I like DeLillo’s style of writing but I felt like the plot was very disconnected to the main character, because whatever happened, he just didn’t seem to care. I think that was probably the point. The whole vibe I got from this book was quite nihilistic in a New York nothing has a consequence sense. I was annoyed they killed off Opel so early, I really liked her as a character.

Bit of a left field read for me. I think I’d read more DeLillo but will probably die before reading this book again

"Americans persue loneliness in various ways. For me Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain."
- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street



A good DeLillo, just not a great one. I read this on a flight from SF to Phoenix. While there were parts of it that I loved (again and again DeLillo can throw out a sentence that seems almost electric; a prose version of a perpetual motion machine), he also tried several experiments with this novel that seemed wasted, or perhaps foul balls. Let me list a few:

1. Lyrics - Please GOD don't inspire any future prose writers to suddenly want to fill their novels with lyrics. I understand that this is tempting, especially when writing about a rock legend. However, writing the lyrics of a famous, god-like, rock star is HARDER than writing a good sex scene. That wire is a tricky one to walk.

2. Sex - DeLillo isn't bad at writing sex scenes, but he's not particularly great.

3. The Ending - a real whimper. I'm not sure the book ever was skipping at 4stars or 5, but the ending definitely didn't raise it up in my estimation. If I were to drop this book next to its peers by DeLillo, it would fit closer to Point Omega, Cosmopolis, and The Body Artist. All good books, but none great are GREAT Delillo.

DeLillo's study of rock music as the merger of art and commerce, nihilism, and urban paranoia is the most quintessentially DeLillian novel I've ever read. This is not entirely a compliment.

DeLillo's protagonist is Bucky Wunderlick, a widely popular American rock star who has decided to retire from the limelight for an unspecified period of time. Much of the book therefore takes place in Wunderlick's small apartment. There is very little action. If you know DeLillo, he relies heavily on dialogue. A highly stylized type of dialogue that resembles not so much real human conversation as it does characters speaking into a void. One long, paranoiac stoned monologue after another.

In many of DeLillo's novels, White Noise, for example, the dialogue is balanced with some forward plot movement, but Bucky is such a depressed, solipsistic character that much of this book reads like a bad Notes from Underground. And I think Dostoevsky is a great parallel here because Delillo's most well-worn topic is that of urban alienation. The loneliness one feels in a crowd. One need only look at the relish with which DeLillo expertly crafts scenes like the baseball game in the beginning of Underworld or the mass marriage ceremony in the beginning of Mao II.

But in Great Jones Street the charm wears off fast.

I haven't even talked about DeLillo's prose style yet. Frankly, there is a type of person who will call sentences of this book "poetic." But, while we can certainly feel DeLillo reaching for star-studded sentences, he isn't a sophisticated enough poet to pull this off. Most of the time his long descriptive passages of New York City read like bad imitations of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. His prose is cluttered with adjectives that are often thrown in just because they share a vowel sound with the noun they describe. The result is some very clunky prose. The very type of stuff that Creative Writing teachers tell you to avoid.

However even his prose is possibly justifiable given that this is a novel about rock and roll. If we take it that DeLillo isn't aspiring for poetry so much as a kind of psychedelic lyricism, there are ways in which this novel works. It succeeds in emulating the pho-profundity of 1970's rock music.

Is this novel worth reading? This is the final question, and I'm not entirely sure how to answer. On one hand, I think it's a better introduction to DeLillo's style, his strengths and weaknesses, than any of the other books of his I read. It is also the most Pynchonian, I think. The book is frequently funny and at times perfectly absurd, and like the best moments reading Pynchon, there are flashes of tragicomic brilliance in the mopey monologuing of his characters.

However....there is another novel from the American 1970's that makes heavy use of dialogue, that also details the reclusive habits of a musician persecuted by commerce, but it is also about so much more. J R by William Gaddis.

So if you like the directionless monologues that are purely of their time, stick around. Great Jones Street is not a long novel. But there isn't much here, frankly. There's very little depth. There are better voices to listen to than Don DeLillo's. Go read something from Gaddis, for example.

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Ho scoperto che Great Jones Street è una strada di New York realmente esistente, si trova a Manhattan, zona sud, vicino Broadway e la Bowery. Immagino certo che ora sia molto diversa da com'era quando Don DeLillo ha scritto questo romanzo, perché le città sono sempre organismi viventi in continua mutazione. Lui tra l'altro non ne parla granché bene di questa zona: una caserma dei pompieri, qualche condominio con pochi piani, tanti magazzini e lavori ovunque. D'altronde è tutta la New York del racconto a essere oscura e decadente e fuori nevica, o piove; è degradata e affollata di personaggi strani. In questo contesto emerge il DeLillo più pynchoniano che io abbia mai letto - d'altronde nel 1973 Pynchon aveva già pubblicato V. e L'incanto del lotto 49 ed è l'anno de L'arcobaleno della gravità -, non il solito lucido scrutatore della realtà e della società, ma un tagliente autore di una satira lunga ed elaborata: sceglie un tema - il mondo che gravita attorno un musicista rock di successo, Bucky Wunderlick - e lo prende completamente in giro. Ed è così che incontriamo la Comune Agricola di Happy Valley, la società Transparanoia e questa misteriosa e assurda droga che tutti cercano, oltre a una sequela di personaggi veramente improbabili e grotteschi. Quanto anticipa certi espedienti di David Foster Wallace questo testo? Secondo me tanto. Ma alla fine DeLillo continuo a preferirlo diverso, meno sperimentale, più indagatore e meno grottesco, più tagliente e meno ironico e quindi questo non entra tra i suoi libri che preferisco.
Ci sono dei pezzi molto belli, un paio di esempi:

L'amore delle menti dovrebbe vivere oltre la vita materiale. E forse è così, come se ciascuna mente fosse una stella di neutroni, invisibile se non agli occhi della teoria, che impone la sua forza di gravità allo spazio per trovare un'amante.

Uomini che studieranno la nostra epoca non per mezzo degli scavi, ma arrampicandosi su dune sconfinate di macerie industriali e acciaio mutilato nel tentativo di raggiungere le cime dei palazzi da noi costruiti.

The superbly named Bucky Wunderlick is a rock star turned recluse, walking out on his band at the height of their fame, holing up and tuning out in a dilapidated flat on Great Jones Street, New York.

Wild rumours of his whereabouts soon start to circulate as Bucky seeks retreat behind his own myth: 'I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain.' Whatever that means.

Bucky is a hybrid of Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop - he even has a legendary set of low-fi recordings called the 'mountain tapes', whereas his live shows are all about sound and abandonment.

His sudden disappearance and the attendant rumours also mirror Dylan's own withdrawal after his motorcycle accident. As one journalist notes, "The accident thing was interesting to us, ideologically. An accident for somebody like you is the equivalent of prison for a revolutionary."

Delillo is about as impressive and infuriating a writer as any I have come across, often in the same sentence. In this novel in particular he really lets fly in both directions at once. The below example is typical, with my own commentary in brackets:

'We lived in bed as old couples rock on porches (nice), without hurry or need (fine), content to blend into benevolent materials (a bit vague and pretentious, but passable if left at that), to become, for instance, wood'. (God help us!)

As for the character of Bucky himself, despite thinking in the same portentous and powerful yet basically meaningless phrases as Delillo, he remains - intentionally no doubt - something of a blank.

Instead, all the noise is made by the various players who can't leave him alone and continually invade his privacy - Globke, his manipulative manager; Azarian, his paranoid co-songwriter; Watney, a cynical English singer who has sold his soul to the corporate machine; Fenig, a struggling writer who lives upstairs; and (no kidding) Dr. Pepper, a shady chemist.

Those and others compete to secure either his sounds or his silence, spouting the most extraordinary gibberish at him during a plot in which the mountain tapes get mixed up, not withot symbolic significance, with a package of dangerous drugs.

I decided to give Great Jones Street a reread after the recent announcement of the much-awaiting official release of Bob Dylan and The Bands astonishing Basement Tapes. Would I get more out of it this time? Would it reveal deep secrets to me?

Not really, no. Delillo is much too obtuse for anything like an honest to goodness rock n' roll revelation. In addition his own attempts at writing song lyrics sucked for the most part.

But it is a great drug novel, full of paranoid images and the insane monologues of highly stimulated imaginations.

Ultimately however, too much of nothing.

It feels like DeLillo writes his novels especially--maybe even ONLY--for me.

I was floored by this book.

No idea how anybody else will feel about it.

"Fame puts you there where things are hollow." David Bowie.

My third DeLillo and by far my least favourite. It's about a reclusive rock star and his involvement in a big time drug deal. It's thus a novel that explores underworlds. Unfortunately, too often, I found the writing pretentious. It's not though put me off reading more of him.

This slim novel is many things: a meditation on the spiritual bankruptcy of fame and 1970s America; a satire of art and commerce; a satire of corporations and the counter culture; a film noir; an evocation of urban decay; a novel of characters making observations on modern life and waxing philosophical. Once again, DeLillo writes beautiful language. He loves people talking and conversation. His characters make lots of monologues. One of them is a writer who expounds on the brutality of the writers' market. The hero, a very popular lead singer of a avant-garde band, one specializing in noise, decides he can't take it anymore--the fame, the excess, the fans, the lifestyle--and retreats to a run down Manhattan apartment to live quietly and strive for some sort of peace and stillness. The comedic problem is that he is constantly interrupted by other people and nefarious, paranoid forces. This is a Pynchon-esque book in a way. In this and in Americana, DeLillo's first novel, the subject is the malaise of America itself, its confusion and ennui. We still haven't gotten rid of them.

So far, the least convincing DeLillo protagonist. He has the usual sort of obscure meditations, aloofness and sense of alienation which is the standard, but it doesn’t fit coming from the rockstar-in-retreat here. Does this voice really sound like it’s coming from a massive rockstar with a live fast die young lifestyle?

Other than that, this starts off slow, largely due to the static location of the room on Great Jones Street where most of the novel takes place, with the rockstar protagonist Bucky Wunderlick (very Pynchonian name) is sick of his fame and buries himself in hovel until he can decide what to do next.

It gets a lot better as the world of the novel builds up returning characters and an amusing drug deal plot. There’s also some early attempts from DeLillo to explore his idea of language as ‘pure sound’ which he returned to in The Body Artist.

I really felt the influence of DeLillo’s postmodernist peers in this one, but also how he was separating from them, and how he would eventually come not not really fit in that ‘postmodernist’ archetype to the point that it’s now seen as poor criticism to describe him as a postmodernist like Pynchon or John Barth. The drug plot and all the zany, monologuing characters involved absolutely feel like they come from the playful noir-tinged aspects of the likes of Pynchon, but DeLillo does away with the overloading maximalism you’d find with Pynchon and has a far more meditative approach. It’s not about an increasing, maximalist intensity, but about slowing down and exploring themes of fame, corporatism of art and the pursuit of pure expression.

Los primeros años de la década de los 70 empezaron con las muertes de Morrison o Hendrix, que hicieron más palmaria aquella visión del rock que cantara Eric Burdon como un lugar “to wear that ball and chain”. Las revoluciones juveniles se refugiaron entre las sábanas de pequeños dormitorios y el éxtasis de aquellas generaciones previas comenzó a disiparse junto al sueño de un nuevo orden para la sociedad. Mientras el rock psicodélico apuraba sus últimos coletazos, a la espera de que su sonido evolucionase hacia lo progresivo, Don DeLillo escribía su tercera novela, La calle Great Jones, con la mirada puesta en el ocaso de ese fenómeno cultural. Un apogeo que dejaría al descubierto las miserias de la emergente sociedad del capitalismo avanzado. Tres décadas después, Seix Barral continúa su encomiable labor editorial con la publicación al castellano de esta estimable, por ingeniosa y feroz, novela de sus inicios.

Bucky Wunderlick es una estrella del rock cuya carrera parece atrapada en un ángulo muerto, entre los balbuceos y el caos musical que han coronado sus últimos discos, reducidos a una definición casi infantil que lleva por nombre Pipimomo. Hastiado de esa realidad en la que cada vez resulta más difícil permanecer agarrado a algo verdadero, Bucky se esconde en un apartamento de la zona de Manhattan. Parapetado tras la cama en la que su protagonista deja pasar el tiempo, DeLillo compone una sátira sobre una época donde los afectos, incluso la realidad, pierden su valor a medida que olvidan cuál es su sentido. Ahora que la euforia ante la posibilidad de imprimir un cambio en nuestra manera de ver las cosas se diluye con el final de las utopías, resulta indispensable encontrar los medios que nos permitan seguir creyendo en la ilusión. Así, ese pequeño piso de la calle Great Jones se convierte en el centro neurálgico de la operación, en el que las visitas constantes de periodistas, representantes o miembros de una extraña cooperativa agraria que trata de distribuir una nueva droga en el mercado dibujan el esfuerzo por mantener con vida un espíritu que ha perdido su lugar; por construir una marca, un estado emocional, que se consuma en una cinta o en una dosis, en un paraíso artificial.

A través de su escritura precisa, DeLillo anota cada detalle como un movimiento mediante el cual la realidad se convierte en algo inestable que desdibuja cada paso de su protagonista. El ocaso de unos afectos que, tras la cultura expansiva de los 60, volvemos a vivir de puertas adentro. Por eso, no resulta extraño que uno de los personajes admita, en un pasaje de la novela, ese giro hacia el interior que está larvándose silenciosamente como el presente del rock, como si el destino de las estrellas fuese convertirse en un sueño, en un estado de ánimo. La prolongación del efecto por otros medios. Eso es lo que busca el representante de Bucky con las cintas con material inédito (el producto) que aquel grabó en su casa de las montañas; también lo que los diferentes grupúsculos trata de diseminar en la calle con su nueva droga (el producto). Esa clase de conmoción que aún sabe cómo sacar el impulso visceral de nuestro interior.

Cada página de La calle Great Jones parece tocada por el lenguaje de la incertidumbre, aquel que transforma la realidad en lo que sea que haya ahí fuera, una sensación mezcla de vacío emocional y frenesí capitalista que DeLillo convierte en el idioma de los personajes y su tiempo. Frases entrecortadas y repetitivas, siempre a la caza de unas sensaciones embalsamadas en el puro tedio, en el fracaso de una juventud que, apenas rascada la treintena, se siente envejecida. De ahí el agotamiento de Bucky, incapaz de continuar una carrera que ha olvidado su razón de ser. De ahí, también, el dolor sordo, inhábil para verbalizar sensaciones, que envuelve cada muerte o desaparición en la novela, que DeLillo describe prácticamente como fugas fantasmales. De ahí, aún más, ese extraño terror que embarga a Bucky cuando contempla el rostro imposible de su vecino, una criatura deforme que encapsula en su monstruosidad todas aquellas reacciones que la sociedad ha reprimido. El anhelo de Bucky de convertirse en un sueño es, pues, el anhelo de una generación por recuperar un territorio que la sociedad no había colonizado ni domesticado. Ese sueño, por qué no decirlo, es nuestra vida interior. Nuestra identidad.

La nueva droga, que comparte con la música la misma naturaleza de producto, acaba inyectada en el cuerpo de Bucky. Según advierte uno de los personajes, su efecto ataca directamente a la región cerebral en la que se alojan las habilidades lingüísticas. Reducido a un cuerpo trémulo, vacilante, incapaz de pronunciar la palabra más sencilla, Bucky se abandona a unos ritmos vitales que reflejan aquello que describía su música más alucinada. Como si se alojase en una cámara anecoica, DeLillo expone el repliegue hacia el interior de su protagonista, donde la vida late con una frecuencia distinta. Lo hermoso de La calle Great Jones reside en la habilidad de su autor para pintar ese cuelgue brutal como el último momento de unas emociones que la aplastante lógica cultural del capitalismo avanzado acabará vampirizando. Ese momento, tan caro a la obra de DeLillo, que denota la búsqueda elemental que todos, en algún momento de nuestras vidas, emprendemos cuando nos preguntamos por la belleza de las cosas. Un rayo, un ritmo secreto, en el que por unos segundos la vida continúa palpitando frente a la impostura más atroz. Esa a la que siempre volvemos.

Publicado en Détour

Great! There's a lot of what's to come in this book -- the voices of White Noise, Underworld, etc. can be found in nascent form in this book.

(Truth be told, I probably should be giving this five stars. But I want you to read it, and not be put off by it.)

Another (1.) New York book, great for those who've never (or hardly) been there, but want to grasp what is the cultural-center-of-the-U.S.,-beyond-doubt; (2.) Rock 'N' Roll novel, like rarely but the overheated these days (try Pagan Kennedy's n  The Exesn, or even Wililam Gibson's similarly-NY ex-bandmate book Spook Country, for more); and a (3.) good read for those choosing the hermit life. Think Lester Bangs. Not the man himself, but why he'd term his novel All My Friends are Hermits -- the empathy, the respect, the reasons why you'd choose privacy (or, rather, "privacy") in these overheated days of give-it-all-up or worry about it a lot or don't at all.

Great book! Easier going down than you might think.

P.S. Don't listen to the naysayers (or, I suppose, the "easy-goers") -- you gotta put a lotta time and trouble in getting around to whichever. (As Stanley Kubrick says, "You can't read everything!") Leave plenty of the canonized books out there; take your time, pick and choose. Chip away at the edifice. This book is a great place to start.