Customer Reviews

Ratner's Star

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Names and Ratner's Star are probably Don DeLillo's two most difficult works. They're both dense, brainy and exacting, both laden with pages of abstract theory. In short, they are a long way from the funny, swiftly moving prose of White Noise, Players and Running Dog. Ultimately, though, because The Names is preoccupied with the nature and textures of language, it might be slightly easier for lovers of literature to enjoy. Ratner's Star, on the other hand, delves deeply in the heavy waters of space, time and complex mathematics. As someone who is scientifically and mathematically inept, I can't say I followed the more esoteric portions of the text, but I'm not sure that's the point. Rather, it seems to have been DeLillo's intention to deliberately lose the reader in order to illustrate that the sciences, while seeking to elucidate the wonders of the natural world, often lead us into heightened states of confusion. If you're thinking of reading Ratner's Star, prepare yourself for a challenge. Maybe not on the order of Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, but difficult nonetheless, particularly in the context of current fiction, which is very often spectacularly undemanding. In terms of plot and narrative, this book deserves perhaps a three (much of it is formless and untethered, a far from the relatively airtight Libra and Underworld). But it is an exacting and complicated book that, like so much of DeLillo's best work, invites us to take a closer look at who we are and what we believe in. And for that it gets five stars.

This is what DeLillo wrote after having spent a few years studying mathematics. It is a beautiful effort, albeit a bit different from much of his other work: no terrorists, no fear of death, and none of the characters is as memorable as the Gladney family from White Noise. It does, however, resemble White Noise is that it has the standard silly/almost-surreal professorial figures, and children wise beyond their years. DeLillo does show his Pynchonesque side, demonstrating thorough knowledge of math and physics; he is not just spouting catchphrases when he writes about these things.

Ratner's Star is mediocre DeLillo (which is still great!) for those not interested in math and science -- and perhaps top DeLillo for those who are interested in math or physics. Extra points for those readers who were intellectually precocious as kids: you will definitely identify with Billy, more or less.

The ending is wonderful, and I must say I didn't see it coming; although as soon as I read it, I thought "how could I not have seen it coming!" That is the mark of a well crafted novel.

I must admit that this book, even after two stabs at it, didn't thrill me the way other DeLillo novels can, and I did feel as though I were reading something more by Thomas Pynchon. Many of DeLillo's finest work seems to work on the exploration and twisting of its own metaphor, but filtered through extraordinary but still accessible characters, people who feel both rooted in and confused by the complexities of the world behind them. _Ratner's Star_ seems to want to delve in such a way, but through a situation far more absurdist.

Billy Twilling is a young math Nobel laureate who is pulled into a think tank that bombards him on all sides with eccentrics, from fellow mathematicians to the custodians. Yet many of these characters become redundant through their lack of introduction and propensity for monologue. Many moments of the book read like Kafka and Michio Kaku co-writing an episode of _Dragnet_. Twilling's main job is to decipher a coded message received from outer space, but of course his progress is hindered and his job outright disregarded by many in Field Experiment One. Eventually, the book breaks down in plotline and form itself when Twilling is pulled underground into a new project that is off the charts.

There are many delights in this book--Twilling himself is a wonderfully concise and hilariously unhumorous boy. DeLillo shows his skill at even comic timing on the page. The scenes with a mathematic precurser who has banished himself to a hole in the ground and the meeting of the esteemed Ratner himself during a torch ceremony are wonderful, yet I didn't find the book as a whole challenging with its exploration of metaphor as DeLillo does in later books. There is a wide expanse of characters, but the ecentricities become the focus of the book, not the crucial ideas, and the eccentricities become a little formulaic at times, even in their seeming randomness.

This book has quickly become one of my favorites. A beautifully written novel about language, mathematics, the fear of death, and an individuals place within the complexity of reality. There are sentences within this book that made me read them six or seven times they were so beautiful. An exceptional work that i cannot wait to read again.

The novel is a thing of great power and beauty, not limited to the works that populate the "best seller" list. Unfortunately, in America, we have been conditioned to expect instant gratification and understanding, whereas truly great works of art require the attention and concentration of a great reader.

Ratner's Star is, according to Mr. Delillo himself, his favorite of all his novels. The reason for this, I can only imagine, is a true sense of pride in having finished it and accomplished something so dense and difficult...and difficult it is. This is not easy reading. The language is a conglomeration of mathematics and science, of speculation and spiritual dimension.

This is a novel by a relatively "new" writer (at the time) wishing to flex his intellectual muscles and perhaps prove to the world at large that he is a voice to be reckoned with in the future of American writing. Cormac Mccarthy also did this with his incredible novel "Suttree."

Many reviews I read seem to expect something from a novel: a very specific and easy to understand plot, wonderful characters, and maybe even some twists and turns. But true literature challenges the reader to step beyond these confines and give himself over to ideas and turns of phrase. This novel is like a dream in which all is understood while in the midst of it, step away for too long and you will lose all sense of time and place.

Of course, anyone reading Delillo is already aware of how he writes, his work is not tailor made for the ADD generation. His work takes time and patience to appreciate, just like great paintings hanging in a museum, to truly recognize the genius at work you can't just walk through the room. You have to stand there, motionless, and study the brush strokes, the amount of skill and effort that went into creating what you're looking at. For this reason alone Ratner's Star stands out and above, a novel of vast ideas and ingenious philosophy. It is a firm demonstartion of Mr. Delillo's power with words and his grasp on what a novel was meant to be...a tool to shape modern thought through one means or another. Granted, they are just words on a page, but they are also so much more than that, just like a sunset is much more than colors in the sky.

In this strange book Don Dellilo's focuses his literary skills to the bizar world of mathematical geniuses and ultimately ends up demonstrating why mathematics is only as correct as logic allows it to be. The book centers around the genius kid, Billy, who enjoys phenomenal gifts in Mathematics and a suspicious relationship to elderly persons whom he continuously accuse of all sorts grossness.

Billy is invited to participate in a top secret research project where he encounters a fascinating array of persons; including the brilliant mathematician Endor, who have chosen to live in a hole after his attempt on cracking a extraterrestial code and the enigmatic Mohole, with his flimsy theory on Moholean relativity and garage sale of "vintage art films" such as "Aunt Polly's Banana Surprise" and "What the Butler Did".

As a mathematician myself I find this book a a fantastic achievement. It's certainly the only book I have ever read that is full of wit and slapstick, while centering around the strange world of modern mathematics. The book is stuffed with brilliant prose and a insane character gallery, but is still not without flaws, mainly that it contains to many wasted side stories that does nothing for the plot. So if you are looking for a introduction to Don Delillo I suggest you go elsewhere (like Libra or White Noise). The avid Delillo fan or math lover will however find this book a fascinating and enormously ambitious achievement.

For those looking for a bit of light reading, I would advise against this book. True, very little of DeLillo is easygoing, but this, his fourth novel, makes his others read as easily as the likes of Grisham or King. Ratner's Star can perhaps be best described as DeLillo does Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." It focuses on a group of quirky scientists and mathemeticians trying to decipher what they believe are messages from extraterrestrials, and the crazy "adventures" they have in the process. There are lots of great moments in this book, great humor, and the central message (the more we learn, the less we know) is very cleverly displayed in true DeLillo fashion. However, the writing is so confusing and dense in most places that it hardly seems worth it except for the truly dedicated DeLillo fan.

Early Delillo novels aren't exactly honed affairs. I mean, all the elements are there but the sharpness of his vision wasn't quite in place at the beginning, so you get good ideas and great prose and it doesn't really come together into anything awe-inspiring, even if it reads well and it still way smarter than most other books. Ratner's Star is probably the first one to really feel complete, even if it's not all the way there just yet. Its vastly more esoteric than his other novels, while it deals with the same themes of alienation and loneliness that normally characterizes his work, here he always throw in a bunch of high theory science just to make things more interesting. The plot of the book involves a bunch of scientists working on trying to decipher a message from a distant star. To help, they bring in a child genius, Billy, who has won the Nobel Prize in mathematics. From there he spends the rest of his time bouncing the various eccentric characters off each other and letting them interact over the course of the book. A lot of time people are throwing extremely complex sounding theories back and forth, which may or may not be actual theories (they sound good but I'm not a mathematician, and I have no idea how much research he did for this), some of which are actually useful and some just reflect the personalities of the people coming up with them. As it goes along Billy eventually winds up working on some other project deep in isolation with an even odder group of scientists. If you were reading them chronologically (which I'm not but bear with me) this is the first book that really "feels" like Delillo, it's exploring themes but also trying to puzzle through what all the chatting means, so it feels a bit more focused, instead of vamping on a topic until it reaches the end. The characters don't ever feel totally three dimensional, because they are wacky scientists but he imbues them with enough so that they aren't total stereotypes. The point of it seems to be that the more you know the less you understand, as if you have a whole bunch of people who can't at all relate to each other or the real world. The science project itself is just an excuse to get everything together and bounce them off each other, and the ending basically reflects that. His prose is sharper here, without showing off, keeping what could be an utterly boring story moving along nicely, never getting bogged down in all the science, but not skimping on it either. There are a few passages that are downright brilliant in composition. And when he gets a little experimental toward the end, it feels right, in the sense its a culmination of what's gone before and not "well I feel like doing this now." That said, the book didn't blow me away, but it was surprisingly readable and entertaining given the subject matter. In a way it also pointed toward what was to come in later novels. Probably the first sign that he might be able to hit a stride, and stick with it.

Ratner's Star is one of those teasingly annoying cultural phenomena that arise when an artist you really like and admire does something you neither admire nor enjoy (other examples being most of John Lennon's solo stuff, Umberto Eco's attempts at being funny, and Georges Perec's attempts at being unfunny.) It's about a teenage maths genius who goes to an enormous convention where the finest minds available are trying to decipher what they believe to messages from aliens. The book is deliberately flat, formal and non-naturalistic (confronted with a menacing pigeon, a terrified minor character confesses that he can't run away because, as a child, he never learned to run - "I've always admired it in other people, this marvellous ability to run.") So okay, it's funny. But there's a feeling that DeLillo was running on empty. His love of jargon and technical languages is indulged to the absolute max, and the book works out its jokes with remorseless mathematical precision. The fear and violence that keep his other books moored in reality aren't as appropriate here, and the reader's eyelids start to droop. It does have one classic one-liner: "Cadillac. The Rolls-Royce of Automobiles."

Don DeLillo fans should turn to this very fine novel after reading the more recent "White Noise and beyond" novels. Although it has all the master trademarks of great DeLillo writing--precision word choice, stunning images and complex ideas, in this case dealing with science and technology--in many ways it is unique among his works. The plot has been stripped bare, replaced by an almost Dickensian range of brilliantly drawn characters (many seen for only a few short pages), and all of it revolving around the main character, the prodigy child-mathematician. The novel is also perhaps the funniest next to "White Noise" and "End Zone" Be warned, this is one of those "big" novels but one you'll want to read again many times.