Don DeLillo Train Keeps Rolling After an Extended Layover

This year I've been reading a lot of DeLillo, D. He and Nabokov are my top two selections (although David Mitchell will be up there too, after I finish "Number9Dream" and get my hands on a copy of "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"). I've still yet to find a novel of his I thought was equal to "White Noise," but none have disappointed me, either (with the possible exception of "Cosmopolis," I suppose).

It's fitting that football season is started for most players already, because "End Zone" is the latest of DeLillo's work I've completed. Now it's largely nothing akin to playing or coaching football. As someone who has done both, play and coach, I feel safe in positing that much. And so suffice it to say, it's missing a realist bent, because as you'd expect there's DeLillo's usual hyper-cerebral, hyper-surrealist satirical pontification and probably earnest theorization abounding throughout the narrative. Every player on the fictional West Texas college team he's conjured has a complex view of the mechanisms of modern life, and shares this view in vivid detail with the story's narrator, one of the team's runningbacks, Gary Harkness.

The story ruminates on a number of different themes: the usual speculative etiology of where man is in relation to where he has been; semantic / syntactical theory and language games as pertaining to realizing one's self more fully; the ontological nature of sport, how it defines something primal about man but at the same time, paradoxically, something very evolved and artfully construed; the clannishness of sport and whether it's encouraging of base jingoistic tendencies or not; and so on.

Moreover, as evidenced again in his most recent novel, "Point Omega," DeLillo sets his story in the backdrop of a barren desert landscape, replete with hazards or at least perceived hazards (players collect horrible bugs with the intention of pitting them against one another in a single confined cage-like place, where they will battle to the death, most likely). Notions of man against nature, and nature certainly operating in this sentence with two meanings or more. There's something necessarily Biblical about such a setting, and I don't doubt for a second this was part of DeLillo's intent in using it. Nothing is more evocative of the caveman, at least to my mind, than the desert, also. Maybe this is because of images I've got stored in my memory of old-time '50s and '60s movies depicting cavemen anachronistically battling dinosaurs in places that look like the American southwest. And so all of the preceding then appearing to me to betoken one of Harkness's earliest lucid descriptions: "We practiced in the undulating heat with nothing to sustain us but the conviction that things here were simple."

At the heart of the team's conception is Emmett Creed, the head coach who contrived with the Logos College president to build the school into a football power. His name indeed is hardly a misdirection; he is moved by his own personal creed, which seems best summed up in a passage of his nearing the end of the novel, when he asks Harkness into his office, saying to him at one point:

It takes character to win . . . It's not just the amount of mileage you put in. The insults to the body. The humiliation and fear. It's dedication, it's character, it's pride. We've got a ways to go yet before we develop these qualities on a team basis.

Yes sir.

I've never seen a good football player who didn't know the value of self-sacrifice.

Yes sir.

I've never seen a good football player who wanted to learn a foreign language.

Yes.

Later on the same page Creed concludes his rumination on the subject of what it takes to win and the notion of football with:

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

Odd, but I feel like I know exactly what Creed is saying here. I've thought once or twice myself that sports are great because of how nicely they remove the gray of life. Things like personal responsibility, merit-based ascension, order and fairness, right and wrong all seem to make sense on the football (or most any other field etc of play) gridiron. Like television, it's a place where the villain and the hero are more or less clear, depending solely on whomsoever you choose to root for. And sure, what I'm saying might not be entirely or absolutely true, but it feels true. It feels true to me.

As pertains to the world of the 20 Under 40 crowd and so forth (other literary items):

I've very much enjoyed Philipp Meyer, ZZ Packer, and Gary Shteyngart's short stories. I'm a little perplexed by Salvatore Scibona's "The Kid." On the one hand I think it's a story that's true to life and should be told. On the other hand I feel like it tugs at heartstrings and looks to affect the reader in a way it must necessarily if that reader has a soul, you could say. In other words, it's an important subject but written as he chose to I think it leaves one feeling a little taken advantage of. I'm open to the possibility that this is incorrect thinking on my part, though.

In other news I learned recently that Adam Levin has a novel coming, "The Instructions." I can't really tell you how jazzed I am for this. Very jazzed is all I'll say. Very.

The DeLillo Slice of "Americana"

I'm not getting better at writing headlines to these posts, and for that I apologize. I apologize a great deal and will try to improve, if I am able. The DeLillo lovefest (like that of my 19th century Russian author lovefest) continues full bore with, as you might already have gleaned, "Americana," DeLillo's first novel -- the back cover emphasizes this to me, so that I know it is where it all started. And with a guy with the writing chops of Don DeLillo it did need start somewhere -- for instance, DeLillo wrote in an article I read from last summer's Granta of his relationship with streetwise and canonical Chicagoan author Nelson Algren, when he (DeLillo) was just starting out. Their relationship was one of mentor and student, where the torch isn't literally passed (so few literal torch passing ceremonies in our time) but it's understood that 1) DeLillo isn't going to suck, as writers go, not hardly and 2) Nelson Algren is not a d-bag who thought himself too good to be a mentor to young Don DeLillo.

Which, relationships like these are always interesting to me, because 1) they're so Hollywood movie-like but in the real, attainable way of the Advertiser's "American Dream" that DeLillo skillfully hashes out in "Americana" and 2) Don't you see George Saunders? Don't you see that there's a guy out here, blogging, and just waiting to be mentored the hell out of, like by a voice with a distinct Sir Sean Connery timbre, which maybe you might work on developing / honing?! That's a lot to think about, a lot of real good to consider, Mr. Saunders.

Moving onward . . .

The America of "Americana" is bored and boring -- and yet in the most paradoxically stimulating ways. Joshua Ferris was so taken (for whatever his reason) with "Americana's" opening line that he used it for the title of his debut novel, "Then We Came to the End." And 100% backing Ferris' decision / appreciation, it is a perfect, loaded and typifying start to the anemia that follows, which the line in full is, "Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year." What a vitiating and ballsy way to begin a story, no? To inherently temper expectations of the story therein, setting the tone of malaise unmistakably at the outset, that's the kind of categoric sentiment, written simply and precisely, that has instilled greatly in me my deep admiration for DeLillo and his way with words.

Conceptually, DeLillo is really stellar in this one, really shows that he was destined to be among the best of the best from my perspective. He portrays an America made familiar to me by "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- but where the tone of Ken Kesey's novel was playful for the most part, "Americana" can be said to articulate a tableau principally awash in gray and dour. It turns American ideals on their head, satirizing in effervescent and sardonic bursts the American Dream mythos. The story is told from the vantage of David Bell who is a young television network executive. What's interesting (and not totally uncommon to DeLillo characters) is that he never seems to fall on either side of the a big postmodern conundrum, it being that technology has a nefarious effect for all the good it debatably may do or that profitability is viability and nothing that is profitable could ever be construed as categorically "bad." Instead, he wavers somewhere in the midst of all of this and observes, a sycophant by some measure at the novel's outset who slowly turns away, attempting to create something uniquely his own with the considerable gifts he appears to possess.

Bell's observations frequently point out the importance of conformity, an unspoken mandate that people look and act alike. He describes this pattern of uniformity in wryly humorous terms at times, for example, "At work I dressed in the established manner, which, granted, was not without a touch of color, the establishment having learned that every color was essentially gray as long as everyone is wearing it." Another good one is, ". . . you come to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence."

Things would probably go on like this, with Bell observing and being more or less indifferent, if it were Joseph Heller's really good novel "Something Happened" in which so little remarkable did happen to Bob Slocum, that story's protagonist. But David Bell has an epiphany, as characters will. It's almost so uninteresting as epiphanies go that it seems uniquely suited to describing the intractable malaise that defines Bell's situation. He's stuck in a world that makes ready implementation of an Orwellian-sounding term, "graytalk," which Bell himself coined and defines as, ". . . not what something meant and often not its opposite."

Bell's epiphany occurs when observes a woman trimming hedges from his perch behind the window of a friend's grandmother's cottage. All of this meaning, right or wrong, I construed to be intentionally dull and not fulfilling, as not so much for the fact that the act itself is so simple as that Bell seems like a man who loves the idea of breaking away from the tedium of his existence but knows not how to earnestly approach the task, so he latches on to something that he for a flicker of an instance can see in a new light, and that in turn becomes the genesis of his project to get to the marrow of the American lifestyle, to use expressions like "cut to the quick" and mean them. On page 349 of my Penguin Book edition, he says the following, nearing the culmination of his project:

. . . that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation's soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw.

In fact the only evidence we're given that Bell has made a break from his previous life is, though fairly compelling, somewhat standard and predictable as well -- he leaves his employ without making his intentions to do so clear, just abandons it, abandons his last assignment, which was to film the Navajo Indians at one of their largest settlements in Arizona, a television program called "The Navajo Project." But word is that there is no way it will succeed, that the premise doesn't easily jibe with attracting viewers. He half-heartedly uses platitudinous lines to describe the subjects, saying, "The Indians don't want pity . . . They want dignity." All in all, the enterprise seems doomed to suffer from a lack of interest by all who are organizing it, Bell very much included. So he runs away, and he starts filming abstractions. Slice of life shots by a faux-artist. None of his "film" succeeds in the way he'd hoped, as the block quote above states fairly concretely, whether there is even an existent method of evaluating how something like that could be described as succeeding.

And in the end, Bell finds himself set on a path homeward bound, preparing to take his flight back to New York City, with a present for his ex-wife in tow. The implication being very heavy that he will attempt to resume his life and, if not the exact same employ, then a job in the field somewhere. His good looks, which he is always evaluating his image in a mirror -- in the third person, and his acumen will save him well once again, no doubt.

Don DeLillo's Postmodern Rebel

Heaving masses of humanity play a big part in "Mao II." And part of DeLillo's "Ultimate Message" of said novel seems to be that heaving masses play a big, homogeneous role in just about everything, when you're talking strictly in terms of human existence throughout the ages. But it's not simply that they play a role, I suppose. They are the players who want to be played. Or, to put it in kinder terms: they want to believe in something greater than themselves.

They are always hunting for someone or something to venerate, to prop up as the next big savior of all mankind. And of course I say "they" but what I really mean is "me and everybody else who isn't one of the 'chosen few.'" Because there's a place in "Mao II" -- as in life -- for those of us lucky (said quasi-sarcastically) enough to have been made idols. It's the dichotomous relationship between man and superman (although with meaning differing slightly from Nietzschean parlance, i.e. intended to avoid implications of the rightness of such terms in a question-begging sort of way). Also, sometimes a "superman" is a superwoman, which Nietzsche made no accommodation for this to be true of women as far as I know. I am.

I'm wary of thinking of DeLillo's central character in "Mao II," Bill Gray, in terms of his generic moniker -- which eventually it becomes clear is a pseudonym or, more accurately, an alias. But because of the emphasis DeLillo seems to put on his character's name (i.e., it's made clear it is not his birth name, as said), I don't think there's any use avoiding the symbolism inherent to it. Bill Gray is gray, for all intents and purposes. He is a writer of some renown, a literary figure. He is not a vivacious character, but he's also not particularly melancholic or phlegmatic, either. He's not detachedly disinterested in the fate of man, but he seems incredulous as to what power man possesses (and indeed someone of his writerly significance) to make the world a more livable, equanimous place.

Bill has his own small following (a man and a woman) who venerate him but who also come to live with him and know him as a human being, and not simply as the "man behind the curtain" writer everyone else is awed by. For instance, the man (Scott) becomes Gray's personal assistant and envoy, and has grown so intimately close that he can be candid and point out that the sprawling, directionless novel Gray is working on is not equal to his other works and in fact is so bad that it might do harm to his reputation, calling into question all works that preceded it. Gray, Scott says, already intuitively understands this to be true, but Scott's criticism provides him the fear-affirming validation he desires.

"Mao II" isn't the sort of novel you sum up. This is in part because it reads more like classic Greek dialectical philosophy and less as a novel reliant on its plot. It's got a number of really excellent dialogues pitting the different ideologies represented against each other. More specifically and, in my opinion, most interesting is a dialogue that takes place between Gray and George Haddad, after Haddad has isolated Gray from his publisher and feels more open to speak candidly on the subject of terrorism and capturing the hearts / minds, imagination, or inspiring fear in the masses of humanity, along with the larger idea of a centrifugal entity for the masses to turn towards and embrace. The spirit of said dialogue is captured nicely, I think, in the following from pages 158-9:

It's an idea. It's a picture of Lebanon without the Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, without the Iranian volunteers, the religious wars. We need a model that transcends all the bitter history. Something enormous and commanding. A figure of absolute being. This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being.

Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it's mine.

DeLillo seems not to resort to any absurd, contrived plot device that would have his characters literally display the kind of revolt that he has Gray describe as being for himself and his own work evidence of the ineffectuality of absolute authority. (There's no consensus to be reached amongst the voices he puts on paper.) When revolt occurs, it occurs tastefully and subtly. Gray becomes injured for instance, and eventually after consulting (of all people) some veterinarians, he understands that he must seek medical attention -- but still he does not. Against all advice he travels to Beirut with uncertain intentions, or intentions that are [SPOILER ALERT] never revealed as passing successfully. The ending is as ambiguous as the viability of the modes of living that history and masses of humanity and their keepers have fated for us all. That's one idea about "Mao II" I've had.

Plus, the not-intended-to-be-sly (DeLillo more or less mentions it in the last pages of the story) association of Mao to a brand with the Coke II allusion is golden, I think -- if it is also, uh huh, dripping with Postmodernity.

Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes' "DeLillo in Winter"

Hey it's a new year so let's kick it off by always mentioning that it's a new year (I plan to really maintain this theme for the rest of January) and let's also talk some Don DeLillo. Like pretty much every other person on the planet who professes some positive feeling for contemporary literature and the impossible-to-pigeonhole, nebulous genre of postmodernism, I consider DeLillo's "White Noise" to be among the seminal novels of the last fifty or so years. (I'm also currently reading "Mao II" and plan to talk more in depth about that in a few days.)

A couple of years ago I tried reading "Libra," another very highly thought of DeLillo novel that speculates about the events in Lee Harvey Oswald's life that led to his assassination of JFK, but I couldn't get into it -- in part because of the lack of a sardonic, obsessive and somewhat effete first-person narrator of the Jack Gladney variety, who it needs to be said is humorously the professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill. One problem of course is "White Noise" is hard to top.

And recently Mark Athitakis of his blog "American Fiction Notes" has lamented the fact that DeLillo struggled over the last decade to equal the work that has made him so notable and important to American literature. I essentially agree with Athitakis. "Cosmopolis" was extremely disappointing, and seemed to lose the weight and heft of a broader worldview that is enviably present in "Mao II" and "White Noise." Something similar has happened to Paul Auster, even though I admit I enjoyed "Man in the Dark" -- enjoyed it far more than I did "Cosmopolis."

But I'm afraid I have to disagree slightly with Athitakis' assessment in his "DeLillo in Winter" post of "Midnight in Dostoevsky" -- a 2009 DeLillo short story published in the November 30th New Yorker. Athitakis' notes that DeLillo has his main character, a contemplative male college student, at one point chat casually with a store clerk at a late-night convenience store, which Athitakis argues the candor of their conversation and forthrightness of the narrator was incongruous with his traits exhibited throughout the rest of the story.

On the one hand this is true. The main character's essence seems to be one that relies heavily on his evident solipsism and introverted nature. The first main locus of the story centers on the walks the main character, Robby, takes with his friend and companion Todd, another college student, who together as they walk, expound and pontificate about what they observe, which in the story takes the form of an old man in a coat, the specific type of which they cannot agree on and which then becomes the focus of much debate. Todd is an extension of Robby's solipsism, an almost internal argument rages between them, one you could imagine them taking part in without speaking, and so his candor and willingness to debate him do little to refute Athitakis' point.

What does more to, however, is Robby's interest in a female student he's currently taking a course in Logic with, which the Logic course is the other essential locus of the story. Her name is Jenna, and Robby learns this after finally asking her, "O.K., what's your name?" She's the only other character we get to see Robby become in any way close with, and she immediately discards him. Not purposely, one supposes, but she rejects the college as a place she isn't "happy" and expresses plans to go west to school in Idaho, of which Robby later wonders alone, "Idaho, the word so vowelled and obscure. Wasn't where we were, right here, obscure enough for her?" The school we sense is tied closely to Robby's unusual temperament. It throws him for a loop.

I think you could argue it a stretch, but Jenna has mattered to Robby as both a person unto herself and as a point of connection (She has had the only real conversation with their mystifying Logic professor, Ilgauskas) to others, and her immediate dismissal of him vis-a-vis his college is slyly important for this reason, as well. Following his thoughts of Jenna, he begins a thread of thinking which starts with his parents, divorced and active in their own lives and plans over the holiday break, leaving him to fend for himself by himself. The town's description is next in the sequence and is likewise abandoned for the break. I think his description of it in this state is apt, "On the stunted commercial street in town, there were three places still open for business, one of them the diner, and I ate there once and stuck my head in the door two or three times, scanning the booths." Implications of searching and straining to realize some connection abound there.

Then the anomalous conversation about the convenience store woman and her son's wife's kidney infection. A blip, yes. But is it unintentional? I'm not so sure. Is it instead the subtle climactical apotheosis to this series of events, which leads him to an unstated desire to talk honestly with someone, anyone? Does this talk, as half-heartedly as it was mentioned, convince him that he cannot relate to anyone, even about serious things of the nature described? The next paragraph reads like a descent, a return to alienation inside the protective confines of a novel he reads in the library, one that remains in the same place untouched and unmoved, exactly as he'd left it the day before, day after day. Still, perhaps the simplest explanation is best here, and DeLillo truly neglected in the one passage to write his character as uniformly as he did throughout the rest of the story. I guess I'm just offering another possibility, one that's admittedly less likely.

Of course I also liked the short story's ending. Athitakis says, "By the end things have moved pretty much nowhere, from a dimly felt fear of connection to a dimly felt fear of connection." I disagree. I feel like the first half of the story suggests a desire in Robby to form relationships with people, despite his bad luck with relationships to this point (i.e. his parents), and at the least it suggests this is possible. It's a transference from winter as idealistic to winter as reality (the former usually comes easiest to mind when winter is not actually taking place). I do think whether or not you consider the mid point of the story at the break to mark anything specifically significant about Robby's transformation, you at least have to concede he's changed by the end, maybe to the point of being jaded. Maybe that's an easy thing to have a character do, although I think DeLillo pulls it off fairly complexly, betokening the DeLillo of old.

There is an early moment in the story, after Robby and Todd are first following after the old man, when Robby, alone, comes face to face with him, and describes in a cursory moment when he seems almost hopeful the man will acknowledge him, perhaps even take an interest in him. He said, "There was no one else on the street. As we approached each other, he veered away, and then so did I, just slightly, to reassure him, but I also sent a stealthy look his way."

By the end of the story, though, Robby's potential desire for anything resembling contact with the old man is completely abandoned, to the point that he doesn't want Todd to know the man's true story, either, and physically fights him to prevent it. He has embraced a fiction about the old man, and that has become the real truth. It's easier and safer. As one of DeLillo's characters in "Mao II" mentions, "We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world." Let it bleed, Robby I think would say.

Has DeLillo lost a step or two as he's aged? Yes, I think you could make that argument, as Athitakis did well. But I also thought "Midnight in Dostoevsky" was a really interesting read, and in some ways a return to the DeLillo of earlier years, which has me looking forward to (or at least hopeful for) his newest novel "Point Omega" -- which admittedly has a dumb-looking cover that, yes, I'm judging.

Inherent Vice a Vision of All That is Good of Thomas Pynchon

I like the recondite, fragmentary style that has always been a staple of Pynchonian fiction and done to epic effect in novels like "V." and "Gravity's Rainbow." Sure, yes they are difficult to follow at times, a narrative is broken up and a new narrative is introduced, regularly without the slightest hint of warning and so keeping you, reader, on your toes. It's reading that can be very rewarding and stimulating, but it's reading I'll concede is taxing and requires some patience, as well.

Most of the reviews I read of "Inherent Vice" -- Thomas Pynchon's latest literary effort -- said that it was something of a departure for one of the great antecedents of contemporary fiction, a lion postmodern literature style. He wrote a novel that tells the same story, follows the same main character faithfully, from beginning to end? (Has Pynchon gone soft on us?) No, though certain elements of Pynchon are lost in this not-as-sprawling text of about 370 pages, the story is as interesting and enjoyable as any of his I've read, also as Pynchon-ey in just some of the best ways.

"Inherent Vice" is a uniquely Pynchonian take on the noir genre -- something akin to a novelization of "The Big Lebowski" but also simultaneously a story going by its own unique drumbeat, to be sure. Doc Sportello is thrust into a typically paranoid Pynchonian narrative, which begins innocently enough, as most detective novels do, with the arrival of his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth who informs him of a plot being hatched by the wife of a wealthy real-estate developer, Mickey Wolfmann, and her lover. The plot they've thought up is to take control of Wolfmann's assets by having him committed to a mental institution. Hepworth had meanwhile become Wolfmann's lover and is asked by his wife, Sloane, and Riggs Warbling, her lover, to assist them in carrying out their plans. Things devolve rapidly and chaotically from there.

I've always wanted to read a Pynchon novel that tells the story of characters like "V.'s" Benny Profane and The Whole Sick Crew and "Gravity's Rainbow's" Tyrone Slothrop et al without interruption. What some people don't know or won't admit is that Thomas Pynchon is actually extremely funny, although this is hard sometimes to pick up on when reading through dense tracts regarding the mechanics of a World War II era V-2 Rocket and its parabolic arcs and achieving "Brennschluss," or the strange nature of espionage and deceit and drunken elephants in early 20th century North Africa, plus conceptualization of the mid-20th century phenomenon dubbed "Non-humanity" by Fausto Maijstral.

Doc Sportello affords Pynchon with an ideal mark on which to spring various unfortunate and hilarious gags. To name some: pornographic neckties, confrontation with a motley assortment of strange musicians and bikers, a cryptic and sub rosa organization known only as "The Golden Fang" dangling precipitously on the tongues of everyone Doc meets. Then of course there is the pervading sense that America has failed to be a shining "City on a Hill," and perhaps there is a new undiscovered continent forming even further west, which it's supposed or implied will somehow reach fruition in a way that the United States has failed to, deliver on the promise that was once our own.

Is that a negative interpretation? Maybe it could be construed more positively. It probably could, but these are negative times, times that try souls. And thankfully we have still got Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo around to proffer their literary opinions, nebulous as they sometimes are -- and I hope it's not too much of a stretch to attach that kind of meaning to their writing (been reading a lot of Donald Barthelme lately and his opinion of literature and what effect it can produce has emboldened me to make this interpretive leap. More to come on Barthelme, though). DeLillo didn't publish a new novel this year, but he did make an appearance in the New Yorker last month with his short story, "Midnight in Dostoevsky." It describes two young students of a college town, walking around it and debating each other. I'll end with a quote from the narrator that I found particularly poignant:

At times, abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks -- to register what was out there, all scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise.