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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastically Readable and Utterly Relevant, August 3, 2000
This review is from: Americana (Contemporary American fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)
Over the course of his career, Don DeLillo has grown into a force of literature. Several of his eleven novels, among them White Noise and Underworld, seem destined to become classics. I've read these books, as well as all of the others in his canon, and admire them greatly. But ultimately, Americana, his first book, is the one I keep coming back to. It is a brisk novel, brimming with tight, controlled prose, and on the surface, not a lot seems to happen -- some board meetings in the offices of an advertising agency, a road trip, several lengthy monologues read as dialogue from a movie script. Subsequent examinations, however, reveal its many complex layers. All of the classic DeLillo themes are present -- advertising, paranoia, American mythology versus reality -- and explode fully formed onto the page. The story chronicles the exploits of a young, self-involved advertising executive who retreats into the heart of America with his camera in an attempt to discover what, if anything, lies beneath the series of images that define who we are and the country we live in. DeLillo's command of the language is remarkable from the first page as he filters the chaos of Christmas in New York City through the ennui of the ironic narrator, David Bell. It has often been said that DeLillo writes "idea books," meaning that he is less concerned with characters (though the characters in his books are always memorable) than the large and complicated issues of modern life (fear of death, fear of life, the nature of terror). If this is true then Americana sets the gold standard for much of what has followed from him since its publication in 1971. Which leads me to my final point: Although this book is almost thirty years old, it reads as if it were written last month. DeLillo's perceptions about our image-obsessed American culture are perhaps more relevant now than ever before (despite the flood of recent fiction that has tackled this very subject). And this, it would seem, is one of the true tests of any novelist, to make the necessary connections to a time and place but also create a work that's timeless. Americana (unlike, say, DeLillo's End Zone or Great Jones Street) achieves this. If you have any interest at all in the work of Don DeLillo, you would do well to begin your study here.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Meet Huck Finn's evil twin, July 21, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Americana (Contemporary American fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)
Though rambling and at times aimless, though missing the technical virtuosity of "Libra" and the sodden comic dread of "White Noise", Americana remains my favorite book by Don Delillo. The novel is a retelling of Huck Finn, in the persona of an all-around Golden Boy and very dead soul named David Bell. Bell, like Huck, lights out for the territory, but instead of a burlesque and edenic frontier, he finds a graveyard of flickering images, of a country at the end of its reel, spinning, flailing, disintegrating, full of phantoms. Twain's daguerotype of a giggling boy's swampy adventures is re-rendered by Delillo as a faithless young man's journey through an empty celluloid desert. Super-good.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another dull and lurid year, February 10, 2000
This review is from: Americana (Contemporary American fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)
In Americana, Don Delillo's first novel, David Bell begins by claiming, "Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year." This is the emptiness he struggles with, his own personal emptiness. The office politics and sexual politics of his world are repetitive to the degree that he is forced to pump them full of strange insincerities. Strange memo's from an unknown source and shooting wads of crumpled paper into the waste basket become his primary professional concerns; while sexually, he beds women distantly, almost as a form of social masturbation. At one point, when discussing his mother, and her death, David confesses that it will be hard to not pump it up with smoke to hide the fire. This confession admits that even his own personal history is somewhat lost to him. When the opportunity presents itself, he sees a quest through Americana as one of personal rediscovery. But Americana overshadows the discovery of David Bell. David is swallowed by the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. He becomes more and more removed from himself, realizing, you can't really run away from the one thing you want to escape... yourself. In Americana, you can see the style and subjects that will become White Noise and Underworld with time. You also get a disturbing image of corporate America's spirtual life in the late 1990's. Delillo is able to predict that existential crisis and alienation of our youth's future.
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