standard DeLillo ideas insofar as it involves:

A) A producer of hyperreal fictions laments the “disturbingly elapsed quality” inherent in existing “only on videotape” (23); dude likes to review “schizograms from girls” such as “Hello from the scenic coast of Nebraska” (22); he’ll refer to someone as a “living schizogram” later (51); the term is defined as “an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning” (347). He’ll refer at one point to how “the deceased bore a strong facial resemblance to a number of Hollywood stars known for their interchangeability” (93). The audience “is really no more than a fragment of the dark” (117). Some belief that “the true subject of film” is “space itself, how to arrange it and people it, time hung in a desert window” (240).

B) seeming fear of potential ochlocracy in “perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely that he” (29).

C) A cocked up marriage (“my ex-wife lived in the same building. The arrangement wasn’t as strange as it may sound” (29)). We see how nasty this gets:

I was no longer content merely to make love to my wife. I had to seduce her first. These seductions often took their inspiration from cinema. I liked to get rough with her. I liked to be silent for long periods. The movies were giving difficult meanings to some of the private moments of my life. (35)

Pure DeLillo, mainlining Baudrillard. Otherwise, we learn that “intensity and suspense are fundamental to the maintenance of a successful affair” (38). Honeymoons at least herein appear to “be a veritable jubilee of ejaculatio praecox” (93), with someone who has “big pink Renoir tits” and whom fiancé will “pretend she’s Molly Bloom, the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to scissor with” (95). (Someone else notes that “when we split up he told me thanks for the mammaries” (104).)

D) And, of course, a setting on “the edge of a desert” (32). This setting fits another one of his concerns, delivered by an “old Sioux mystic”:

Things had hardly changed at all. Only materials had changed, technologies; we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste. We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as tress, mountains, and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space. The ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency. (118)

Very Underworld, but also Point Omega, End Zone, Love Lies Bleeding, Falling Man. It is “satisfying to help keep the city clean” (190). This descends even to the preclusion of “wearing of articles of clothing which might possibly dull the effect of the brutal truth of one’s immediate environment” (285).

Semiurgical overload more famous in White Noise appears here as how “there was no time for remembering things because something else was always coming along” (35).

Anyway, there’s a story and characters and whatnot, but no one reads DeLillo for any of that. The “exactly ten reasons” for lying (58) is as good a theory of art as any that I’ve seen. Similarly, a cosmopolitan catalog of theological irrationalisms is a nice example of practical fictions (183 et seq.).

At times involves some ad agency losers, such as one who thinks that “when you get to be my age, [women] all look the same” (83). Another regarded it as “his purpose” “to find the common threads and nuances” of commercials that rated well (84)—something like Eliot’s objective correlative. It was not “how funny or pretty” but rather “it has to move the merch” (85)—a matter of the production of demand itself, the compliant consciousness as the ultimate product of postmodern consciousness industry—a standard DeLillo concern. Instead of commercials interrupting shows, “exactly the reverse its true” (270): “In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man” (id.). It is a dream, “but the time may not be far off when we tire of the dream” (272), which becomes agambenian insofar as slice-of-life commercials may develop into “slice-of-death” (id.). (In that last connection, the concern of Zero K appears here as “Put the body on ice in a plastic bag […] Once we figure out how to thaw the sons of bitches, we’ll have mass resurrections” (301).)

Ultimately, it’s “much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams” (334).

Recommended for those who have life without a future tense, readers wearied by others’ chronicles of infidelity, and readers stationed in Turkey tending an undisclosed number of tumescent missiles.

With this reread, Americana legitimately has become one of my favorite of DeLillo’s and is actually a really good starting place if you haven’t read him. My biggest compliment is that this is the book I’m trying (or I’d like) to write. It’s thematically and atmospherically so similar to my current novel-in-progress. It has me wanting to go back and rewrite everything.

It’s about what really makes up America, not the faux Americana that is cited so often: about dying at your desk at work, using your Amex to buy a plane ticket, having your brain warped by advertising, the normalization of the Bataan Death March, the warding off of impending death, CIA Psy-Op programs, and all that other fun stuff we don’t blink an eye at.

It’s amazing.

3.5/5 • ίσως του αξίζει 4 αλλά το διάβασα σε περίοδο εξεταστικής και δεν μπορούσα να συγκρατήσω όλα αυτά τα ονόματα, μετά από κάποια φάση χάθηκα τελείως. Η γραφή ήταν ωραιότατη δοου

ma che storie sono 'sta letteratura nord americana? Maledetti obbligati, intellettualismi fasulli on the road, infanzie disperate di nulla... forse sarà colpa del kindle che mi distrae nella lettura, ma 'sto libro che sembrava iniziato con slancio si è perso per le strade del mondo.