More thoughts to come, but this was rather confounding for me. My reactions varied widely; for a good stretch I'd be delighting in the reverie of abstract theory after theory, bordering on slapstick. An amusing inundation on the reader. Other stretches this same stimuli overload became turgid causing my eyes to glaze over. I can't say this is my favorite Delillo book, but it certainly adds another dimension to his oeuvre that I had yet to experience.

Mysterious message from the stars! Mysterious message from the stars? Some really odd characters melded into relationships with a 14-year-old genius trying to solve the code from the stars. Perhaps it ends up being more about these relationships with the odd characters than about the message from the stars. Or is it a message from the stars? Interesting read however you interpret the roll of the dice.

One of the most disappointing, frustrating and for the most part tedious books I have ever read, Ratner's Star did not shine - it bludgeoned me to death with boredom.

What started as a 4-star book and filled me with that rare thrill of excited anticipation lapsed by page 160 into an ineluctably inevitable downslide of disappointment, and a single star defeat. The opening - as good a setting up that anticipation as any novel's start - promising the dual thrill of this special boy with his precocious mathematical gift lending him an early maturity of perspective tinged with the expected slightly autistic response to all things, and the promise of the potential communication with an alien race from the vicinity of Ratner's Star - dissolved into a series of tiers of absurdist vignettes by the agglomeration of highly yet abstractly intelligent scientists and Nobel laureates and their supporting clique, who, beyond idiosynchratic behaviour and deviantly abstract perceptions, proclaimed variously, widely and often inanely on everything from tersely perspicacious, eruditely accurate, elegantly true, through silly, stupid, mad and insane.

But what - a supportive pillar of the intense frustration the book sliced under your skin for the most part - annoyed the most was that, despite the organisation of the Field Experiment (strangely subterranean topped by a geometrically attractive armillary sphere) and its sophisticated brief, premises and staff, this agglomeration of the keenest scientific minds couldn't organise a proverbial in a guano cave. They individually and communally failed to progress one of the most important scientific projects by a single iota - until Billy, our singularly sane hero, solved the riddle of the momentous transmission while attempting to flee the insanity of his friendly captors, and proved the lot of them useless and superfluous. Which meant the plot - which evaporated as the book waded through more and more dense meaningless language and statements from the tedious absurd episodes of this bunch of charmless crackpots - developed not one bit until page 390...

Yet, by the end, a couple of revelations - not about the story, but the mechanism, about the novel's lack of story, its purpose, its writer's cathartic end - explain the whole pointless mess:

"The very uselessness of [the project] ... is what makes the project a pure act of intellect and therefore supremely enriching." (p409 Vintage 1991).

For the writer perhaps. Negate this, and you have a neat summary of this novel's near-uselessness for the reader, even though the project - the novel - may be useful to the writer.

Further, the whole exercise - the novel - is clearly explained:

"To express what is inexpressible isn't why you write if you're in this class of writers. To be understood is faintly embarrassing. What you want to express is the violence of your desire not to be read. The friction of an audience is what drives you crazy. The more they understand, the crazier you get. You can't let them know what you're writing about. Once they know, you're finished. If you're in this class, what you have to do is either not publish or make absolutely sure your work leaves readers strewn along the margins. This not only causes literature to happen but is indispensable to your mental health as well." (pp 410-11 Vintage 1991).

On the nail, here. Most of what's written - the scientific, mathematical, metaphysical and sheer insane lunatic babble - is inexpressibly incomprehensible. This is DeLillo at his extreme. It drove me crazy. You meet this in many places in Mao II, come away from that book fretted about the margins, all confused. 'What do you mean Mr DeLillo?'

But by here, you have simply stopped caring long long before.

The only reasons to finish this vastly annoying novel were to:
f) glean something from the undoubtedly intelligent and incisive thoughts of the author and enjoy some of the language in that process;
g) stick it out with gritted teeth, issuing moans of forebearance, to see if there was some wonderful twist to redeem it all (endless hours of sighing)
h) say you've read another DeLillo book, it was Ratner's Star, and frankly, it was bat shit.

I thought the character of Billy one of the most promising of any I have read; I loved his intelligent simplicity; hated his family backstory. I thought all the other characters were prats. I came away with one line I could wholeheartedly equate with:

"The period before sleep is my time of greatest mental helplessness..." (p413).

I encountered this state dozens of times while reading this book. I sincerely hope no other DeLillo I read (and I will read more, despite this) is nowhere similar to Ratner's Star, except for Billy Twillig and the final almost redemptive passage of compassion (p429-32).

My favorite Delillo so far, by a wide margin, inclusive of Underworld.

First Nobel in mathematics goes to teenage protagonist, whose work was “understood by only three or four people” (4), which work kid has designated as “zorgs” (20): “it’s pretty impossible to understand unless you know the language. A zorg is a kind of number. You can’t use zorgs for anything except in mathematics. Zorgs are useless. In other words they don’t apply” (id.). These statements are of course manifestly dishonest, as kid was really saying on the inside (i.e., the same manner in which I launch dreadful broadsides contra any of my wives when their respective wraths may have been upon them), that “beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence” (13) (emphases added).

We should expect therefore that the aesthetic principles of this novel are laid out strictly as a consistent inner code, insofar as the text discloses rules for its own construction. It is of course pleasant when one’s expectations come to fruition, such as in one character’s description of her own writing, which is appropriately self-referential: “it’s an experimental novel, an allegory, a lunar geography, an artful autobiography, a cryptic scientific tract, a work of science fiction” (57). We know that “strict rules add dignity to a game” (334).

I plan to make strict rules that I plan to follow. Reading my book will be a game with specific rules that have to be learned. I’m free to make whatever rules I want as long as there’s an inner firmness and cohesion, right? Just like mathematics.” (352)

Certain ‘notes’ on the final third’s ‘Logicon’ project might serve as hermeneutic rules here (cf. 330-332, 365-66, 383, 391-92); a clever reading might work through those, as well as any mandatory grammars or peremptory language otherwise deployed in the text—I’m not doing it because that’s work and this is pro bono. Regardless, “This is where zorgs fit in, the technicality, the precision, the mathematics, the language. Strict rules” (359).

Text proceeds as kid’s somewhat picaresque journey through several special projects related (vel non) to an alleged alien broadcast. He meets many other science types, all memorable, witty confrontations. A few of these characters recur, but many of them are pynchonian one-offs. There are nevertheless some basic principles that recur with regularity, and might be the rules of the text.

For instance, protagonist’s “kind of mathematics are undertaken solely to advance the art. In time to come, of course, what had been pure might finally be applied” (33). The most important rule, then: “There is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality” (48). Mathematics

has no content. Form, it’s nothing but form. It stands on thin air. The symbols we use are everything. What they represent we discard without the slightest misgiving. The focus of our thought, the object of our examination, our analysis, our passion if you will, is the notation itself. (286)

The next recognizable rule is “the terror of the irrational” (22), specifically that “no definition of science is complete without a reference to terror” (36). We then see ‘terror’ (lovecraftian terror, rather than osamaniac) reiterate often: “Of course if evidence of universal blueshifting is ever found, it will merit the smallest note. This is documentary void. Not void whose essence is terror. Not the human sensorium streaked with darkness” (50); “There may be a lot of crazy things in the world that scare you and me but mathematics is the one thing where there’s nothing to be afraid of or stupid about or think it’s a big mystery” (67); “Terror is everywhere. […] Take demons, for example. You wouldn’t think there’s a connection between demons and the sperm in your testicles. The terror of onanism is that bodiless demons are able to make bodies for themselves from the spilled seed” (227); “But math struck terror” (234); Protagonist hasn’t “had time to drift away from your psychic origins, whatever these may have been, however replete with terror, darkness and fetal shrieks. Routine horripilation” (265).

The terror of the irrational that is inherent to the definition of science leads quite plainly into the second rule of the text: “By common consent the star code is no longer an ongoing project. I’m amazed anyone took it seriously in the first place. Radio signals weren’t even repeated. A jumble of pulses” (264) (emphasis added). That is to say, the rules of the text are no longer an ongoing project, a baudrillardian dissimulation that disavows rules even while following them. Consider the following constantly changing reports of the scientist administrators regarding the text’s underlying mystery, the receipt of an apparent transmission from the eponymous celestial object:

1: “We’ve been contacted by someone or something in outer space” (46);

2: “The star is a common G dwarf. It’s called Ratner’s Star. It lies away from us a bit toward the galactic center. We’ve analyzed the variation or wiggle in its path and we believe the object in question is a low-mass planet that occupies the star’s habitable zone” (50);

3: “Is Ratner’s star an illusion? Of course not. It’s out there and everyone knows it. Is the planet’s existence a hoax? Ridiculous. There’s clear evidence of a planet in orbit around the star. Is someone transmitting signals? Absolutely. Is our synthesis telescope receiving on the secret frequency? Nods of affirmation” (63);

4: “The star is part of a two-star system” (93);

5: “Ratner’s star is a main sequence star and its sister star is a black hole” (101);

6: “Ratner’s star is on the verge of becoming a red giant […] increase in luminosity. Startling increase in radius” (140);

7: “Space Brain has now confirmed a two-satellite configuration” (151);

8: “the computer retrovert we’ve just run indicates error in the receiving equipment” (240);

9: “I’d like everyone to stop using expressions like ‘Ratnerians,’ ‘superbeings,’ ‘extraterrestrials’ and so forth. It’s a radio source we’re in touch with. If Moholean relativity is the real thing, the source isn’t even where it seems to be. So why assume it’s a planet orbiting a star? Remember the homely adage: ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.’ So let’s from now on be sure to use the term ‘artificial radio source.’ And let’s find a more precise name for the so-called beings who are presumed to have initiated the transmission. How about ‘artificial radio source extants’? ARS extants” (274);

10: “Because Ratner’s star lies within a suspected Mohole, which is a fractional part, as I understand it, of the value-dark dimension, meaning no spatial area and no time, it was thought the signal picked up by the synthesis telescope was originating from Ratner’s star. But it wasn’t […] It was just that the Mohole had trapped the signal and sent it our way. Ratner’s star is a binary dwarf. Couldn’t possibly sustain a planet of any size” (357);

11: “Using information gathered by satellite, balloon-borne instruments, and, most of all, by a device of recent concoction called an echolocation quantifier, we believe we have traced the radio signals to their source […] The source of the message is the planet Earth […] The signals originated somewhere in this planet. Were absorbed in some component of the Mohole totality. Were eventually reflected back this way” (402);

12: “What we’ve apparently discovered is that we are in the Mohole, if that’s the way to phrase it. This solar system appears to be what we call Mohole-intense. We are part of the value-dark dimension” (410).

I’m sufficiently Hegelian to recognize this process as a dialectical reversal of some sort or another; either “the solidarity of opposites is completely shattered” thereby, reduced to “essential dichotomies” (34), or it’s just a pedestrian “reconciliation of opposites” (313). (As M&E otherwise lay out in the Manifesto, class struggle shall result either in the ‘revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’)

It may well be swiftian satire of science, though of course Swift was misanthropically rightwing, whereas Delillo strikes me as nothing if not a strident exemplar of enlightenment. (One may be forgiven if one is confused however by such bits as “He was part of a committee formed to define the word ‘science’ […] the debate continued to drag on and the definition at present ran some five hundred pages” (30).) Text presents plenty of bogus theory at the research compound: ‘slyphing’ (49 et seq.); ‘bi-levelism (66); challenge to phenomenal basis of empiricism (87); a “lust for abstraction” that leads inexorably and completely reasonably to the grafting of a brain on a computer (146, 244); and then moholes (179 ff.), which are the undisputed champion of douchitude in the text.

Anyway, most of these clowns win Nobel prizes (306). As the text is pleased to reiterate, “keep believing it, shit for brains” (27, 57, 167, 258). (KBISFB is likely a rule of the text, of course.)

There likely a rule in the recurrent discrete/continuous binary (95, 245, 348, 389), but am not sure about it beyond the punchline: “The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made Mohole identification practically inevitable” (418).

A further rule: We are assured that there’s “something about waste material that defied systematic naming” (38), which is of course the primary concern of the epistemology of the accursed share provided by Underworld. But this is also a consideration of “things beyond expression” in general:

the names of deities, infernal beings, totemic animals and plants; the names of an individual’s blood relatives of the opposite sex (a ban related to incest restrictions); the new name given a boy at his initiation; the names of certain organs of the body; the names of the recently dead; the names of sacred objects, profane acts, leaders of cults, the cults themselves. Double substitutes must be used.” (38)

Looping back to the rule on terror:

To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one’s substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source. (19)

We might consider these comments in connection with Derrida’s  On the Name (not now; that’s work).

Derridean concerns will provide other rules of the text, which notes a “direct correlation between writing and memory” (361-62) (that’s the Speech & Phenomena, yo); “writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self” (362). We are presented with “the very uselessness of Logicon” project (409), which seeks to develop an ideal language to correspond with the ARS extants, who of course, supra, turn out to be Earthlings. The uselessness (‘it does not apply,’ recall) is considered a virtue by those who do ‘pure work’: “I do pure work. A lot of it is so abstract it can’t be put on paper or even talked about. I deal with proof and nonproof” (46), which is both uselessly virtuous but also another “thing beyond expression,” an excess exorbitant to language. “There are things past spelling and far beyond counting” (147).

Other interesting bits in this connection: a guy’s voice is a “proto-laryngeal reconstruction of the sound of a lost language” (147-48); another guy believes in “the secret power of the alphabet, the unnameable name, the literal contraction of the superdivinity, fear of sperm demons” (215) (KBISFB?). Something about the Heideggerian polemos (217), the “beginning of distinctions.” Elsewise, a “thing beyond naming” (226). One guy eats post-circumcision foreskin (105); another guy eats post-natal placenta (140).

As our teen protagonist notes, “I make no reply” (9, 155).

We make a brief listing of other potential miscellaneous rules of the text: a typology of ignorance (157); “truth accumulates. It can be borrowed and paid back” (193); “The whole history of mathematics is subterranean, taking place beneath history itself” (195); “worship of the body always ends in fascism” (361); “latent in any period’s estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane” (387) (cf. Foucault!).

Not rules, but kinda cool: teen protagonist’s mentor is a brilliant, extremely sexually active person afflicted by dwarfism, and is described as an “idealized Hollywood dwarf” (312). Perhaps a source for Tyrion Lannister?

Teen protagonist is the inventor of the “stellated twilligon” (116-17), a quadrilateral of some alleged import in the setting, and which shows up repeatedly throughout. Kid receives fill-in-blank quiz questions in the mails (294 ff.) from one of the other Nobel prize winners: “In a tricky situation it is your best friend, above all others, who would find it easiest to ___________ you. ___Deceive ___Believe.”

So, am wondering: After reading Ratner’s Star, the fictive quadrilateral is best described as a _________________? ___stellated twilligon __fellated dellilogon?

By the end, kid deciphers the signal, which communicates a specific time, which time marks the end of the world. That end is appropriately named a “noncognate celestial anomaly” (420, 434) by some characters, which is the most kickass name for the end of the world that I’ve seen. Teen protagonist by contrast refers to it simply as “zorgasm” (438). That is also kickass.

Recommended for readers who touch themselves in the male or female region, persons who wonder how we can learn from the past unless we repeat it, and those who slowly have begun to understand the higher reality of nonobjective truth.

Don DeLillo, although I have loved some of his work, he also surprises me as to just how mediocre he can be, and this one was a right rambling struggle which I never really got into. It's length was putting me off that I ended up skimming through the second half of it. Would have better off re-reading The Names, Libra, Underworld, or Mao II which are my faves. Only one of his novels now left to read and then that's all of them read.

La matematica è ciò che è il mondo quando sottraiamo le nostre percezioni...

According to Wikipedia this is Don DeLillo's favorite of his novels. It's not mine. I think that I missed something in the book, like DeLillo was doing something that I didn't quite catch, or I caught but I wasn't that impressed by it. I'm not sure what I'm saying.

This is DeLillo's first 'big' novel. I haven't read Underworld yet, but from the books of his I've read I think I like him best when his books are compact. I think it's possible (this could change as I read the rest of his works) that Point Omega might be my favorite of his works. It's short but it's tight and beautiful. Every word in the book counts, unlike in most of my reviews. The writing in Ratner's Star has the 'DeLillo' sparseness to it (usually) but the plot or the narrative is too sprawling. The narrative sort of reminded me of something that Gaddis might have tried to do (and the characters have a very Gaddis quality to them, and the way especially in the final section of the book that action and characters will shift for no discernible way made me think of the de-centering that Gaddis is such a master at in his 'big' novels), but (I hate to say this), at times many of the scenes felt like skits. As if there were some funny things DeLillo thought he could have scientists do so he made an absurd or slapstick chapter to put them in. Each chapter might have a continuing theme or message he's trying to convey but I never felt like he was successfully getting that message across. It was as if he were being too blunt about what he wanted to say but vague in the details. He wasn't leaving enough table scraps around for the reader (me) to put together the story myself, but what was being given was kind of, yeah, so?

I'm having a hard time writing this. A lot of my criticisms are things I normally like in novels. It's too big, it's too sprawling, there isn't enough of a center, it's too silly at times, it's not clear enough... if anyone were to say that Infinite Jest or JR were any of these things I'd be ready to jump at the books defense and say, yeah they are but that's all part of the book, it all has to be there. But for this novel I thought that all of these things I'm normally a 'meta-fiction' nerd in loving just weren't working right. It's like this book is a really nice looking car and you want to love it but a lot of stuff in the engine is just not firing off right so you've got this nice looking car that is sputtering down the road being trailed by a noxious black cloud (an Airborne Toxic Event?) and limping along with two nice tires and two donuts. If I was told what the book was about, and how it was presented and all of that I'd be jumping up and down in joy wanting to read it, but somewhere in the execution the book failed for me.

What saved the book was DeLillo's dialogue. I love the staccato overly stylized way he writes dialogue. It's very artificial, but overly stylized things have to be, right? Even though it's not flashy at all, the way his characters speak reminded me of the violence in a (good Hong Kong) John Woo movie. So totally fake, but beautiful in its construction and execution. I'm not sure why I kept thinking about John Woo movies while reading this book but I think the analogy holds at least a little bit.

Two DFW related notes. I'm convinced that DFW is paying homage to DeLillo in Infinite Jest. Out of the early novels of his I've read so far, this one has the least explicit things that DFW returns to in Infinite Jest, but there is a fictional event called The MIT Language Riots that appear in both works, and the recurring question of "Explain please" I think is used quite often by a character in a DFW work, but I can't remember if it was in Infinite Jest or another work, or obviously what character uses this.

Dense, nearing on impenetrable at times, but also endlessly rewarding. To rationalise a world which is inherently irrational can send one down the rabbit hole. The deeper we dig, the less we understand. Science, by turning what is experiential into incomprehensible abstraction, can alienate us from what we know to be true: what it feels like to live and exist as a human being.

Don, I forgive you...

My first DeLillo. I figured I'd cherry pick a few that looked interesting, head in a rough chronological order. Maybe Ratner's Star -> White Noise -> Libra -> Underworld?

Anyhow seems to me Ratner's Star is a silly book, which stars boy wonder Billy Twillig ('twas Brillig?) for whom the Nobel Prize in Mathematics is invented just so he can win it.

Billy goes underground to work on a mysterious sequence of 101 digits transmitted from Ratner's Star.

He partakes in dialogue with dozens of experts with silly names. They all specialize in different things, I lost count after about thirty. Some of them are pretty funny though. Most of them leave the book after a single scene.

Communication overall is really pretty hopeless. Billy wanders and talks about zorgs and learns about moholes in a way that is somehow reminscent of the story of Alice in Wonderland. Billy does go down a hole, for instance. I felt like I was going down there with him. Inside the first hole he finds another hole.

I should mention there are some good bits having to do with bat guano.

There's a second story interleaved with the main one, about Billy's unusual upbringing in Brooklyn. This story is much more conventional than the first and in some ways more satisfying.

Ratner's Star is worth a few laughs, but what does it say about science, and how it's really done?

I'm not an expert, so I really can't say.

Chiariamo subito che il libro si è preso una stella sola e che l'altra è per me, che sono riuscita a finirlo. Devo ammettere che in alcuni passaggi mi è sembrato addirittura di aver visto una luce, ma forse era il delirio indotto dalla lettura. Un'esperienza traumatica :D... però è servita a farmi capire alcune cose:

- Leggo perchè mi piace essere portata "altrove"; l'altrove in cui vorrei essere portata NON è lo scenario sconclusionato di questo racconto. La scrittura mi deve prendere per mano, stupirmi, farmi riflettere, emozionarmi... non farmi venire istinti omicidi libreschi.

- Il delirio può anche essere considerato una forma d'arte, ma sinceramente non me ne frega un accidente. Devo già decodificare quotidianamente i comportamenti schizzati dei miei simili, per avere ancora voglia di farlo anche leggendo un libro.

- Ho capito perchè l'unica versione reperibile in italiano de La stella di Ratner è quella rilegata e fighettosa (la prima edizione): visto il numero inconsistente delle vendite (e di quello, credo, consistente degli invenduti), l'editore avrà deciso di non pubblicare una versione economica di questa "perla" (giustamente).

- Mi piacerebbe sapere cosa si è fumato, ingurgitato, sniffato DeLillo durante la stesura di questo libro. No perchè una mente normale (anche se affetta da turbe psichiche) non credo possa raggiungere queste vette di caos narrativo senza (pesanti) stimoli chimici.

- Sicuramente andrò a leggermi altri libri del Don, se non altro per vedere se riesco a finire due pagine di fila senza chiedermi:
"Ma che c... sta scrivendo?? E soprattutto... perchè?", oppure (variante) "Sono io che sono una capra o lui che è allucinato?" (sono altamente probabili entrambe le cose).

It would be advisable to be at least familiar with the canonical works of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Turing before tackling Ratner's Star, if that's really what you want to do. This is a novel about ideas, mostly concerning issues and topics these people wrote about in these works, though Delillo never acknowledges this explicitly.

Delillo has interesting takes and angles on some of the issues and topics raised in them, though I would not go so far as to say that he expands or elucidates them in any way—he explores the act of writing, essentially, through the lens of analogous topics in the realm of logic, mathematics, and linguistics.

The plot, told in so few words, is that a Math prodigy is sent to a facility full of (other) Nobel laureates on a mission to decode a message from space. This book is not about the plot, however.

The main problem with the book, I think, is that Delillo does not play his strengths here, and writes in a way that seems alien even to him. (This gets really meta, by the way, considering how he's writing about writing, and about describing and validating the coherence of systems through the use of a metalanguage, so I reckon he is very aware of this.)

In an interview, addressing the importance of meaning plays in his writing, Delillo stated "[meaning] is not the primary force at all. I think of myself as a writer of sentences, and I will always follow language." Which I think accurately describes his works in general, though not really this one. DFW described the prose in Delillo's masterpiece Underworld as "exquisitely controlled, sober, poised rather than lunging." Which I would agree is true of Underworld, and his better works as far as I've read them, but which is unfortunately not true of Ratner's Star.

Perhaps because of the topics at hand, their inherent complexity, and the apparent self-reflectional aspects of the book, the writing simply comes off as lunging, rather than poised, sober, and controlled. As such, the best parts of the book are the ones that least resemble the parts which make Ratner's Star stand out in Delillo's corpus, such as my favourite part:

"His father's shoes were also there, scuffed and monumental, located between the cigarette lighter and the newspaper. It was hard to believe that creatures with feet large enough to be suitable for these containers actually walked the earth and that one of these creatures was his own pop, his own flesh and blood, [father's name] of the subway tunnels. Are we really of the same race of people? Did I really come from him and her or is it all some kind of story they tell to kids? Ovulation, intercourse, fertilization, pregnancy, labor, delivery. It can't be that simple. There must be more they aren't telling us. A circling bird, a dream, a number whispered in the night. At his side Natasha seemed to look directly into the sun. Izzy Seltzer cautioned her, semi tragic in his faded swimming trunks, hair everywhere on his body, white-tipped clusters curling from his nose and ears."

Some say that Ratner's Star is Pynchonesque, and I do see the resemblance. On the surface, the amount of quintessentialy whacky postmodern names is staggering, and on a deeper level the analogues and connections drawn between, say, ordinary day-to-day life to mathematics, and rigorous science, or unbelievable adventures and escapades are similar. Though the prose, intent, and general style of the writing is so vastly different that I cannot help but feel that those similarities are actually quite superficial, and that Delillo's heart is really in another place than Pynchon's.

5.5/10