I dragged ass all through this for over a week and stayed up late to finally just be done with it, and found myself at 5am laughing hysterically at this one particularly vulgar and hysterically funny scene very near the end, to the extent that the big cat was expressing heavy waves of concern from his perch on the couch arm - and the big cat concerns himself with very little these days. I was lost for a few medium-long stretches - as lost as the narrator is in his fever dream of elaborately produced synthetic American culture, you could say - but this particular scene made me want to read the entire thing again. Were I in a position to criticize the work of the American master Donald DeLillo, I would say, There's so much stuff in here but it was hard to spend the kind of time I should have, just because there was so much, so many little things, and there maybe ultimately wasn't enough big stuff, or the sense that the little things were accumulating into a meaningful bigness, to make it, overall, the kind of thing I would invest that amount of time in. It's a kind of avalanche of imagery, the sheer number of words on the page and how they look next to each other excusing some of the more overwrought and/or undercooked elements while also just being a lot, overall. It's a lot. I'll probably read it again - Hell, I look forward to reading more books by the same author.

Delillo"s first book and it shows it's age, but still a terrific read. There's a section in the middle that explores the main character's past that is among his best writing. The last 4 pages are inexplicably, but explicitly insane.

An anti-On The Road and a proto-American Psycho all at once. And in that way, it was really good. But as with most road novels, it faded in the stretch.