Great Jones Street reads like it could have been written yesterday, and in many ways, that fact saves it from being just an okay book. Rather than feeling prophetic, it feels as though DeLillo has captured the absurdities of celebrity culture, rock culture, and paranoid drug culture so perfectly, that now, more than forty years later, it still doesn’t need any updating. And how can you react to something so depressingly unchanged as that but to laugh.

The plot isn’t really super relevant. There’s a Yossarianesque quality to Bucky Wunderlick, our rock story hero and narrator, as he fails to disappear from his own celebrity and instead gets involved in an elaborate drug caper that escalates mostly due to the fact that he isn’t involved in the slightest. He is the center of a plot that he is also completely outside of. Aspects of this are both hilarious and wearisome at times, but if you’ve ever read Delillo, you know the drill, this stuff is speeding by at a million miles an hour and you’re mostly having a great time. Read this and watch the adult swim cartoon Metalocalypse.

But what happens later? Will anything here be worth holding on to? I said there’s a Yossarianesque quality to Bucky… I doubt anyone will be using the equally preposterous invention Wunderlickian to describe anybody, and for me that’s a problem with a lot of DeLillo’s works (though definitely not all). They go down like literary candy, make you crave more and more, but at some point the high wears off and you move on to something a little more sustaining. This is his third novel to write, and I liked it better than Americana and End Zone, but I won’t be thinking about it much in ten years. In fact, I pulled out my copy of End Zone before sitting down to write this and found some notes on a sheet of paper my wife had made. I went over and asked her if she had read it, she said no. I showed her the notes, and she said, “oh, then I must have.”

Nonetheless, it’s worth a read if you like DeLillo’s style – which I do very much – or if you just want to have a great time blazing through a funny book that has more value in it than any beach book ever could. Even if it doesn’t work for you, it won’t take too long, and there’s always just the song lyrics. They alone may take you back to some of the ridiculous bands you listened to in your youth and loved, but have conveniently forgotten.

Premessa: questo è uno di quei libri sfortunati che ogni volta che ti metti a leggerli succede qualcosa che interrompe/disturba la lettura. Quindi sappiate che non l'ho letto attentissimamente.

Fatto sta che comunque non mi è piaciuto tantissimo, ma non mi è neanche dispiaciuto. È scritto bene, soprattutto per quanto riguarda i dialoghi, personaggi caratterizzati bene eccetera. Il problema sta nella trama e in certe scene che non hanno né capo né coda, nel senso che non sono conseguenza di niente e non causano niente. Semplicemente arriva un personaggio, dice le sue battute, se ne va, e se non le avesse dette non sarebbe cambiato nulla.

Il libro decolla veramente intorno a pagina 93, quando succede una certa cosa che sarebbe dovuta succedere, secondo me, una settantina di pagine prima. La trama quindi è debole ed ha un'importanza relativa, e forse è l'intento dell'autore. Il libro è scritto in prima persona dal punto di vista del protagonista, una rockstar che si è un po' rotta di stare sempre in tournée e in sala d'incisione e che quindi decide di andare in un appartamento in Great Jones Street per isolarsi dal mondo. Il punto di vista è molto introspettivo, e la trama è meno importante che in altri romanzi, ma questo lo rende anche meno appassionante. Comunque è un libro che penso di rileggere, credo ci sia di più di quanto non abbia notato.

Consigliato se vi piacciono i romanzi introspettivi e psicologici.

“Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism.”

Let me begin by saying that the first chapter of this book is a 5-star chapter. No doubt about it. And the first sentence...yeah, that's a 5-star sentence.

"Fame requires every kind of excess."

What a perfect way to begin a first-person novel about an aging rockstar/one-man-zeitgeist. And one amazing feat of this chapter--and the book as a whole really--is that, despite how few details he reveals, we believe that our narrator, Bucky Wonderlick, has bathed in the putrid, holy waters of this excess.

In fact, he has given everything to this excess. He has imparted "erotic terror to the dreams of the republic." He "feeds himself on outrage" which includes "hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs."

This is the man who wants to talk to us for the next 265 pages about why he left in the middle of a tour to hole up in a rundown apartment on the titular "Great Jones Street." And believe me, I want to listen.

But more specifically, I want to listen most when he actually treats the reader like a confidant. While I enjoyed all of Bucky's semantic riddles that he weaves with members of the media, managers, and desperate band members (think an even more glib and witty version of Dylan circa "Don't Look Back")I felt a bit disappointed down the stretch that DeLillo never allowed his creation a real sense of human vulnerability. I can't imagine him actually having had a childhood. It's also impossible to think how he first got to where he is now.

In his effort to make Bucky a soul-drained wanderer in a hyper-real media culture, DeLillo might have actually drained the man's soul, which leaves us mostly with a very clever satire, punctuated with moments of entrancing darkness. I can see how this might be enough for some readers. The sentences alone are glorious. Yet, without spoiling too much, our hero has a non-reaction to a very important death, only a passing interest in another very important death, and no interest whatsoever in having an actual conversation with anyone. I felt myself wishing to have just a few moments of the kind of x-ray a true rock tell-all promises.

Though, in its favor, add a nice drug-related payoff down the stretch, the best band manager in fictional history, and a hilariously sad hack writer who haunts the upstairs of the building.

There was much to like here. It's just hard to fall in love with cleverness and bile. Especially bile. But I suppose Bucky has lost his capacity for love, and it might have been too much to ask to wish I felt a heart beating in his tale.

the first word of the title was the last "great" thing about this stinker

I got bored with "satires" after suffering through The Recognitions, written by one of DeLillo's heroes William Gaddis. It's so bloody easy to point out how absurd something is. So easy to pile up them words. Showbusiness is full of nonsensical horrors? The beating heart of The Market is a dark one? THANKS, DeLILL. WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT YOU, M8.

Someone else can locate the essence of this story, the one that makes the jokes funny (I never laugh at DeLillo) and the admittedly quality writing actually work. When a character dies in the middle of a stream of consciousness rant and none of the characters react in any way, how is the reader supposed to give a shit? What is that trying to say?

DeLill, aka the Whitest Writer of All Time, is just not for me. I might check out Libra at some point when I've forgotten that I actually don't like this guy, and White Noise is meant to be a classic. Maybe. I forget that he has really good premises, but when you describe things the way he does––with this flat uncaring tone, where every bit of sensory awareness is tinged with the fart-smell of an unconscious un-appreciator––it's enough to ruin any premise. It's always that disappointment, of wanting to hang out with someone cool and remembering they're just a cunt.

This book sucks.

¡Vaya! Parece que voy a discrepar con la mayoría.

Sí, el alter ego deformado de Dylan, Bucky, y toda la trama que lo envuelve tienes fallos, de hecho, una de ellas sobra del todo pero en esta amalgama posmodernista de ideas premonitorias deLillo nos propone ir sacando hebras, jugar a invertir el binomio causa-efecto, llegar a la rebeldía más absoluta y beligerante: luchar contra nosotros mismos hasta retirarnos a un refugio como un animal herido.

El libro destaca sobre todo por ser un compendio de imágenes, es del todo visual: un escritor que vive arriba y que busca la selección mediante patrones de pasos, una vecina que vive en la planta de abajo que esconde a un hijo deforme y con él una historia devastadora.

Un libro del que extraer mil citas y sobre todo conceptos, el "sensory overload" de la civilización dada a la tecnología, autocanibalismo o términos en una escala que posiciona los valores humanos.

La intención del libro es clara: devolvernos, antes de que sea imposible, a nuestro estado más primitivo.

Great Jones Street – Don DeLillo’s novel published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series where a young rock-and-roll artist seals himself off in a Lower Manhattan down-and-out apartment. Well, there’s the occasional visit from his girlfriend and members of his rock group and hawkers connected with a Happy Valley Commune yammering about a future miracle drug, enough visits to keep his sharp edge very sharp and enough visits to possibly drive a crazy boy crazy.

And here's our man, the one and only Bucky Wunderlick, musing on the mystical nature of his girlfriend and soulmate, the incomparable Opel: "All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language." A batch of reasons why this novel by Don DeLillo is fab:

THE BOX MAN, AMERICAN-STYLE
Within months of publication of Great Jones Street another new novel hit the shelves addressing many of the same themes: The Box Man by Japanese novelist Kōbō Abe, where the nameless protagonist surrenders his previous identity and conventional routine to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Great Jones Street and The Box Man – so into yourself, so “society get out of my face.” At one point in DeLillo’s novel, girlfriend Opel tells Bucky about a new underground counterculture group: “The return of the private man, according to them, is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man.” Oh, Opel. Oh, Bucky. Oh, Box Man. This is so 70s! Sidebar: I recall watching a 1970s newscast where a university student wore a black cloth over his head down to his shoes and walked around campus calling himself “the black bag.” Actually, I thought this guy really cool.

POETRY
At one point, Bucky reflects: “Alone I lived in the emergency of minutes, in phases of dim compliance with the mind’s turning hand.” And here’s another of his rock-and-roll reveries: “Euphoric with morphine we’d be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were.” It’s as if Bucky’s words could have been excerpts from Alan Ginsberg’s many page beatnik slam-poem “Howl.” And there are numerous other such Bucky rant-lines for fans of DeLillo’s poetic, philosophic prose.

THE WRITER IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE
“Some writers presume to be men of letters. I’m a man of numbers.” So says the novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer Fenig, who lives in the apartment on Great Jones Street right above Bucky and who is a writer obsessed with seeking fame and knowing the ups and downs of the writer’s market better than a seasoned stock broker knows Wall Street. Don DeLillo, you sly dog, putting a writer who might be the shadow side of yourself in the apartment above your protagonist.

ROCK-AND-ROLL, THE NEW MODERN ART
In an interview, Bucky pontificates how when people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there, but through his music, he makes people move. WOW! The one and only Bucky Wunderlick, shining star, prime mover, kinesthetic force, creator of a new political-erotic-mystical art form that, as sculptor Claes Oldenburg insisted, does more than just sit on its ass in a museum.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY
Again, Don DeLillo fans will not be disappointed since many are the zingers hurled at contemporary American society. For example, how TV programs are interrupted and announcers sound close to insanity, their voices soaring, as they report on the impending snowstorm: heavy snow, deep snow, drifting snow, big fluffy white flakes are falling and will continue to fall from the sky. (I myself am always both amused and amazed at the panic snow arouses in the media). And, again: Bucky has issues with his hard-earned money having to work . . . no, no, no, he did the work; he wants his money resting in nice big green stacks in some cool bank vault. He’s told in so many words: so sorry, Bucky, like it or not, your rich ass is tied into the American financial world!

BUCKY’S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
Inserted into the first-person narrative is the Superslick Mind-Contracting Media Kit featuring The Bucky Wunderlick Story told in various news clips, song lyrics and Zen-like enigmatic responses to interviewers. All very fitting since Bucky’s words have that ring of rock-and-roll truth, when he states further on in the story, “Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape.” Yea, baby! Hearing such wisdom I have to ask: What’s the sound of one Bucky turning at thirty-three and a third, second cut, side one, third album?

THE FIGURATIVE DEATH-IN-LIFE JOURNEY
Bucky wants us to know his solitary journey on Great Jones Street is only the literal way of looking at things. Figuratively, he tells us, he lived in a remote monastery with the lamas of Tibet, being guided through the mysteries of the highest levels, the most esoteric planes of death. That’s what he came to know. Death-in-life.

Oh, how cool is that! Thanks, Don D. You rock!

Only my second Delillo. Not as good as White Noise - the ending feels slightly fudged as if Don realized that having had the whole thing narrated in the first person present, he couldn't leave it with his narrator having lost the ability to talk in the final scene without negating the entire existence of the book - although maybe that would have been more interesting? As it is, both the main plot points are not unresolved - we know what happens - but sort of muffled into meaninglessness. Perhaps that's the point - the book is like Bucky's anechoic chamber with its baffles likes "bats hanging in a cave" that absorb all resonance. And perhaps there is something appropriate about following what feels like it could have been the final line, marking the end of speech - "Longboy opened his medic's kit and lifted a hypodermic syringe to the pale light" - with a riotous celebration of words and language, a freewheeling descriptive journey through the streets of NYC with no apparent purpose other than defiant denial of the expectation of aphasia.

I'm talking myself into liking it more. The language is frequently sublime, and to paraphrase something I read once in a GR review, who needs characters and a coherent plot when you've got language?

One thing that started by bothering me but quickly crossed over into so-bad-it's-good was DD's attempt at representing British English. Watney - an Englishman so rich he can afford a manservant in the 1970s - talks in a bizarre mixture of upper crust formality and incongruous cockney elements (nobody who says "I anticipate your digressions" also says "innit") all bolted onto mostly American-sounding syntax (despite attempts to add "all right" to the end of random sentences). It's like watching Dick Van Dyke's chimney sweep in Mary Poppins. But in DD's defence it was the early 1970s, they had no internet, and he was at the time a fairly obscure early-career writer. Maybe he hadn't met that many English people?

P.S. don't forget to lick the spoon.

Book three on my list of nine Delillo books I'm reading this year. This is the first one I came to with some trepidation. It's hard to imagine a good outcome when an author is writing a book about rock music culture but claims to listen to "mostly jazz and classical." An outsider's perspective can be good, but it's not hard to imagine an endeavor like this falling into perfunctory dismissal.

Of course, we're talking 1972 here. This isn't "Good Golly Miss Molly" anymore. It's not even "All You Need Is Love." It's after the days of "The American Ruse" and "Kill for Peace" and Meredith Hunter. Indeed, protagonist Bucky Wunderlick's group sounds less like the Doors (I've heard Morrison or maybe Dylan during his first exile was a template) and more like the Fugs. The pummeling noise and howling aggression, aimed squarely at their audience, seems a bit farcical for the time, but not much. Read after the age of punk and post-punk and no wave and noise, it seems downright contemporary. Only the sheer magnitude of fans seems suspect.

Wunderlick ditches the band and hides out in a squalid apartment on the titular street in Manhattan. Above him is a writer, and beneath is a woman with a strange, disfigured child. Wunderlick tries to hide out, to escape his escalating fame and infamy, but people find him soon enough. Connected people. The outside world spins yarn after yarn about his true whereabouts.

"Great Jones Street" is the first book where all the elements really lock in. The wild-eyed flights of fancy in "Americana" fuse with the close-to-the-vest observations of "End Zone" into the thing we think of when we think of Delillo -- it's muted, funny, profane, incisive, it plays around with the edge of the form (at several points, the narrative quits and we get to read excerpts from Bucky's press kit, including lyrics), it pumps in huge quantities of paranoia and plenty of fringe groups vying for control. The sentences are sumptuous as ever, and I underlined tons of great moments; the difference here was that almost none of the standout lines made much sense outside of the narrative. The ideas needed the context of the story to really pop. I'm not sure if that's an improvement or not.

The places where I thought it would stumble, it did. Bucky's "lyrics" aren't profound when either sung of scanned, and, as I said before, they don't even seem like an ultimate parody, as there were plenty of bands at the time trafficking in this very set of concerns. Delillo's outsider status only ever catches up with him here. Other things, like the supposed "excess" of Bucky's lifestyle, seem almost quaint when put up against the modern era. The opening line, "Fame requires every kind of excess," is great and endlessly quotable, but the excess of our hero is already a distant memory when we meet him. Apart from a few crimes of negligence, his status as a Delillo-cipher is well on its way from page one.

On the other hand, some of Delillo's skills that seemed over-used in previous books are put to perfect use here. In "Americana," there were a bunch of strange, spot-on descriptions of mundane sounds, as musical and specific as any music writer or poet could muster. Here, they actually find fertile ground:

"Down the street someone was using a hammer. The sound was vibrant, accompanied by liquid echoes, and soon it was joined by the sound of another hammer, maybe a block away, a thick ripple to each granulating blow, probably Bond Street. The heavier of the two sounds was the more distant, and together they formed a slowly spreading wake, one of time, silence, and reverberation, each of these flowing through the others, softening the petrified air, until finally one hammer was rested, and the other grew brutal."

An ear of this sensitivity and precision is no great surprise coming from a musician, and such diversions are better integrated into the text than when they come from the minds of TV ad men or superstar quarterbacks.

The book is full of speculation about the desire for privacy in an age of surveillance (welp...score one for Mr. Delillo), being connected vs. "tuning out," and that first age of rock and roll where the question of whether to quit or not isn't a matter of personal choice. Quitting a band no longer means going our separate ways; it's more like dissolving a company. You're not just throwing Ringo out of work anymore -- you're also neutralizing Apple Corps, and all its subsidiaries, Ltd. If this seemed impossibly cynical at the time, history has shown it to be right on the money.

Most importantly, while the first two books were witty, this is the first one that was actually FUNNY. It also spends more of its time living in the woozy dreamlike world of later Delillo books, an atmosphere not unlike Bunuel movies, where everybody's choices are logically absurd but emotionally real. It comes from a place outside reality. And it's a lot of fun, too.

The reader of this novel is introduced to a rock and roll star who goes by the name of Bucky Wunderlick. He is dissatisfied with the life which has brought him all the fame and fortune but suddenly he decides that he no longer wants to be seen as a product. He starts to leave his band in the middle of the tour and takes up cover in an apartment in New York that is gloomy and unfurnished in Great Jones Street. Suddenly, the disappearing act only becomes successful in which his situation becomes of interest which then begins to stir up. As all of his faithful fans wait for messages, Bucky encounters every kind of angry force he is trying to escape from.

This is the third novel written by Don DeLillo and happens to be the third book I have read written by this gentleman. I had given it the same stars that I had given Point Omega which is four out of five stars meaning I enjoyed reading this novel. I think that the novel is much more than it is being a musical satire, it is about the investigation of proving the main rights of the main individual which foreshadows the key struggles of an artist inside a world that is ruled by capitalism which then delivers a devastating portrait of our current culture obsession with the lives of the few. It can also be seen by other readers as anxiety satire of the romantic myth of stardom and the emptiness heart of rock and roll which in itself that has been more relevant than it has ever been in our time of celebrity obsession.

Written in the first half of a six-novels-in-eight-years fever that gripped Don DeLillo in the 1970s, Great Jones Street caries many of the hallmarks and several motifs shared by DeLillo's greatest works: fame's empty center exposed, great wealth squandered, a neurotic writer spinning his wheels, mysterious cults and their deadly conspiracies, a new wonder drug that serves to remove a brain functionality that most would consider a normal part of being alive, the aesthetic magic of the Arab world, mesmerizing children with severe deformities, media people being career-obsessed and made of plastic, a digression on Californians being awful, theories of language seeping into the plot, and a McGuffin containing the only physical copy of a much-desired media artifact. And, as always, what most attracts is the abundance of highly quotable prose, jokes hinging on a turn of phrase, metaphors that are surgical grade in their precision, and a circular and half-unspoken dialogue style that no writer can read without rethinking everything about their own approach.

Where this particular work falls short is in its pacing during the first hundred pages, and in its leaving a couple major shifts in the story mostly unaccounted-for. I'm not the type of reader than needs or even wants every loose thread tied up, but when the person framed as the second-most central character dies suddenly in what feels like the end of a bloated first act, you hope to get a little more than just muttered condolences from the people who are calling for other reasons. And given that the majority of the book takes place in a cold-water walk-up in the East Village, with all the trouble to be had arriving in the form of lovers, admirers, vultures, and handlers coming to pay a visit, one at a time, as if lined up in a queue outside, the protagonist lacks agency, spending most of the book explaining to other people why he can't or won't help them out, or reiterating how little he cares about the outcome of any of the various subplots going on around him, the most reluctant star at the center of a solar system of greed and homage.

Bucky Wunderlick is a depressed 26 year old, and aside from a few choice digressions into his unique-enough thoughts on the ways of the world, he acts like one - right down to being physically immobile, nearly performative in his intentional lack of self-care, and outwardly cold to anyone he's known from his actual life. If anything that might make him a realistic posterboy for the anhendonia, detachment, and ennui that accompany being serotonin deficient, but it doesn't make him an exciting guy to be around for 250 pages. Still, the pleasing aesthetics of the novel and funny dialogue more than make up for the wet blanket narrator-protagonist, and if you're as into DeLillo's rhythms and motifs as much as I am, it's worth reading just for the intertextuality with his other works.