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In perhaps the most memorable trip through New York since Holden Caulfield’s, multi-billionaire Eric Packer takes a snail-paced, surreal ride in his very large white stretch limo. (How large? It has a retractable toilet and room for a doctor to set up an examination table and give Eric a rectal exam while Eric chats with one of his advisors on another seat).
Traffic jams and road closures abound to slow his passage, but this doesn’t seem to bother Packer. Occasionally other people get in the limo to talk with him, or Eric exits the car to investigate the various islands of activity that arise – violent protests, a movie production set, a passing funeral, etc. These events are all entertaining in their ways – sometimes laugh-out-loud funny – though just as often they feel a bit like arbitrary, draggy, purposeless, linked journal entries.
What I loved about this book was its masterful sentences and its sharp observations. The narrative voice is a riot, spotlighting the foibles and quirks of late 20th-Century urban society in an off-hand, darkly funny way. DeLillo is one of those authors with such a unique style that if you found a random sentence on the ground that he had written, you would immediately recognize it as his.
What didn’t work for so much was the story’s forward momentum or lack thereof. Sure, we have the through lines of what’s going to happen to the yen, of the looming threats coming from the ether that Eric’s life might be in danger, of the occasional, comically unlikely meet-ups with his wife-of-less-than-a-month whom he seems to barely know, etc, but the book often seems to mosey this way and that, abandoning (or just failing to make) any attempt at real direction.
Also, the dialogue is clunky at best, never feeling natural at all; realism in this respect is probably not a goal of DeLillo’s, who seems to have other people talk to one another in order to give the author topics to mock or to express his own opinions about.
The last chapter in particular — where Packer has a multi-page, paragraph-less internal monologue and a long conversation with a psycho – felt very wearisome and self-indulgent, not a satisfying conclusion to all that has come before. Similarly, the two chapters that focused on a different character felt unnecessary, except perhaps to set up this last chapter.
Still, I looked forward to picking the book up every day, knowing that the reading went pretty quickly; that I’d get some chuckles out of it; and that DeLillo would expertly describe some unique scene in a perfectly-worded way that would make it enjoyable, thought-provoking, and/or envy-inducing (for those of us who dabble at writing).
Overall, this is another modern book where the parts far outweigh the whole in terms of satisfaction and literary heft. Many of the parts (sentences, paragraphs, images) are awesome; the whole is kinda meh. I enjoyed reading it in some ways, but I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.
Traffic jams and road closures abound to slow his passage, but this doesn’t seem to bother Packer. Occasionally other people get in the limo to talk with him, or Eric exits the car to investigate the various islands of activity that arise – violent protests, a movie production set, a passing funeral, etc. These events are all entertaining in their ways – sometimes laugh-out-loud funny – though just as often they feel a bit like arbitrary, draggy, purposeless, linked journal entries.
What I loved about this book was its masterful sentences and its sharp observations. The narrative voice is a riot, spotlighting the foibles and quirks of late 20th-Century urban society in an off-hand, darkly funny way. DeLillo is one of those authors with such a unique style that if you found a random sentence on the ground that he had written, you would immediately recognize it as his.
What didn’t work for so much was the story’s forward momentum or lack thereof. Sure, we have the through lines of what’s going to happen to the yen, of the looming threats coming from the ether that Eric’s life might be in danger, of the occasional, comically unlikely meet-ups with his wife-of-less-than-a-month whom he seems to barely know, etc, but the book often seems to mosey this way and that, abandoning (or just failing to make) any attempt at real direction.
Also, the dialogue is clunky at best, never feeling natural at all; realism in this respect is probably not a goal of DeLillo’s, who seems to have other people talk to one another in order to give the author topics to mock or to express his own opinions about.
The last chapter in particular — where Packer has a multi-page, paragraph-less internal monologue and a long conversation with a psycho – felt very wearisome and self-indulgent, not a satisfying conclusion to all that has come before. Similarly, the two chapters that focused on a different character felt unnecessary, except perhaps to set up this last chapter.
Still, I looked forward to picking the book up every day, knowing that the reading went pretty quickly; that I’d get some chuckles out of it; and that DeLillo would expertly describe some unique scene in a perfectly-worded way that would make it enjoyable, thought-provoking, and/or envy-inducing (for those of us who dabble at writing).
Overall, this is another modern book where the parts far outweigh the whole in terms of satisfaction and literary heft. Many of the parts (sentences, paragraphs, images) are awesome; the whole is kinda meh. I enjoyed reading it in some ways, but I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.
