Customer Reviews

Great Jones Street

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Read the first page of Great Jones Street and you might think you've stumbled across a new DeLillo novel about Kurt Cobain. "Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide," DeLillo writes, with eerie foresight.

Unfortunately for contemporary readers, that Cobain imagery is likely to stick with you throughout this 1973 novel and become a distraction. Bucky Wunderlick, DeLillo's rock idol, is neither as tortured or talented as Cobain. As other critics have noted, his lyrics are awful. DeLillo doesn't have an ear for rock lyrics (or at least didn't in the early 70s.)

Like Running Dog, Great Jones Street is a great premise and an awkward delivery. DeLillo had yet to develop his signature style of putting subtext before story. He also hadn't developed his micro-detail style of painting an environment, which he used to such brilliant effect in describing the supermarket in "White Noise" and the Bronx of his youth in "Underworld." What we're left with is conventional dialogue-and-plot story telling -- which is what DeLillo has always done worst.

If you've read the masterworks of the DeLillo canon -- Ratner's Star, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld -- Great Jones Street is a worthwhile diversion. If you haven't read DeLillo's best, come back when you're done.

GREAT JONES STREET is a novel set in the 70's that is as relevant now as when it was first published. The main character - an AWOL rock musician - with shades of Dylan or Lennon attempts to escape the life of celebrity only to find his disappearing act, in mid tour, has made him that much more an enigma, raising the torch of his celebrity. With the much publicized saga of the late Kurt Cobain, an artist drained by commerce and ultimately destroyed by it, GREAT JONES STREET forshadows the struggle of artists within the system of commerce and capitalism of the United States. It is a novel about fame, and commerce, and the rights of the individual in society whether they be famous or not. It doesn't have the taught language of UNDERWORLD or the magnificent LIBRA but it is worth the time. A definite precursor to the grand themes of LIBRA, Delillo's finest novel.

I have read all of Don Delillo's novels and Great Jones Street stands among my favorites. Although many of his works are ultimately best described as "dark" (such as Mao II and Libra), Great Jones Street reveals Delillo's surreal comedic edge as he mocks the music industry (among other subjects). Like most of Delillo's works, this book is ultimately about a journey, but in Great Jones Street the path is laden with both subtle and not-so-subtle humor

General consensus has that this is one of Delillo's lesser novels and I really can't disagree. However, I don't think it's completely terrible either, it's short and has enough passages to recommend at least a quick reading of it. One of his early works from the 70s, it involves rock star Bucky who suddenly decides he doesn't want to be a rock star anymore and goes into seclusion, with all kind of rumors swirling about him. People constantly visit him and try to convince him to come back and he gives them evasive answers and flatout denials. Meanwhile, other stuff happens. And that's pretty much the plot. You can see why some people aren't exactly fond of this one. For a certified rock star, you don't really get much of a sense of Bucky as a musician, which may make sense since he's given all that up, but even when people describe what his band plays, you can't quite see how he would have become so ridiculously famous as he apparently is. It doesn't help that, as others have noted, Delillo cannot write rock lyrics to save his life at this point in time. Some chapters are comprised entirely of snippets from his songs, and it proves that Delillo was right to go into prose writing and not help out King Crimson or anything. But those don't bother me too much since I just skim the lyrics and move on to chapters with people talking. I'm not sure where Delillo was actually going with this story, he seems to be trying to do a cross-section of life in NYC, and then at other times he's attempting to satirize the culture and examine the rock and roll lifestyle. But in trying to do all of that, he really doesn't succeed in really dissecting any of them. The plot, for what it's worth, mostly consists of Bucky sitting in his apartment either talking to his neighbors, or to the people visiting him. Interesting but not terribly exciting, especially since Delillo's characters don't normally talk like real people. At his best, dialogue becomes almost a dance, as two people dart and stab at each other. In this book, it becomes one character giving a really long speech that seems almost stream of consciousness and doesn't really amount to anything. When the plot seems to pick up steam later on, you aren't exactly sure what's going on (it involves both a set of "mountain tapes" Bucky recorded and some new drug that people want) or why it's happening. About the biggest selling point is Delillo's prose, which was incisive even at this point, he's nowhere near his peak and the narration isn't consistent in that respect, but he does whip out a number of well worded paragraphs over the course of the novel. As I said, a quick read, but probably more for completists only, since he's done more memorable or interesting work elsewhere. Has anyone ever tried to set his lyrics to music, even just based on the descriptions of Bucky's band given in the novel (which was a lot of screaming, if I understand correctly?) . . . I'd be curious to hear what people come up with.

A most ingeniously constructed novel existing in a space defined by the coordinates of drugs, rock'n roll and Wittgenstienian metaphysics of language. Uncannily predictive with respect to the grunge scene, with characters reminiscent of William Burroughs and Kurdt Cobain. Both poetic and funny, rigorously structured and artistically detailed.

Great Jones Street is a wonderfully claire voyant novel that works sharply with themes that are of immense importance in the modern world. It is about pop arts, consumerism, the American junk culture and all the things that you can expect from DeLillo with the added element of dealing with problems with celebrity. Even when Bucky Wunderlick looks to escape from "his" life to be alone, his isolation becomes more valuable to others than it was meant to be to himself. This book deftly explores how the modern culture is dangerously obsessed with the lives of the few. Above all else, this is a more tightly structured novel than the later, greater works of DeLillo. Its opening pages lead right to the crux of the narrative and handles changes in time and place much smoother than Mao II and Underworld despite its hazy atmosphere.

This is the surreal odyssey of one who declares himself no longer a commodity. Bucky Wunderlick has become that contemptible thing,a Rock Star. Even though he finds it ridiculous and can't quite believe that people buy it, they do, so f*** 'em. But his desire to disconnect from the consumer culture in which we live creates difficulties. This is, after all, Don DeLillo,and Bucky pays a price for stepping off the corporate bus.

Let's start with this: the lyrics that DeLillo writes for Bucky Wunderlich, I mean Wunderlick are just short of pathetic. But let's own up to this too: most rock 'n' roll lyrics look faintly ridiculous on the page. You can print Dylan maybe, but hardly anybody else. If you think I'm kidding, take out your liner notes from your favorite album and read them to a friend. Too embarrassed to finish? My point exactly.
I am prejudiced by my own New York history, but I think that this is a fairly successful novel about life in the city at the end of the sixties. (The sixties, you know weren't really over until the late 70's). Some of the characters-Michelle for example-are merely talky standins for the author. Globke, on the other hand may be the author in his weakest moments and that's a lot of fun to speculate upon.
Finally, the end of the book with its vague messianic suggestions is one of the finest epitaph for its era. Maybe, it says, just maybe we have all gone off to some other place to perform acts of kindness and good will. Maybe we stopped chasing and started changing.

It's a hopeful little idea and a hopeful little book.

This is the third book that I've read by DeLillo, and I'm honestly glad that it wasn't the first. I'm not sure that I would have been motivated to pick up anything else if I had started here. Bucky Wunderlick and his rock-star musings about the face of the world just didn't do it for me.

The prose itself is elegant-- and the structure is so clever that I almost liked it despite myself. I get (or I at least kid myself that I get) some of the themes that he was playing with-- Wunderlick's last words-- the regression of his discourse. (That of which we cannot speak, yadda yadda) I'm also not discounting the possibility that there's a parody here which I am missing. I found myself more than once glancing sideways at the author and being sure that I nearly caught him in a secret smile. So-- meaning, elegance, and the possibility of parody. Some great stuff, right?

Trouble with me was that I didn't care enough about any of it to really try to decode the text. (Not that it's ever a good thing to go rummaging around in the novel with a secret decoder ring. I mean that I didn't get the pleasure that I've gotten in the other DeLillo books from making the little connections with the writing. I could see that there were roads to follow, but I wanted the book to end more than I wanted to have fun with the intertextual connections.) The characters left me cold and uninterested. Frankly, his view of rock & roll subculture felt much less authentic to me than-- say-- his take on hothouse academia.

Probably of interest to DeLillo fans, or people interested in the rock star in literature. I certainly wouldn't make this my first DeLillo.

This is the one Delillo novel I consistently re-read. I love Bucky Wunderlick! People are rating this as a Delillo novel and not on its own merit. True, not one of Delillo's best, but, my god, look at what he's written. They can't all be the best. If this was written by any other author, this would be a cult classic. The themes of this novel - celebrity, language, artistic creation - are the foundations of all Delillo novels to come. If you want to know where the germination of his ideas come from (and you should read all his novels in order to see his ideas germinate - including Amazons for the origins of White Noise) read Great Jones Street. Read it as an exceptional novel, not an OK Delillo novel.