Customer Reviews

Americana

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This was DeLillo's first novel, and it feels like a first novel. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The imperfections and inconsistencies found in a novelist's first attempts at long fiction often let the reader steal a peak into the writer's thought process before the writer has learned how to mask that process.

That said, this is a book where the seams show. DeLillo's prose is always fun to read--although intentionally disorienting at times--but this book doesn't hold together as well as his later masterpieces like the "Names" or "White Noise." Certain scenes are brilliant. Others just sort of linger in the narrative seemingly without a reason for being.

The meat of the novel, wherein David Bell constructs his anti-film about image-driven modern America, is pure DeLillo bravura. However the reader of this part may get lost in--among other distractions from which the novel suffers--DeLillo's obsession with Godard. (At one point he practically rips one scene right out of "Masculine/Feminine".) DeLillo seems to have thought he was writing this part of the novel with a camera in hand rather than with the novelist's traditional weapons (e.g. a pen or a typewriter). In this, it is misguided.

"Americana" is not a great book, but DeLillo is a great American author and I encourage anyone new to his fiction to start with "White Noise" which seems to be the easiest route into the DeLillo mindset. After that, I'd recommend "The Names" or "Great Jone Street" or "Underworld."

Even so, any true fan would be remiss to ignore "Americana."

Don Delillo is an amazing writer. His prose, and the ideas contained in his novels, are so powerful they sometimes make me stop and catch my breath, and that's not hyperbole. I can't think of another contemporary author that moves me so much, with the possible exception of Saul Bellow. Reading his novels is pure joy, it's a wonder on every page, it's magic. I don't say that often.

I read somewhere that "The Names" was his first great novel, so I picked up "Americana" expecting to read the work of a budding author showing only flashes of brilliance. I found the writing and ideas expressed in "Americana" to be as fresh, brilliant, and moving as in any other book of his I've read. Delillo writes beautiful, highly intelligent novels that are also page-turners, and that's a rarity. He is, quite simply, a completely original American novelist, and "Americana" is a wonderful first novel.

Delillo should win the Nobel prize for literature some day, and I'd be very disappointed if he doesn't.

This first line is something that, in 1971, when the book was first published, almost predicts the aimlessness of the nineties. The principle character David Bell is lost in corporate America. There are few, if any, moments that occur in his life that he doesn't think of as dull or lurid. When David tells of his youth, you can see his separation from the world around him growing. The complete insincerity towards others and even himself. Before he tells the story of his own mother, he admits it will be hard, and hopes to not have to "blow some smoke into this or that passage - some smoke to hide the fire." Delillo's Bell is totally disillusioned. He's not ever sure what he wanted, but he's positive he's not getting it. He's unable to truly separate from past relationships: his ex-wife, old friends from college, old lovers. He leaves New York to find himself, to have that journey outward that leads inward, but the opposite occurs. As he delves deeper and deeper into Americana, Americana overshadows him. It becomes a giant organism in which he is only a single cell. No amount of ranting can change this fact for David. He buries himself in sexual encounter after sexual encounter, a sort of social masturbation. He lets secret angers (secret even to himself) boil out at odd moments that become strange acts of violence, kicking strangers in the ribs and trying to choke a friend to death in a misdirected drunken rage. Americana begins with a man lost, and ends with the desperate search for self having failed. A moment of insight occurs when David confronts hiself at a mirror. He recognizes at this moment, that all his life, every mirror he's ever looked into, always had him reflected back. And no matter where he was or what he was doing, this would always be true. Is it hopeful to be able to simply look into a mirror to find yourself? Or is that the tragi-comic reminder that running away is impossible? That no matter where you go, you always take yourself with you?

Americana is a fine first novel. You can see in it the brilliances that will become White Noise and Underworld with time and refinement. Paul Auster dedicated his book Leviathan to Don Delillo and depicts a man rumored to be pattererned after him. But take it from me, there are no cross-over insights to be found. They key to digging beneath the layer of Americana is not held within Leviathan. The key to Americana is simply to heed David Bell's own warning, and try to read past the smoke to get to the fire it's hiding.

DeLillo has given us all something to think long and hard about. DeLillo creates in David Bell what many have seen in America, a success hungry, impatient and careless entity. Delillo provides a great example of high post-modern literature and I recomend it to anyone who wants to get a litte closer to what it means to "be on top" in Americana.

I've been reading Delillo's stuff out of order so I really haven't been able to get an idea of his artistic progression over the course of his novels. Which isn't key to enjoying them but it's a thing I like tracking. I'm not sure how much it matters though because this, his first novel, actually reads much better than the last one I read (Great Jones Street) that comes along later in his career. As far as I know this was his debut novel and shows that he more or less emerged fully formed from whatever writing crucible that he came from. The writing is as sharp as it ever was, the prose near flawless, each sentence effortlessly spinning out uncanny descriptions of the surroundings or a snapshot of the character's mental state that achieves a weird kind of detached beauty. If one were to go by the writing alone, the book would be brilliant because there's never a missed or wrong note at any time. However, there is a caveat and this is what proves it to be a first novel. Namely, the plot isn't all that tight. What I can tell concerns a TV executive David Bell, a man in his late twenties who is living the cynical dream of the decade. But something makes him want to get out there and see America, and so he takes on an assignment with a camera crew to go make a film, forcing him to go cross country. And that basically is what the plot entails. You can tell Delillo is attempting to make a big statement about the country, or at least the mental state of it at the time. All the characters talk in his usual half-despairing, half-humorous dialogue, like they know things are falling apart but can't help but find it funny, or are past the point of caring. But on a whole the book doesn't hold together with any strong central theme, it comes across as a bunch of detached episodes kept together purely by the strength of Delillo's writing. And if his writing wasn't as strong as it was, this book would have been terrible because a lot of scenes are aimless, or take the "look at how detached and cynical we are" motif and drive it right into the ground, or simply don't make any sense at all when connected to the larger plot. There's room for digressions (the bits about David meeting his wife are pretty good, as are the sections about his parents) and the looseness does give the story a certain charm that his tighter, more focused works don't have, the sense that he was willing to try anything. But for all the memorable moments, it doesn't really add up to anything, there's no haunting theme to stay with you after the book is done, even though you'll probably enjoy it while it's being read. That said, it does show promise, it has a strong and consistent voice and shows that right out of the starting gate he was already sorting out what his major themes would be. I found it very readable but don't expect any kind of grand statement. That's still to be found later, in more accomplished works.

If you haven't heard, DeLillo is one of America's five most important active writers, and this first novel is quintessential to understanding his concerns: writer as exiled pop icon, U.S. culture as reductive poison, etc., all of which we see more finely developed in later works, especially Mao II and White Noise. Sure, there are obvious structural deficiencies here, like the final orgy scene in a Texas warehouse which seems unnaturally appended, but that's what makes the book so great: It's DeLillo's opening salvo in a brilliant career as literary social satirist.

Don DeLillo is one of the greatest wtiters of contemporary fiction. Americana is a delightfully conceived, but jaundiced view of the American way of life. As a serious satirical writer he has no peer. The characters he creates, particularly his protagonist, live in a world of make believe, a phony fantasy land of pretentious expediency with mannerisms. Nevertheless, all are interesting as personalities because DeLillo is a superb creator of realistic, yet bizarre people, often referring to screen idols such as Burt Lancaster as some sort of lifestyle role model. His characters are about as real - yet they are entertaining - like puppets. Their ethics are non existent, yet they go through the motions, they pretend to be friendly - but politeness is only a means to an end. Loyalty is meaningless. It seems their beliefs are the result of indoctrination at the hands of the puppetmaster, or master of ceremonies, DeLillo himself.

The setting is an advertising agency. David is one of the executives who has been pushed into it by his ruthless and detestable father. He is going quietly insane in a cynical exploitive way, without any loyalties whatsoever - not even to his wives, lovers or family members. He takes what he can get without regret or compunction yet has a certain sensitivity lurking just below the surface. He knows he is beyond redemption but doesn't seem to care. He is the complete iconoclast and he knows it and he knows why. He realizes what his father and many like him represent, but doesn't condemn him. He accepts him for what he is and takes what he can get from him. He has been programmed to conform to the life of a predator without a conscience, with a pseudo religious sense of self righteousness, and is aware of it, but does he care? He is in advertising where images and sales are all that count. It is all about the survival of the fittest, and the fittest are the phoniest. It is where the origin of the species died of shame. This is a wonderful read by a superb craftsman.The Learning Process: Some Creative Impressions