I have read 16 Delillo novels so far. His literary cobbling definitely intrigues me. The sense of place, the weird characters saying off-the-wall things. The long, unnecessary, wandering, plotless sections of simply intriguing writing.

My ranking of Delillo so far:

1. Underworld
2. Americana
3. Cosmopolis
4. The Angel Esmeralda
5. The Body Artist
6. White Noise
7. Mao II
8. The Names
9. Zero K
10. Point Omega
11. Great Jones Street
12. Players
13. Libra
14. Falling Man
15. Ratner's Star
16. The Silence

Most people could disagree and come up with their own rankings. I think the reader brings something to Delillo, interprets his aesthetic and appreciates his writing on different levels.
I'll be tracking down and completing his final remaining works with trepidation and a touch of sadness. I will have to return to Ratner's Star, having been disappointed. Then I will return to Underworld, having been enraptured. Is he a genius or a clever collagist?

My guess is he writes sentence by sentence, stringing together thoughts, characters, scenes. The themes bubble beneath the surface, but the subtle dance of his point is often elusive. You can always be assured that he will crisply construct elegant phrases, and incorporate many universal emotions and pointed comments related to the zeitgeist.

This book is only marginally about a rock group, a drug, a commune, writer's complaints, and many other side topics. There is a near constant refrain of social commentary. Delillo's books teach us a little bit more about being human, with all of our flaws, misconceptions, and compassion. Taken together, I think his body of work is more compelling than most other American authors, and comparable to Cormac McCarthy's, or Steinbeck's.

A true original, like Pynchon, who placed style and sentence precision above plot. Yet, I believe that most of his books fall just short of masterpieces due to their unfocused approach. Occasionally, whole sections fall flat to me, or certain books require an uneven amount of effort, with dense, impenetrable monologues abutting cinematic descriptions. This could be a failing in me as a reader, and proper appreciation of the hidden nuances may come with time.

This is as good a place as any to start with DeLillo. But I think Angel Esmeralda is the more perfect distillation of his powers.

I wanna burn this book so bad for all its edgy existential dialogues but it’s so,,,,,,,,,,,,,strangely addictive??? I hate it truly but also,,,,,,,,, I want more. It’s funny and gross and annoying but yeah I’ll take it.

First person narrator opens with “fame requires every kind of excess” (1), in his role of “imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic” (id). This is apparently an “Extreme region, monstrous [!] and vulval [!!]” (id.). He takes it upon himself, however, to return “the idea of privacy to American life” (17), a way to “pursue loneliness” (19). His intentional withdrawal from the public is held out by one silly communard group as exemplifying “the old idea [NB] of men alone with the land,” pursuing privacy, without which “there is no freedom” (60). Their doctrine intones that “the return of the private man […] is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man” (id.), a nietzschean, heideggerian, or marcusian objective, surely.

It’s similar in some ways to the writer in Mao II and the violent radicals in Players, which the former novel will place into concordance with writers and artists; we are told of a guy who has “been trying to create pressure along a fault with a series of very delicate TNT explosions,” to create an earthquake, “the greatest work of art ever achieved” (77)—very much Mao II, Point Omega, The Body Artist. To the commune people, however, “Mass man isn’t free” (194). Part of that might be because of the “sensory overload” (252) inherent in mass communication, the nihilism in Baudrillard’s semiurgical overload.

Similar to Americana, which has a cute discourse on asceticism, narrator “became a half saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain” (id.). And ‘bodily economy’ is definitely a thing, such as in one character, “horribly disfigured in a gruesome accident,” whose “face is being reconstructed with the skin and bone taken from volunteers. His voice is not his voice. It belongs to a donor” (22).

Radical corporeal disaggregation is not the only bodily economy; rockstar narrator notes that one corporation with which he does business “markets facsimiles”:

Everybody under contract has his or her facsimile. It’s one of the terms in the standard contract. Once you sign the contract, you’re obliged to live up to the terms [which sounds like an agambenian eidos zoe, a rule that coincides without remainder with a life?]. This is basic to a sound contractual relationship. At this precise moment in duplicate time, [another guy] is getting his toenails clipped in Waldorf Tower. You’ve been conducting an interview with his facsimile. (24)

‘Bodily economy’ apparently includes the production of simulacra. (Others think however that “the body is an illusion” (237), so there’s that.)

The focus on privacy extends further to history: “The professorship deals with events that almost took place, events that definitely took place but remained unseen and unremarked on, like the action of bacteria or the rising and falling of mountain ranges, and events that probably took place but were definitely not chronicled” (75). We are told, like in RSB, that “potential events are often more important than real events” (id.).

Further agambenian interest in one character’s claim that “I don’t do anything […] People use me for whatever they want” (43); “I’d rather be used than use others. It’s easy to be used. There’s no passion or morality. You’re free to be nothing” (45), which is curiously consistent with the notions of Aristotelian slavery described in The Use of Bodies.

In that vein, narrator’s neighbor, a writer, is “working in a whole new area,” “pornographic children’s literature” (49) (which makes him something of a terrorist, consistent with Mao II). Not only does he believe that there’s a market for such a thing (“a new market automatically develops around the material itself” (id.), a decent parody of facile bourgeois microeconomics assumptions) and that “it has an Aristotelian substratum” (50) (yeah, wtf?), but also “without grownups there’s a purity” (id.): “tremendous sadism in evidence. Really vicious stuff. All rendered in terms of the classical forms of reversal, recognition, and the tragic experience” (id.). Some sort of bodily economy there, I suppose?

The writer will eventually evolve away from this, coming to believe that “every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism” (224), which is interesting insofar as “it reduces the human element.” Overall, not so different from the narrator, who, in his role as a rockstar, wants to “injure people with my sound. Maybe actually kill some of them” (105). (Another, by contrast, “didn’t arouse the violent appetites of the young as much as it killed all appetite, caused a dazed indifference to just about everything” (154), which is far more regular.)

The threads of privacy and bodily economy come together in narrator’s contemplation of his return to the public:

It was an evil thing to consider, allying myself with the barest parts of mass awareness, land policed by the king’s linguists, by technicians in death-system control, corporate disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry. (68)

Eventually it results in a self-estrangement: “unfamiliar with my own body” (136). (Some fear that ‘do not resuscitate’ orders are “the true beginning of the killer state” (156), which is pure Homo Sacer.)

Otherwise, stuff happens. Standard DeLillo marginal notes on postmodern conditions, such as the notion from Underworld that we’ve got all this waste to manage: “In a millennium or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archaeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel” (209)—good to remain optimistic! (That magnum opus might productively be read through this novel’s principle that “The true underground is the place where power flows” (231); as with the professor of hidden events, supra, “power flows under the surface” (232).)

Recommended for those always emerging from hotels in timeless lands, secret feculent menaces, and readers who think that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was them.

Don DeLillo, born in 1936 in the Bronx district of New York, is an American writer. Author of short stories, plays, screenplays, and articles, he is best known for his novels. But unfortunately, Great Jones Street, his second novel (1973), was only translated by us in 2011. And let's say it right away, it's not his best, even for me, who is an admirer of this writer.
Don DeLillo is not always an easy-to-read author, so with this novel, either you'll get hooked from the first pages, or you'll give up right away, and in this case, you'll join those who see it as big nonsense - which I can understand but who I didn't dislike.
Let's try a summary of the plot: Bucky, the narrator, a rock star in the grip of a spiritual crisis, abandons his group without warning and goes to hide in the seedy apartment of his girlfriend Opel, absent, located in Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, New York. He wants calm and solitude, but he will be surrounded by a pack of undesirables of all stripes, eager for various reasons to bring him back into the world that continues to turn inexorably.
Some, like Dr. Pepper or Bohack, want to get their hands on a mysterious package given to Bucky by a third party. It possibly contains a new drug with unknown effects of great interest to the Happy Valley farming community split into two rival currents. Globke, his manager, wants him to get another package (!) containing recordings/demos made by Bucky in his chalet in the mountains.
As the reader ventures – it is the case to say it – in the novel, he has the distinct impression of reading the confessions of a paranoid drug addict. Bucky is the literary synthesis of all the symbolic figures of rock, stars of the star system: crushed by a world celebrity, unwittingly becoming a kind of messiah for a public eager for the slightest of his gestures, his slightest word, or any belch. His existential crisis resembles a depression tinged with paranoia, which gives his words a questioning echo for the reader: who are these people who contact him and hold a particularly twisted, even incomprehensible language? Is it a pure invention of his brain or a distortion of reality? Is he on a chemical trip?
This fact is why reading this novel is complex. Either you let yourself be carried away by these ramblings that will stun you by the overflowing imagination of Don DeLillo, or you give up. Suddenly, we are entitled to ask not "How can we read that? but rather, how does a writer manage to "write that?" But beware, this three-dimensional balancing act holds! In this verbal delirium, slip theories and attempts at explanations (which we will accept or not).
Of course, behind the form, there is the substance. The writer is not content with swinging stories at the bite-me-the-knot for free. He brings out the heavy artillery to denounce. I quote in bulk: rumors and the manipulation of words (he predicts Twitter?), conspiratorial paranoia with this drug which would be a creation of the government to deprive its opponents of language, the economy market ("If there is not yet a market for a lambda product, a new market automatically develops..."), the media, a particular success ("Megadeceit. Big mouth. Unimaginable insults. Pious lies to the small week. Pukes of all kinds. Betrayal of friends that we brag about. These are the things that give you stature in this industry."), the relationship between art and money. In the middle of all this (modern Society), Man (Bucky) is a prisoner of his role/habit (rock star).
The novel, which is not the best of the author but with the acceptable excuse of being only his second work, is complex to read but not without charms for those interested.