Customer Reviews

Running Dog

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

 

 

For anyone who is looking to get involved in the paranoiac, conspiracy-riddled world of Don DeLillo, Running Dog is a perfect jumping-off point. Replete with all the DeLillo standards-ambiguous, dangerous characters, postmodern disenchantment, the spectre of violence and war, voyeurism, as well as humor, compassion and loss-Running Dog serves as DeLillo 101. Before engaging in the complexities of White Noise, Underworld, Mao II or Libra (for which Running Dog is a kind of template), try this shorter, lighter version of DeLillo's later work. The subject, at least initially, is simple: in the mad dash for material conquests (in this case, an antiquated porno film supposedly depicting members of the Third Reich engaged in lewd sexual acts) the combatants lose sight of their motives, their souls, and most alarmingly the item itself. Commentary on war, sex, greed and our modern version of self-realization.

Running Dog is essentially a witty and sarodnic spy/intrigue/romance. DeLillo in a bar room brawl with Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Charles Willeford and Larry Flynt. It's like punk rock DeLillo. Filled with porn, sex, violence, apathy, lecherous men and empowered women and DeLillo's Hitler fixation, manifested here less incidentaly than in White Noise. For my money its the least indulgent and most readable and fun novel of DeLillo's ouevre. All Of Chuck Palahniuk's work is a sort of cross between Running Dog and Vonnegut's Sirens Of Titan and Cat's Cradle. If you like Palahniuk, then Running Dog will offer you a great bridge to step up to DeLillo. For those who were turned off to DeLillo after yawning through Underworld and its hype, then Running Dog will be a revelation. If you don't agree with Penguin Books and have a hard time considering White Noise to be one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, up there with Ulysses, The Big Sleep and Madame Bovary, (Don't worry-neither do I) take it from me- You'll love Running Dog. I won't bother giving you a plot summary because do you really need me to reiterate what the publisher and Amazon says above? Alrighty then. Running Dog's a lot of fun!

The characteristic strongest in Running Dog is ominous suspense, a coming-to from any angle. While it suffers from the De Lillo style of excessive psycho-analysis/stream of consciousness association, it is made up of meetings, usually between two people, sometimes three, in varied and interesting places.

An airplane sauna, in a car heading south on a straight highway, a Nude Reading room, an art gallery/apartment, a vollyball court in Central Park where tennis is being played, a limousine with St. Bernard puppies, a fire escape, magazine offices, an abandoned espionage training facility, a motel in the woods, a minibus, Capitol Hill, a Georgetown home, an apartment roof, and more.

At these places peoples jockey for information or sexual connection, seeking the treasure which incites them all, directly and indirectly into a void of contact and codes.

I found Running Dog engrossing, and was amazed at De Lillo's capacity for langauge and image. His dialogue scenes begin without formality and are influenced as much by the memory or his characters as their present intentions.

Searching for a long lost film which may or may not come to rank as a legendary smut film, over a dozen characters cross paths in attempts toward victory and knowledge. Time and space shifts across the country, and an America of double and triple dealings, hidden collections and taboo tastes, lost and won partnerships skirts along toward understood oblivion.

Originally published in 1978, 'Running Dog' is a provocative novel of ideas brilliantly disguised as a political thriller. It's also, incidentally, a wonderful time capsule of Seventies Americana and paranoia. Reviewers who criticize the book's lack of character development or large cast are missing the point of this novel (and much of DeLillo's fiction). Don DeLillo is a hyperintelligent, hyperliterate novelist who's in the business of upsetting our expectations, not fulfilling them. Case in point: this book begins like a police procedural (two NYPD cops discover a murdered corpse); we think we know where things are going; but instead of giving us the mystery story we expect, DeLillo curveballs his readers into a seriously twisted (in all senses of the word) story of political conspiracies, pornography, the mob, a film from Hitler's bunker, and much else...And those two cops from the beginning of the book? They vanish. We never see them again...

Bottom line: 'Running Dog' is a wild ride. Hop on. You won't regret it.

For me, the great pleasures of DeLillo are his absolute narrative control and his precise descriptiveness. Here's a quick example, with the character Selvy on the southwestern desert: "That day was like this one. A morning of startling brightness. Clarity without distracting glare. The sky was saturated with light. Everything was color." At the same time, DeLillo's narratives are sometimes about characters on meaningless quests-think "Mao II" or "Players". Read this book. But don't expect any edifying or enlightening commentary on life as it is lived, unless you are paranoid.

OK: a New York smut dealer and a lefty muckraking journalist team up to find a lost porno of Hitler in his last bunkered days, end up traipsing onto a secret government military-corporate web and high-tailing it across the American desert. As improbable as it all seems, the book leaps convincingly from post-60's liberal wreckage to government stoogery and fascism to the empty acquisitiveness of American society in the 70's, DeLillo's florid language making the jumps delightful to follow. With such disparate elements woven so seamlessly together, this is a real work of art, one of DeLillo's unknown gems, and a light-on-its feet read.

I'm not a big reader of crime fiction, although I do have a stack of Raymond Chandler books that I swear I'll get to one day. It does seem to me though that a lot of writers want to write Chandler style crime stories but because they're supposed to be post-modern they have to put some kind of odd existential spin on it, as if modern audiences can't handle something straightforward, relatively speaking. Of course, the other theory is that the author is just shoehorning their typical style into a genre they don't normally write in, which may be more the case here. What you have are all the usual elements of a Deillo story but adapted into a gritty noiresque tale so that everything gets kind of tweaked, the dialogue taking being a bit sharper and tougher but still definitely his semi-ironic style where people talk past each other and treat conversations more as a game to be won. His descriptions become a bit more honed, a bit leaner while still maintaining an eye for detail, but you get the idea that if this wasn't supposed to be a detective story then it would take twice as long to get to the end. The plot revolves around people trying to secure a film of what may be an amateur adult video made in the final days of WWII in Hitler's bunker, so you have people of power manuevering for it as well as folks involved in the erotic black market (as in "selling illegal adults products", not a sexy underground) and a spunky yet hardbitten reporter trying to piece it all together. Maybe. The central plot itself doesn't really seem that important as much as an excuse for a lot of entertaining scenes of people attempting to manipulate the crap out of each other and talk tough and try to decipher what the heck else everyone is planning. You have double agents and questionable motives and twists and it actually is a lot of fun in a weary and doom-laden fashion, the book reads a lot faster than I thought it would, but once you figure out that the plot is more or less window dressing for the stylistic hijinks, it gets easier. Thus the characters are more like caricatures and no one really develops but that doesn't seem to be the point. Tellingly the most effective part of the novel is when they finally screen the film and that feels the most like a true Delillo novel in its starkness. But while it's fun and everything, there's not much in the novel to really stick with you. I'm sure Delillo was taking it all quite seriously but it basically amounts to a extremely well written genre exercise. Worth the time but don't expect your life to be altered.

Running Dog is a fast paced, disorienting, paranoia-drenched trip through underground America. The plot is relatively simple: A reporter for a seemingly sludgy magazine called "Running Dog" is looking for a pornographic film of Hitler, supposedly taken just before his suicide. As the story progresses, we follow characters on different sides trying to find the film.
I suggest slowing down for reading this one: the plot gets pretty complex with who's trying to get what for whom.
This was the third Don Delillo novel I read, so I'd already developed a taste for him. It seems that no matter what book someone reads by Don Delillo, they won't like it, or won't start liking it until they're a long ways in. He's certainly the epitome of an acquired taste. If you don't like this novel, I'd read elsewhere and come back to it later.
One thing I love about this novel is that it made me realize how funny Delillo can be! An inexperienced assassin attempting to shoot up a bar and shooting about five feet above everyones head, a man at a bar describing his hilariously bizarre idea of the perfect spectator sport, and Don Delillo's killer dialouge, which never gets better than it does in this novel.
Read this if you've already read and loved Delillo. If you've never read Delillo and you start with this one and dislike it, don't be discouraged. He's often disliked on the first reading. But this book has hair-trigger suspense, humor, killer dialogue, and everything else you could ask for! Check it out.

Having recently read several of his excellent later novels ((*White Noise,* *Libra,* *Mao II,* *Cosmopolis*)), I was primed to be disappointed by this earlier DeLillo effort...and I wasn't disappointed in my expectation that I'd be disappointed.

*Running Dog* is a curious novel--a kind of metaphysical/existential detective story written in a sometimes jarringly noir style. This is the kind of novel in which the men all sound tough and jaded and so do all the women. No one actually calls anyone a `dame,' but it seems like they could at any moment. Its that kind of dialogue, especially in the early going, and it takes some time to adjust yourself to this cliché detective-fiction patois, especially if youre accustomed to the exquisite dialogue of DeLillo's later work. But you do adjust, and it does get better eventually, and by the end the novel hits its stride.

The "mystery" surrounds the legend of a film shot in Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II. There are rumors that its a Nazi porno flick starring the studly Fuhrer himself. Thats quite a juicy tidbit to build a novel around--I mean, how could anyone resist reading about that?--and DeLillo does a good job keeping one's decadent appetite `aroused' throughout although whats really on that film ends up being a shock a lot different than what you probably are imagining.

That's not a complaint, necessarily. *Running Dog* is, in the end, a `serious' novel with many of the themes that will eventually re-emerge more powerfully in DeLillo's masterworks. So, despite its detective-story trappings, you shouldnt look for the kind of neat resolution you might expect from genre detective fiction. That kind of resolution is not a part of DeLillo's world, not even this early in his writing career.

All in all, *Running Dog* is an interesting, literate, if not quite literary, thinking-man's page turner--250 pages of entertainment that doesnt insult the intelligence.

This is the first novel I've read by DeLillo, and it was a major disappointment. The author has a formidable reputation in American letters, so my expectations were high. The book starts out quite well and appears to be a police procedural, somewhat in the manner of Elmore Leonard (one of my favorite authors). Some previous reviewers have stated the central plot premise, the search for a supposedly hard core pornographic film shot in Hitler's bunker, in the final days of the Third Reich, that supposedly "stars" high-ranking Nazis and possibly Hitler himself. The book begins as highly readable and sustains a rapid pace for nearly the first half. The dialogue is crisp and realistic and the characters are well drawn. But then it falls apart. A large number of secondary characters are introduced, all of whom are cardboard and indistinguishable from one another. Moreover, the plot becomes incomprehensible. I couldn't figure out who was on which side--if indeed there were "sides"--and what they were fighting for, if indeed they were fighting for anything. Moreover, it probably doesn't make any difference. In addition, several seemingly important characters just disappear from the pages and are never seen again. I was kind of curious as to what happens to them, but I guess I'll just have to remain disappointed.

To be fair to DeLillo, this is supposed to be one of his lesser books, so I won't judge him by this production. I plan to read his other major books, and perhaps I'll develop a better sense of what he is like as a writer. However, I cannot recommend this book in any way.