If On the Road had been done right.
Also, reminded me big time of American Psycho and somewhat of Henderson the Rain King.
I was close to giving it 3/5 as it got a little tedious towards the end but the writing was too good and the worthwhile passages kept coming till the very last page so it's a 3.75-4.

I really wanted to like this book. I remember when I read DeLillo's book "Libra" that I had been completely enamored with his prose. It was a really good book, and he had a penchant for detail that was completely unmatched. And the prose in Americana is good, but I just didn't like it as much. It's not DeLillo's best.

There are a lot of good things I can say about the book. I did love his repetition of icons and ideas that really are associated with Americana: the cheap hotel room, the idea of female sexuality as glorified by commercials, the romantic ideals of cross-country travel. The strongest sections are those in which the protagonist, David Bell, reflects on his own past, particularly his memories of his family and his mother.

There is also a clear transformation in David's character from the beginning of the book to the end, and that ultimately comprises the majority of the story arch. And DeLillo's prose is still very lush and exciting at points. I definitely love the way he phrases things because it is very vivid and alive.

What is important to note about Americana is that it was DeLillo's first novel. He can't be expected to have the poise and delicacy in his early writing that he would later in his career with works such as "Libra" and "Underworld."

Further, some of the frustration I had with the novel may be more a matter of timing. The novel was written in 1971 and was very much a novel of its own time. The Vietnam War is at the front of consciousness throughout the book, as are elements of changing cultural mores. It seems an early example of the kind of work that would inspire the likes of Bret Easton Ellis, with his literature of the grotesque, and it is clear that the novel investigates many postmodern elements.

All said, while Americana wasn't all that good itself, I would recommend it to any DeLillo fan in order to gain a wider understanding of his work. For anyone else, I would recommend DeLillo and I would start with his excellent novel, "Libra."

I finally finished this novel recently and can certainly say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's Don DeLillo's first I think and very accomplished it is too, displaying a fine talent for writing straight out of the gate. I read one other novel by him ages ago called White Noise, and that was a cracking read as well, although out of the two, I think I actually preferred this one. It's quite a strange reading experience in some ways and has fairly distinct sections to it, beginning with David's life in New York working as an ad executive, living it up in sixties Manhattan. There are plenty of wryly funny bits in this first section and I actually laughed a few times, which surprised me as I didn't know DeLillo was a funny writer, but it seems like he certainly can be when the mood takes him!
This first section had plenty of odd little details and gave a great feel of one of these ad agency type places with the boozing behind closed doors; execs chatting away with their secretaries, glasses in hand, of a rainy afternoon, instead of working, and all the intriguing office politics and scheming that seemed worryingly rife. I probably enjoyed this part most, even though the rest of the book was still really engaging as well...in the next part you find out more about David's background and see how certain things have shaped him, and this was all very readable as well, although not as much so as part one, but it still added depth and a greater scope to the novel which all contributed to it's overall appeal.
The rest of the book is all about David and his friends going on a road trip, as he seeks to discover what modern America is all about and begins to film life in a small town that they all end up hanging out in for a while, his friends patiently indulging his cinematic ambitions...the pace is quite slow and the mood very thoughtful by this stage, but always engrossing and as always contains plenty of unusual, pretty unpredictable little moments that scatter the pages of the book liberally throughout, from beginning to end...
I really enjoyed Americana and it's one of those books that has quite a unique feel about it and is hard to adequately describe in a quick review, but if you enjoy very well written, unusual, thoughtful and yet entertaining reads, where you can't be quite sure where the journey will take you, then certainly give this a go...I have Don's Underworld sat on my shelf, but being a big hefty-looking tome, I'll have to ready myself to attempt that one day, once I feel in the mood for it...

Strangely surreal, a document and satire, Americana sets the tone for so many works of American fiction. It's kind of shocking how the tone of say "American Psycho" or even "Mad Men" is set with this novel yet it vanishes into these tangents and finds itself. So glad I finally grabbed a copy.

ΝτεΛιΡιο

Like many, I've got interested in Don DeLillo because of David Foster Wallace, and it's easy to see similarities between the two authors (I missed DFW's humor though). The tone of the first part of also reminds me (a lot) of American Psycho, another obvious comparison (the author, Bret Easton Ellis, was also a big fan of DeLillo). Americana has a lot of style and some great passages, but as a whole didn't work well for me; it's a bit too experimental and open-ended, things I don't usually consider "problems" but that in this book made the reading experience quite boring and a bit repetitive.

DeLillo’s debut is less a novel in the traditional sense than an extended photographic description of scattered and various ‘Americana’ as it ranges across from the east coast to the southwestern United States, and more or less serves as a writing exercise for the budding author; at this point DeLillo had certainly developed the talent to craft sentences – interesting ones, good ones – but had yet to form them together into what could really be considered a novel. It begins promisingly, with a satire of American workplace culture that Bret Easton Ellis almost certainly took notes from for American Psycho and a levity of dialogue that DFW would find inspiration in, but about a quarter of the way through the writing gives way to structureless tangents, monologues, asides and clusters of various oddities that attempt to create a portrait of DeLillo’s home country through literary collage.

Many of the lively, evocative passages succeed, while others fall into tedium and lack direction. Tom Wolfe’s brand of New Journalism comes to mind, his ‘Electric Kool Aid’ in particular for its wandering psychedelia, and the much later “Slacker” wears Americana influence as well. The book has a number of strengths and weaknesses, and in it we see the nascent DeLillo as a very solid writer, though not quite yet an author.

If "Mad Men" were to continue on for another five/ten years, or worse, do a spin-off, "Americana" would be its jumping of the shark. I really wanted to like this book. But I just couldn't connect. David wasn't doing it for me. There is a great line though, (thus two stars and not one), "The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it." I wish I had that sort of visceral reaction to "Americana." Seriously, the fictional novel Brand was referring to, "Coitus Interruptus," sounded like a better story than this one. I hate to stop reading something when I'm less than one hundred pages from the end, but I need to move on to something a little breezier and a lot less masturbatory--it's Friday. Hello, Jonathan Ames.

Part One is the most enjoyable, a hilarious world of work and co-workers. Part Two switches to a boyhood account, whether autobiographical or not I don't know.
Parts Three and Four wander off into pointless non-sequitur passages written at times with beautiful eloquence. I felt obligated to read them only because I was already invested in 200 pages of the book and hoped it might crawl out of the hole it went down. Unfortunately it did not.

A book very much of it's time - end of 60's. Describes a nation in the middle of a big transition and the divide between a new generation that questions the traditional way of living, personified by the American Dream-type protagonist David. It's both a great piece of writing than encapsulates an era, but also a rather dull story without any real drama or progress. All in all, an interesting read if you can manage.

I feel like a lot could be said about this novel as a social commentary, obviously - the shallowness of capitalism (the almost Kafkaesque mechanisms of rumours, terminations, and promotions at David Bell's company is a hilarious thread woven throughout the novel), the intersection between toxic masculinity and the construction of identity through Accomplishment, which leads to David's identity crisis and the sense that nothing about him is real, except through what he tries to rebuild in himself through the camera lens, and the hollowness of a closed social world of upper-class white kids who go on to become upper-class white kids in suits. However, I think a lot of people have said that already, so I just want to make some comments on the reading experience.

This novel feels slow at times and aimless at others, but as it concludes it becomes clear that it is a masterfully constructed story about a man's downfall, or maybe a breakdown and a reconstruction. It's astonishing to think that this is DeLillo's first novel - the characters, even minor ones, are fully realized and completely believable, and the most minor interactions between characters balance perfectly between the symbolism and profundity we expect of characters in a novel and the authenticity of average, real people we've met.

For personal reasons, the beginning half of the novel is pure fun - David Bell is a conniving advertising executive who is sleeping with his secretary (and a few other women, too), hearing rumours about others hearing good rumours about him, sitting exasperated in a meeting at work, worrying about office politics, and obsessing about his age. DeLillo perfectly captures male bravado and fragility in one person, David's vulnerabilities counterbalanced by the arrogant facade demanded of his job (as well as the good face he puts on for his friends and family). He's unlikeable but sympathetic, and from the beginning of the story DeLillo reveals enough of David's self-consciousness and doubt that the character's perverse, self-sabotaging decision to abandon a work project for a personal home video seems less like a contrived story about the All-American Man turning his back on capitalism/modern life and more like the honest reversion to a person David's buried deep out of necessity.

DeLillo's also skilled at taking what could be cliches and making them believable -David's mentally ill mother, for example, could have been played off as the trope of the wealthy housewife with a drinking problem. Instead, she's a spectre, with the full extent of her illness played out in the tragedies of her children, like the daughter who ran away from home or the son who bases his self-worth on how accomplished he is compared to men his age. The character Sullivan, the modern artist, comes off less like a sexualized modern artist and more like a career woman who plays around with her image, enjoys her work, and doesn't put up with the bullshit of men who try to box her into the stereotype of a hyper-sexualized creative type. I could go on, but the gist is that as the story unfolds, you find yourself encountering characters you've met in other novels, but the iteration of them is thoughtful and purposive, as though DeLillo is aware of these perceptions we have of certain people in society (the reclusive writer, the wealthy exec, the new-money father playing at old money) and intentionally breaking them down to show the reader how we form archetypes and the depth behind them (so either showing us howe we perceive people in a certain way based on their job, or showing how people put on masks because of their career or ambitions).

The narrative is also brilliantly constructed, in the sense that you're pulled into some machine and you don't realize what's happened until the novel ends. I said David's breakdown and it is a breakdown, in an honest and sympathetic way - he ditches work, paints a movie script on a hotel room, and runs out of money because of his obsessive desire to finish his artistic project. The home film itself is hilarious, sardonic, and intensely self-aware, with DeLillo capturing perfectly the intersection between the desire to produce art and the obviously amateur and cliche work that David is producing. It speaks to the power of DeLillo's talent that he's able to write a script within a script that's profound, affecting, and illuminating with respect to David's character while also telling a story about the absurdity of a man dedicating himself to that same script, a futile, pretentious, navel-gazing project with no relevance to anyone but David. By the time we get to the end and we see the culmination of every memory, every aside, every truth avoided by David, every monologue in his story confronted, other chapters that seemed irrelevant become significant and the pieces fall into place, although frankly I think a lot of the novel went over my head.

Small details were funny, too. David's obsession with his age, even going so far as to ask his secretary to keep track of how old his colleagues are, is so relatable it hurts (I'm the same age as David and work in the legal profession, and it is exactly the same). David's dad feeling intensely self-conscious about the university he attended, and the allure of colleagues with Ivy League educations, is also something that I've gone through and it reveals a vulnerability behind a character who is otherwise all game face. I also find it, overall, refreshing to read about a relationship between a son and his father (a conversation about David's father's experiences in the war, which David's father cuts off by saying David can read a book about it, is heartbreaking and shows both how masculinity functions and how the characters are close but separated by a wall). I also found it admirable, especially considering this novel is written in the 70s, how interesting and fully-fleshed the women are - not in terms of being rah-rah Strong Female characters but because of their complexity.

What?!