DeLillo had very interesting things to say about the effects of the continuous encroachment of the digital in our daily lives. In this book, he speculates on the contradictions and possible implications of society's interest in smut. The only gripe I have - as with most DeLillo's books - is that if only he allowed himself to work with plot, the book may be a bit more accessible to those who aren't already willing to take DeLillo at his word. Nevertheless, the book is a fun romp, but I'm rating relative to the genius that was White Noise, and this book comes across clearly as a pre- (proto-, perhaps?) White Noise work.

Here's a character talking, in this novel published 45 years ago, about something that feels pretty current.

“When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals,” he said. “Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport officers, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It’s a little like I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes.”

Paranoid, funny, mean: all the good stuff.

This is an interesting read. I see the previous DeLillo novels shifting towards the later DeLillo novels (or, the "middle novels"). (I stilh have a few of his novels left before I can really make these assertions. But isn't Goodreads just filled with assertions based in mere chaos?).

Anyway, very happy I read this one. I think the outline of this novel is really interesting. I just didn't find the details were all that focused.

Narrative chases a “very curious film” (18), made in “the bunker under the Reich Chancellery” (19). We learn that the “Nazis had a thing for movies” and “film was essential to the Nazi era” (52). A prelude to White Noise insofar as “People can’t enough. If it’s the Nazis, it’s automatically erotic” (id.). It’s presented as a mix between journalist mystery and espionage thriller.

Some presentation of Chaplin’s parody of Hitler (60 et seq.). The video everyone’s chasing is not, as it happens, Hitler porn, but is rather Hitler parodying the Chaplin parody (234 et seq.), which the audience regards as a “disgusting, “Hitler humanized” (236).

Much concern here with underground knowledges and protests. Pointed out that “if you study the history of reform […] you’ll see there’s always a counteraction built in. A low lying surly passion. Always people ready to invent new secrets, new bureaucracies of terror” (74). That said, one wonders “What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it’s sexual” (110).

Some interest, perhaps self-referential, in art theory here: “Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn” (148).

Recommended for those who think the handgun is intimate, persons who collect to own a fragment of the tangible past, and readers who build an elaborate dream structure using a single unnamed source who’s already said he denies everything in advance.

Alla ricerca del film porno (del Führer ) perduto

Più che una ricerca è una vera e propria caccia , e parecchio movimentata anche ,
che ritmo !
Segreti ,giochi di potere , realtà inverosimili e apparenze plausibili , inseguimenti , spari ,
coltelli , corpo a corpo,
dialoghi vivaci e serrati , intriganti
e che personaggi !
Su tutti Glen ,n   cane che corre n( il suo nome indiano )
con i suoi freddi occhi grigi, quella strana aura pallida, quel senso di implacabilità . Era quasi una forma di talento, quella capacità di rivelare la presenza di una forza oscura del proprio carattere.
Quell'aria di austerità, l'indole dominatrice e intransigente, quel genere di fermezza che non s'incontra tutti i giorni

Alla fine forse Moll non ha tutti i torti...
il probabile esito di una caccia ,anche lunga e ossessiva, può essere ancora più deprimente della ricerca in sé.
Qualunque sia l'obiettivo di una ricerca, un oggetto, una situazione interiore , una risposta ,uno stato dell'essere, il risultato è quasi sempre deludente.
Alla fine ci si trova di fronte a se stessi.
Soltanto a se stessi.
☆☆☆☆

Non è mai facile raccontare, spiegare le emozioni che suscita o non suscita un romanzo di Delillo.
"Running dog" non è altro che una ricerca che coinvolge tutti i protagonisti di questa faccenda. Una ricerca che ha come oggetto un filmato, un video con le immagini di Hitler. Un video che darà il via a una ricerca spietata, una ricerca di possesso.
"Running dog" tratta diverse tematiche: lo spionaggio, il thriller, l'arte erotica e che mostra attraverso la visione di un filmato che tutti vogliono la nostra sete di possesso, il nostro potere.
Non è sicuramente una delle opere migliori di Delillo, ma è una ulteriore perla che si aggiunge alla collezione di questo straordinario autore.

This has all the hallmarks of a DeLillo classic:

· tennis-match dialogue
· specific world-altering historical event as basis/background/mood-setter/character
· Pynchon-light intrigue
· Neurotic characters

So I got what I wanted out of this one, and it didn't take forever to read.

Recommended for who like scratching the itch.

This is the first de L book I’ve been able to tolerate from beginning to end. I’m not really sure why. It’s not because it took about 7 hours to read because I’ve a shorter one.
AND I want to know what is it with this author and Hitler? I’m going to research this because I do not understand.

Guernica: Do you have any favorite genre writers or books?

Don DeLillo: I don’t really read much of that. I don’t read detective work and I am afraid I don’t read graphic novels.

Guernica: That’s interesting, because your books often make little feints in that direction. I’m thinking about, for instance, the shooting at the end of White Noise.

Don DeLillo: That was intentional. If I can recall my design accurately, it was to reduce the idea of death to a tabloid level. Running Dog, I think, would also meet your definition. I wrote that book in four months. I hope it doesn’t look it. Maybe it does.

Guernica: Were you thinking of Running Dog as a sort of refraction of genre material or as an actual attempt at—

Don DeLillo: I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way.

Guernica: But did you think it might be a hit?

Don DeLillo: I knew I wasn’t writing hits.

—"Intensity of Plot: Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo"

The first-edition hardcover I have out of the library was once shelved as "mystery" according to a stamp on the top edge. Running Dog is a stripped-down 1970s thriller of wry paranoia. It alternates between several characters' viewpoints as they compete to acquire a film, possibly pornographic, shot in Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II.

The novel's heroine is Moll Robbins, a journalist for the ironically-named radical magazine Running Dog. "Running dog" is a phrase from the Maoist lexicon, a term of abuse for capitalism's supposed servants, as in "running dogs of capital." "Capitalist lackeys and running dogs,'" says one of the characters to Moll, glossing the magazine's name. She answers, "'Someone remembers,'" a rueful reply as I read it, not only a cynical comment on the folly of youth but perhaps also an elegy for expired radical dreams. Moll is, to my mind, much the most interesting character in Running Dog, the most novelistically inward—as indicated by her name, which combines pioneering novelist Daniel Defoe's most famous protagonists, Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, those exemplary modern individuals who had to make their own way through a newly interconnected and money-dominated world, alone within society and before God, no tradition to guide them. But DeLillo's Moll comes after, not before, inwardness; all that's left in DeLillo of the modernist dream of psychological depth is a droll self-consciousness, a weird writers' view of the world: "The shirt accentuated her height in ways she found interesting." DeLillo's later work will achieve greatness in exploring this sensibility. In Running Dog (his sixth novel and, I must confess, the earliest I've read), he is not quite there yet.

Other seekers of the Hitler film whom the novel uses as viewpoint characters include the endearing elderly gentleman Lightborne, who runs the gallery Cosmic Erotics; Earl Mudger, a vaguely comic take on a postmodern Mistah Kurtz type, a military contractor who brought back an entourage from Vietnam and who is now obsessed with making knives; Lomax, some kind of deep-state agent who meets his contacts in a black limousine; Lloyd Percival, a senator who collects rare erotica; Talerico, a mafia boss with facial paralysis who operates out of Toronto; and probably more I'm forgetting. These are the fauna of the thriller and the detective novel, colorful gargoyles to adorn the plot architecture. They are entertaining enough but eventually tiresome, at least if you are not a devotee of those genres.

The novel's main hero, perhaps even more than Moll, is Glen Selvy, a man so well-trained as a deep-cover espionage agent (he is the real "running dog") that there is almost nothing left of him but his nearly mystical absorption in a pared-down routine:

He was a reader. He read his man. There was nothing cynical in his view of the world. He didn't feel tainted by the dirt of his profession. It was a calculated existence, this. He preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms.

This, I suppose, is an attempt to lend some aesthetic dignity to the super-spy/super-detective/super-hero archetype, especially as Selvy moves toward his inevitable end, undergoing a kind of ritual purification. I don't find it an entirely successful gesture: DeLillo takes a figure that belongs in an exaggerated aesthetic environment and tries to fit him into a novel that, for all its thriller trappings, still works in the mode of Flaubert. Hemingway is perhaps DeLillo's model here, but Papa's heroes were common soldiers, fighters, etc., not super-spies. An air of camp, though, hangs over the whole novel, from its now-offensive beginning, where a man dressed as a woman falls to his death (we later learn that he is the source of the Hitler film). So perhaps I am the one taking Selvy too seriously. Still, when I want Batman, I want Batman, and when I want Flaubert, I want Flaubert. I respect Running Dog's attempt to create a synthesis but find it unpersuasive. When compared to the extraordinary Lee Harvey Oswald of DeLillo's Libra, Selvy in his cartoonish extremism vanishes.

While allowing for DeLillo's correct assessment that Running Dog is not "utterly serious," I think it does gather itself into an argument. That so many authority figures in the novel desire a Hitler porn movie suggests a secret yearning among the elite, government and criminal, to believe in fascism's self-advertisement as the politics of self-annihilating ecstasy. Without spoiling the conclusion, I can say that the novel shows fascism up as a far more conventional, even sentimental affair, not an aesthetic sublime in the least. And whatever nostalgia the novel may harbor for the '60s dream, DeLillo is also aware of how that dream was commodified into irrelevance, turned into traditional authority's loyal opposition:

"Who do you work for?" Selvy said.

"Running Dog," she said.

He paused briefly.

"One-time organ of discontent."

"We were fairly radical, yes."

"Now safely established in the mainstream."

"I wouldn't say safely."

"Part of the ever-expanding middle."

"We say 'fuck' all the time."

"My point exactly."

Fuck all the time: the connection of sex to power, the search for an escape from "the ever-expanding middle." And the novel occasionally suggests that sex itself is a kind of fascism, echoing Sontag's classic essay on Leni Riefenstahl from three years before the novel's publication. Such hints—as when the source of the Hitler film is revealed as a "transvestite" (in the parlance of the times) or when Moll suggests that homosexuality is natural to an imperial elite (as in English public schools)—will no doubt offend the contemporary reader schooled in queer hermeneutics. On the other hand, in the novel's most arresting passage, a passage of far more relevance now than when the novel was published in 1978, Mudger explains that technological developments create an appetite for transgression:

"When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals," he said. "Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can't escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport officers, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It's a little like I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we're guilty, then we're guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn't it? It's the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we're committing crimes."

In my Inherent Vice review, I alluded to T. S. Eliot's treatment of the occult in The Waste Land: he seemed to see it as a rich source of imagery, even one to which some authentic spiritual yearning could be attached, but also a body of lore that it would be insane to take literally. I think this describes DeLillo's approach to conspiracy and other forms of apocalyptic thought, including the mystique of sexual transgression. These are images he returns to, again and again, to make his art; but the art itself is the real riposte to the omnipresence of technology, to the machine-police that estrange us from ourselves. Because this insight is not quite articulated in Running Dog, as it will be in Libra or Underworld—because in fact a somewhat bathetic super-heroic tragedy, only half meant in earnest, is substituted for it—I can't say that this is one of DeLillo's best novels. Then again, he mined it again and again for his later fiction: White Noise's Hitler motif, Libra's Dallas-tending conspiracies, Underworld's and The Body Artist's bold female intellectuals, Cosmopolis's pursuit of an exterior to capitalist technocracy—all are present in Running Dog. Not bad for four months' work.

Finally, the DeLillo dialogue is here in all its stylized dueling-monologue comedy. It has always reminded me of Wilde. You either love it or hate it, and I love it:

"Are you as sluggish as I am?"

"No," he said.

"It's my biorhythms. They're way out of whack today."

"I'm great, I'm tuned."

"Biorhythmically I feel awful."

"You need a swim," he said.

And the DeLillo prose-poetry is here (though sometimes held up by too much genre-fiction exposition), the voice of a bewildered aesthete entranced at the postmodern spectacle. I will end where the novel begins:

You won't find ordinary people here. Not after dark, on these streets, under the ancient warehouse canopies. Of course you know this. This is the point. It's why you're here, obviously. Wind comes gusting off the river, stirring the powdery air of demolition sites. Derelicts build fires in rusty oil drums near the piers. You see them clustered, wrapped in whatever variety of coat or throwaway sweater or combination of these they've been able to acquire. There are trucks parked near the warehouses, some of them occupied, men smoking in the dimness, waiting for the homosexuals to make their way down from the bars above Canal Street. You lengthen your stride, although not to hurry out of the cold. You like that stiffening wind. You turn a corner and move briefly into it, feeling your thighs take shape against the dress's pleasurably taut weave. Broken glass shines like white mica in the vacant lots. The river has a musky tang tonight.

"Running Dog" is the name of a magazine. It started out covering radical topics and genuine revolutionaries. Now, it's little more than a style rag, a TMZ for the '70s. It's probably supposed to be based on "Rolling Stone." It makes it first appearance in a Delillo book in "Great Jones Street," when a reporter comes out to interview Bucky Wunderlick, revolutionary rock icon in exile. Delillo clearly felt the idea was too good not to expand on, so the paper gets top billing in his six novel.

Moll Robbins is on an assignment she's not being asked to cover, talking to a senator who doesn't want to be interviewed about a topic he doesn't want to discuss. He's more than happy to talk about his work with a top-secret government bureau which is tied to an ultra-secret organization called Radial Matrix. You'd think the senator would want to keep this all mute, but he'd much rather talk about that than his art collection, the real object of Moll's desire.

Senator Lloyd Percival collects erotic art. It's stored in a hidden section of his mansion. His assistant, Glenn Selvy, bids for new acquisitions on his behalf through New York erotic art dealer Lightborne, who has seen the writing on the wall. "Movement, action, frames per second. This is the era we're in now, for better or worse," he laments. The ancient Persian phallic sculptures aren't flying off the shelves like they used to. His clients want movement. They demand it.

Through Lightborne and Selvy, and the discovery of a murdered man dressed up as a murdered woman, Moll (with Selvy close at hand) start to stalk the story of the day: high-ranking erotic collectors, and their quest for the ultimate holy grail of modern sex trophies -- a long-rumored reel said to filmed in the bunker beneath the palace (possibly starring A.H. himself) in the last days of the bombing of Berlin. The trail has gone cold and warm many times in recent years, but this time, it seems like it may be real.

Although my chronological read-through of Delillo's books now has some gaps in it (I went from "Great Jones Street" up to this book, bypassing "Ratner's Star" and "Players" for the time being), the big difference between this book and the first three is the plot. There is some! This is the first Delillo I'd loosely classify as a "page-turner." It has the smell and taste of a conventional thriller, and it builds up legitimate suspense for its characters' actions. About halfway through, though, it goes full Raymond Chandler and overloads the inputs with so much double-dealing, so many hidden motives, and so many unreliable narrations as to make a clear resolution almost impossible. More importantly, Delillo wants us to believe that this era of acquisitiveness causes a sort of moral and intellectual aimlessness. As the characters get ever closer to the grail item, more and more of them start to fall away. Without giving too much away, the final airing of the film (a tersely-rendered affair that really knocked me for a loop) is between Moll Robbins and the dealer Lightborne. Everyone else has fallen away.

This is a bit hard for me to cosign. A lot of the people move on for reasons other than general boredom. The stakes get too high for some. Lives are lost. The publisher of "Running Dog" takes Moll off the assignment. Selvy comes to an epiphany, and takes off to the southwest to chase it. Petty grievances become new compulsions. The Senator finds a new interest. The object itself hasn't changed. Only the circumstances around it have.

Perhaps I'm too close to this subject. As I was reading this, I was in deep research mode, seeking out some rare CBC interstitial footage shot by a young David Cronenberg in the early '70s for a film festival I'm curating. As such, Delillo's message that acquisitiveness of the moving object is a corrupting force may have fallen on some deaf ears.

At the same time, I enjoyed so much of this book. It's the first one where I started to see elements of what I'd called the mid-period Delillo. Like his 1979 short story "Creation," the hallmark of this era of Delillo's writing is the dreamy irrationality of it. The narcotic elements of one's life, making decisions, chasing after necessary things results in 180-degree pivots that might seem to resemble the actions of a person under hypnosis, if observed by an outsider. It's an effective tactic, and it wraps this straightforward thriller in layers of bizarre but realistic ambiguity. It feels like the last five minute of any dream -- you want the story to continue where it was going, but somehow, it always devolves into walking around the desert, chased by two strange men who are your old boss's cousins.

While feeling like one of Delillo's smaller books in terms of aim and ideas, every little plotline reveals tons of depth upon further reflection. It's not as crazy as some of his other books, but it does contain naked storytelling, an overly careful hitman (he wears safety goggles and earmuffs while he shoots up a bar), shamanic rituals, and the requisite shadowy government organizations.

Fans of Delillo will likely read this anyway. Folks looking for a good intro should stay away from this in favor of something earlier and woolier or later and more accomplished.

Not my favorite DeLillo but he still deserves the Noble (as Trump would say) and the Nobel.

Edging closer to completing all DeLillo's novels, and I'd put Running Dog just below Great Jones Street - which is just below my four or five faves. Written ten years before Libra, I can't help but wonder whether this novel - which is politically heavy - gave him the idea for that. Anyway, this is no Libra, but I did like it more than I thought I would. Running Dog kind of reads like a conspiracy thriller, and although it does feature a few scenes where guns are drawn and shots are fired and people are under threat, I wouldn't simply lump this into thriller territory. In a way - DeLilllo being DeLillo, and not opting for the smooth flowing storyline - that it doesn't really read like a novel in the traditional sense. There is just something about his writing that I truly admire. And that's why I like him probably more than any other American writer. His characters throughout is what really made this book tick for me, rather than any story. We have the seedy New York dealer in erotic sundries, Lightborne, who hears of a reel of film made in the Fuhrer's bunker in Berlin towards the end of World War II. Could be pornographic? And even starring a deteriorating Hitler himself. Yet no one seems to have seen the film, but there are all sorts who want it in their possession, including a U.S. Senator, The Mafia, and a 22-year-old king of the smut business who just so happens to to be barricaded within his Dallas warehouse. Aside from this there is the ex-fighter bomber commander and C.I.A. employee in Saigon, Earl Mudger, who is now in charge of a secret operations organization called Radial Matrix, which specializes in failing to see the difference between efficiency and terrorism. Anyway, it's all dodgy stuff. And this leads to Moll Robbins, a reporter for running dog magazine who is working on a series of articles on sex as big business. If there is a centre to the piece, and the character that features most, then it's probably Glen Selvy, who is an agent for Radial Matrix and on the run after his superiors order his killing. He is hunted down. Now, how does all this tie in with the Hitler film? Simply answer is some of it does and some of it doesn't. I was hoping, at the very least, for there to be a viewing of the film at some point towards the end of the book, but I wouldn't have been surprised if there wasn't. There was. And when it came along - not to give anything away about the actual content - it truly gave me the creeps. Real eerie as what is shown on the projector screen is described in acute detail. Not close to his best, but an intriguing and innovative work nonetheless. 3.7/5