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A review by batbones
Americana by Don DeLillo
3.0
Americana is dreamlike in slow sauntering fragmentariness and implausibility. A/this novel is a reel of events existing only within the space of fiction itself, despite the rather expansive cast, the impression this reader gets is that no one real talks or acts like this, that every scene is a tableau, the series of which is all part of an elaborate staging. This is in part indebted to having this maiden reading haunted by, and frequently anxiously measured against, Bruce Bawer'sreview of White Noise, "representation of reality is not DeLillo’s strong suit. It’s hard to accept most of his characters as living, breathing human beings [...] or to believe in the existence of all these cliques, clans, and cabals". Reading the review of a book frequently spoils it with pre-judgment, but admittedly this is not far off from the reader's estimation in the end. There are moments like this that sound so awfully pretentious as to be cute:
"My life," I said, "is a series of telephone messages which nobody understands but me. Every woman I meet thinks she's some kind of Delphic phrasemaker. My phone rings at three in the morning and it's somebody stranded at some airport calling to tell me that the animal crackers have left the zoo. The other day I got a telegram - a schizogram - from girl on the Coast and all it said was: MY TONSILS WENT TO A FUNERAL."
Like the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre of the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch, Americana is the great current in which swirls all the detritus image-fragments of "modern America" - the competitive tv industry, the artefacts of modern life (mass media, telephone, office affairs), the unsettling violence of male-female sexual/romantic encounters, the personal quest to traverse an expanse land just to find and realise oneself. None of this is new. Which leaves an expectation for something more, something interesting, distinctive, moving, even, that sets it apart from all other depictions of the American experience recycling these sad images. (Like Mad Men.) Yet whatever symbol, reference or archetypal situation Americana furnishes for a scene lacks that final flavour that brings everything vividly to life. Landscape and country-specific placenames lock the narrative to the region but these seem mere words on a page, and the characters insufficiently titillate - perhaps this reception is a matter of being in the wrong time and place, now it rings so hollow to merely call female characters complicated and mysterious.
So despite the title, this feels less like a novel about American life at a certain time/place, than, more accurately, a tale bout technology, media and its ripple effects on culture and the psyche. The dreamlikeness and abruptness in the prose, channeling the media recently come into being. I.e. the splicing and turning-on-and-off of experience via film clips, phone calls, television sets, that convert what could once be seen as a continuous flow of perception into chopped up sequences, bits of pure sensation and image.
DeLillo's pen has a flair for perfect precise images ("he was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner"), at times startlingly moving, at times outright hilarious (best seen in instances where characters wreck petty acts of revenge). These merits kept this reader reading on but insufficiently persuade beyond ambivalence the need to go on to another of his books.
"My life," I said, "is a series of telephone messages which nobody understands but me. Every woman I meet thinks she's some kind of Delphic phrasemaker. My phone rings at three in the morning and it's somebody stranded at some airport calling to tell me that the animal crackers have left the zoo. The other day I got a telegram - a schizogram - from girl on the Coast and all it said was: MY TONSILS WENT TO A FUNERAL."
Like the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre of the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch, Americana is the great current in which swirls all the detritus image-fragments of "modern America" - the competitive tv industry, the artefacts of modern life (mass media, telephone, office affairs), the unsettling violence of male-female sexual/romantic encounters, the personal quest to traverse an expanse land just to find and realise oneself. None of this is new. Which leaves an expectation for something more, something interesting, distinctive, moving, even, that sets it apart from all other depictions of the American experience recycling these sad images. (Like Mad Men.) Yet whatever symbol, reference or archetypal situation Americana furnishes for a scene lacks that final flavour that brings everything vividly to life. Landscape and country-specific placenames lock the narrative to the region but these seem mere words on a page, and the characters insufficiently titillate - perhaps this reception is a matter of being in the wrong time and place, now it rings so hollow to merely call female characters complicated and mysterious.
So despite the title, this feels less like a novel about American life at a certain time/place, than, more accurately, a tale bout technology, media and its ripple effects on culture and the psyche. The dreamlikeness and abruptness in the prose, channeling the media recently come into being. I.e. the splicing and turning-on-and-off of experience via film clips, phone calls, television sets, that convert what could once be seen as a continuous flow of perception into chopped up sequences, bits of pure sensation and image.
DeLillo's pen has a flair for perfect precise images ("he was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner"), at times startlingly moving, at times outright hilarious (best seen in instances where characters wreck petty acts of revenge). These merits kept this reader reading on but insufficiently persuade beyond ambivalence the need to go on to another of his books.