Books by author: Don DeLillo

This is DeLillo's most bizarre offering to date. The paragraph-level writing is superb, as usual, but the novella as a whole does not hold together that well. It is dark and haunting and poetic, but in my opinion it favors style over substance. I really didn't care much for it.

I lost my notes on this book in a freak PalmPilot disaster, so my review will be ultra-brief. End Zone is, on the surface, a book about college football. It centers on Gary, a player fascinated by armageddon, and with something of a problem with authority. It was DeLillo's second novel, and it's more of a novella in style and length. I'm not a football fan in any sense, but I enjoyed End Zone quite a bit.

DeLillo just vaulted onto my favorite author list. Great Jones Street is more slapstick than White Noise. The protagonist, aptly named (in Pynchonian style) Bucky Wunderlick, is a burned-out rocker trying to reclaim his privacy in a New York apartment. He becomes embroiled in a complicated plot involving a powerful new drug and a powerful entertainment (foreshadowing Infinite Jest to a degree — indeed, DeLillo's influence on David Foster Wallace is clear).

Perhaps DeLillo is a poor man's Pynchon. The paranoia is there, as is the slapstick and to some degree the wordplay. DeLillo is much easier to read than Pynchon, mainly because his books actually have clear plot advancement, but also because they are simply more focused. Great Jones Street is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's not as well-wrought as White Noise, but the subject matter is slightly more to my liking, and I heartily recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in rock 'n roll.

I enjoyed DeLillo's biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, but not as much as his other novels. I'm too young to really care much about the circumstances surrounding John Kennedy's assassination, so as ahistory this did not interest me greatly. Conspiracy theories have never been my bag, so DeLillo's version is as good as any other in my opinion (and reading a well-written book is much more interesting than watching an Oliver Stone movie). Libra is definitely a novel: many of the important characters behind the assassination plot are invented, though it is hard to see where the historical record endsandDeLillo's imagination begins. As with DeLillo's other novels (so far I've read White Noise and Great Jones Street), the writing is uniformly strong and accessible and the dialogue sparkles.

I think I just don't get it. In part, the problem was that I read this in short chunks over three weeks rather than in 2-3 sittings as it probably should be read.

The opening chapter of Players is brilliant. DeLillo sets the scene in an airplane, where the in-flight movie (a terrorist thriller) is accompanied by a lounge pianist in the manner of the silent films of years past. The rest of the novel is vintage DeLillo, with the theme being people who are morally detached from the world. The novel is somewhat unsettling, perhaps because it doesn't quite make sense.

This is DeLillo's take on Science Fiction, and it is brilliant in places. I particularly enjoyed his version of the MIT Language Riots, which predates David Foster Wallace's (in Infinite Jest) by over 20 years. Ratner's Star is surreal in a number of places, and the ending is likely to leave many readers frustrated. The passage where a writer introspects (about why she writes) is great. I'm a little bit tired of DeLillo's style (perhaps of the whole postmodern thing), but I'll probably read the rest of his novels over the next year or so, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the critics say about the novel he's about to publish ( Underworld, I think).

Again, DeLillo's dialogue sparkles. The story here is surreal. It centers on a quest for a pornographic film featuring Hitler. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it any further, other than to say that I enjoyed it quite a lot, but that the conclusion was very unconventional. See also: Great Jones Street, White Noise, and Libra.

After two attempts at this, I'm giving up for now. I like it a lot, but I find it too easy to put down.

It's rare that I read two truly excellent books in a row, but here we are. This was my first exposure to DeLillo, and I'm bordering on blown away. His talent for dialogue is amazing, and the sophistry his characters engage in is riotously funny and at the same time a condemnation of our sound-bite society. Make no mistake about it: this is a novel about death, and it's dark at the same time that it's funny. I wonder if DeLillo has a background in science because his knowledge of psychology and neurology is pretty sharp. I look forward to reading more of DeLillo's ouevre.