Dhalgren [Paperback]

Samuel R. Delany (Author), William Gibson (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 1996

Delany's masterpiece about a wanderer who searches for meaning and identity in the ruins of a devastated city.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.

Dhalgren is many things, but instantly accessible isn't one of them. While most of this big, ambitious, deeply detailed novel is beautifully pellucid, the opening pages will be difficult for some: the novel starts with the second half of an incomplete sentence, in the viewpoint of a man who doesn't know who he is. If you find the early pages rough going, push on; the story soon becomes clear and fascinating. But--fair warning--the central nature of the disaster, of its strange devastations and disruptions, remains a puzzle for many readers, sometimes after several readings.

Spoiler warning: If you want to figure out the secret of the novel as you read Dhalgren, then stop reading this review right now! If you want to know the secret before you start, this is what the novel is about: the experience of existence inside a novel. Time passes differently for different characters. A river changes location. Stairs change their number. The Kid looks in a mirror and sees not himself, but someone who looks an awful lot like Samuel R. Delany. Central images include mirrors, lenses, and prisms, devices that focus, reflect--and distort. The Kid fills a notebook with a journal that may be Dhalgren, and is uncertain if he has written much, or any, of it. The characters don't know they're in a novel, but they know something is wrong. Dhalgren explores the relationship between characters and author (or, perhaps, characters, "author," and author).

The final chapter can be even tougher going than the opening pages, with its viewpoint change and its stretches of braided narrative--and the novel ends with the beginning of an unfinished sentence. But the last chapter becomes clear as you persevere; and when you get to that unfinished closing line, turn to the first line of the novel to finish the sentence and close the narrative circle. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Published back-to-back in 1975 and 1976, respectively, these works involve an apocalyptic society on the verge of collapse and a utopian society at war with Earth. LJ's reviewer dubbed Dhalgren an "important novel" (LJ 3/15/75).
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 817 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; Cloth is limited slipcased edition, numbered and signed by Delany and Gibson edition (July 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819562998
• ISBN-13: 978-0819562999
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,699,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

166 of 182 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rumors of Dhalgren's impenetrability are greatly exaggerated January 2, 2005

By Michael Alexander

Format:Paperback

I read this book in three days, found none of the sex gratuitous, never felt lost (though the narrative certainly does fly apart in the last section), and thought the book, if it needed editing, only needed about 75 pages worth, and that's spread out across 800. I seem to be in the minority, and that makes sense--this is not a book for everyone.

But for me, Dhalgren is the best book I've read in months, and I desperately don't want its detractors to scare people like me off. No, fans of early Delany, this is not Babel-17, but I personally think he didn't start getting really good until Nova and his short stories. No, people of delicate sensibilities, this is not a sanitized book, but those who believe it's _just_ about the author's own bisexuality are probably betraying their own sensitivities; frankly, I found issues of race, the concept of identity, the artistic drive, philosophy, the power of myth, semiotics, metafiction, and the overwhelming theme of "What happens when time has no meaning?" to be far more prevalent than the issues of sexuality. There _is_ a lot of sex in certain sections of Dhalgren, but it usually serves as a signpost in a relationship, showing just how two or more people stand at that particular moment. Dhalgren is also not "about nothing," nor is it "disjointed"--there is very clearly a storyline going on, though its initial stated goals lose meaning as certain themes start to take over the universe of the book. It's no A-to-B plot, but it's one seriously good A-through-B-and-around-back-to-A (or IS it?) plot.

So what IS Dhalgren? To me, it's a book with all of the best thematic concerns of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow combined with a few very awesome riffs on Joyce, universalized by the sheer mythic BIGNESS of this very, very weird place in which it all occurs. Fans of the Big Dense Postmodern Novel and SF's '60s New Wave might fall madly in love with this, as might anyone who likes both Haruki Murakami and Hunter Thompson. I know I did.

Plenty of people have tried to summarize this thing, but this is what you need to know: Dhalgren is an eerie, sexy, alternately thrilling and draining, mythic picaresque of a book in which one very confused guy enters the weirdest place on earth and ends up at the center of everything through no fault of his own. The desperate search for knowledge comes up with tantalizing clues and some emotionally walloping encounters and relationships with other people, but the Kid's mind is his own worst enemy, and the nearly self-aware city seems not too far behind. By the end, the Kid might not even care, but that doesn't free him from the troubles not knowing causes. Plenty of possible answers pop up, but this mystery's solution seems overdetermined: there are dozens of ways to explain what's going on, but each one has just as much tantalizing evidence as the others, and none fit the whole story perfectly. This is a book where you're going to want to flip back a lot to find out what the Kid is having frustrating bits of deja vu over, and like Finnegans Wake, you're also going to want to read the first couple of chapters over again as soon as you get to the broken sentence that ends and begins the book, because just like in Joyce's most frustrating creation, the end enriches the beginning INFINITELY.

I'm already itching to reread this thing, because I have the feeling that the entire novel glows with interconnections the second time through. Till then, though, I beg anyone excited rather than scared off by this review to purchase this immediately. The risk of disliking Dhalgren greatly is far outweighed by the rewards the right kind of reader gets out of this book. This one's now a part of my mental constellation, and I hope it can play the same part in yours.

84 of 91 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The pros and cons of reading this legendary book July 3, 2001

By mattyreed

Format:Paperback

I just finished Dhalgren a few hours ago and I am still thinking it through, so maybe this review is a bit premature, but here goes:

I'd heard about this book for ages, so I was excited when it got reissued recently. Being a big Pynchon/Joyce fan, I have much patience and love for the so-called Big Difficult Novel. Not being a big SF fan, I was more intrigued by the book's titanic reputation as a surreal masterwork. However, right now I disagree with the notion (from previous reviewers) that this book is an absolute love or an absolute hate, as there is so much in it to recommend, as well as some basic things to criticize. Hence, my three stars.

Well, in so many ways this book is certainly fantastic. It has imagery I've never read anywhere else, and having grown up in a formerly industrial New England city that is only now coming out of it's crumbling, chaotic doldrums, I related to many images of Bellona. Overall, I think the book is a grand project of metafiction, portraiture of mental illness, or some inexplicable religious/apocalyptic mystery. The fact that it works on all those levels makes me admire the novel more. I did not need anything explicitly explained, as I liked feeling the confusion and whirl of ideas that the main character feels. (If you've seen the movie "Memento," the experience is similar.)

What I did not admire was the fact that the book was easily 200 pages too long. For example, I'm hardly squeamish about descriptions of sex, but after dozens and dozens of them...well, like any cheap pornography, it gets kind of numbingly dull--which may be the point, but hey, I got bored. Furthermore, many scenes of gang life absolutely serve no purpose but are merely mundane--and while that may be the point too, it leaves the reader (or maybe just me) feeling like such writing was flabby and flat. So even if these certain elements served a point--for metafiction, for depiction of mental illness--they still come off as bad reading. While cutting 200 pages would rob the reader of some fantastic scenes and images, I really think that a shorter work would have made this haunting novel even more powerful than it is. Therefore, be careful who you recommend the book to, not because of the sex scenes or anything, but because some people may find it too much of a slog.

That being said, my mind is still racing through all the possibilities and characters and images of the novel (the red eyes, the shifting streets, the frighteningly delusional Richards family's attempts at middle-class order), and it's quite refreshing to read something that makes me think hard. I think the book also influenced some of my dreams, which was not always pleasant, but showed how effective much of the book is. So hey, maybe if I were to write this review a week from now, I might give it four stars.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Many days and nights in the mysterious city of Bellona September 4, 2003

By Robert Dumas

Format:Paperback

At last, at long last, I have finished Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and here are my thoughts, enhanced by some quotes from William Gibson's foreword to the book.

Dhalgren is not a book for everyone; in fact, I'd even go so far as to say it's not for most people. Delany's work is definitely influenced by the fact that he is a gay black man, so if you're expecting normal sexual and emotional relationships, look elsewhere. It's also a dense book, which your average Grisham- or Crichton-reading person is not going to get, or even want to get. It's also long and slower-paced than most books I've read.

That said, it's also one of the most fascinating tales I've read to date. I have sincere worries I'll ever be able to look at, say, a Philip K. Dick book with quite as much reverence again.

It is a labyrinthine book, a sort of wandering narrative that somehow stays carefully focused as the tale weaves continually through its long tale. In his foreword, William Gibson said, "I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it. This has never caused me the least discomfort, or interfered in any way with my pleasure in the text. If anything, the opposite has been true."

When I read those words before starting the text, I had my doubts, along with a few lofty - but misplaced - ambitions. How, I wondered, could you not "get" a book, yet still enjoy it? "Maybe I can figure its mystery out," I said to myself. How foolish I was.

In re-reading the foreword after finishing the book, I see now that Gibson was absolutely right. "Dhalgren," he says, "is not there to be finally understood." This is absolutely correct; the nature of the city and the events that occur within it are part of the story, but are not the point. The point of the story is the story; it is one of the few works I have read that justifies itself simply by reading through it.

Gibson also describes in his foreword how reading Dhalgren strips the reader of many of the things that readers often consider to be their fundamental rights as readers, because it refuses to deliver itself unto the reader in the typical question/reward fashion. "If this is a quest, the reader protests, then we must learn the object of that quest. If this is a mystery, we must be told at least the nature of the puzzle. And Dhalgren does not answer."

This, too, is true. This may sound strange, but there is simply no way to put into words how this book can be so unconventional, so unyielding of its secrets to the reader, and yet so thoroughly enjoyable.

And the strange thing about this book is that even though it is long and has no overt "point", even though it does not deliver insights on what will happen next, even though it took me over four months to read, I loved it. It feels good to have finished this book, as though I took the ride with Kid and Lanya and all the rest. It's a journey I won't soon forget. And if you're just the right kind of reader, you won't, either.