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Don DeLillo

Americana Paperback – July 6, 1989

by Don DeLillo (Author)

126 ratings

Part of: Contemporary American Fiction (14 books)

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"DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country American nightmare doesn't have a dull or an unoriginal line." —Rolling Stone

The first novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence

At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination.

When, at the height of his success, the dream (and the dream-making) become a nightmare, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture and to impose a pattern on America's—and his own—past, present, and future.

Print length

377 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

July 6, 1989
Grade level

12 and up
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

7.77 x 5.04 x 0.73 inches
ISBN-10

0140119485
ISBN-13

978-0140119480
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In search of his roots, a successful but unhappy TV executive takes off for the heartland of America. "This first novel is peopled with characters alienated not only from one another, but from themselves. It has the smell of staleness and despair. It is also, with its deadly accurate observations, its veracious dialogue, and its consistency of view, brilliantly written," maintained PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Praise for Americana:

"DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country American nightmare doesn't have a dull or an unoriginal line."
—Rolling Stone

"Nearly every sentence of Americana rings true, an insistence upon the authenticity behind the stereotypes . . . DeLillo is a man of frightening perception."
—Joyce Carol Oates, The Detroit Sunday News

"There have been many—too-many—novels in which the protagonist tries to find himself: here is one in which he tries to lose himself."
—The New York Times

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (July 6, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 377 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140119485
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140119480
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.77 x 5.04 x 0.73 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #752,019 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,542 in Classic American Literature
- #20,322 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #39,299 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
126 ratings

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Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.

Customer reviews

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3 star		14%
2 star		8%
1 star		13%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Aren LeBrun

"And then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year."

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 5, 2021

Verified Purchase

Americana is a personal and at-times autobiographical novel by a young Don DeLillo that serves as an important touchstone for both wartime mid-60s America and DeLillo's epic body of work to come. It's easy to explain it away as a hip, jaded, ironic novel of postmodern sensibilities. A young, handsome television executive slowly loses his mind amid a funhouse of commerce and sloganeering. But in another fashion, the novel is also intensely modern in its themes and design. In the limited interviews he has agreed to, DeLillo has eschewed the "postmodern" label (in short, to borrow Frederic Jameson's definition, a writer whose work details "the cultural logic of late-capitalism") by describing himself simply as a novelist, a writer of novels. The second of the novel's four parts, for instance, is a near-direct allusion to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The overt theme of Americana is not subtle – America's launch into vast corporate-commercialism (achieved by way of global imperialism) has left in its wake a chasm of empty, malformed individuals, spoiled and stupid, purchasing items they don't need, watching TV shows they can't remember, wanting for something they don't know they're wanting for, haunted by a lowdown awareness that there is something more to it all than this. DeLillo lays this on thick on almost every page, but his use of language is fresh and very much his own. The subconscious theme of the novel is the ancient literary one: human intelligence suffers loneliness and disjointness in a world whose codes are shifting in some profound way all the time. DeLillo's deployment of language and character in order to communicate this message is masterful. It is clear he worked on this book for a long time, and discovered his skills as he was working on it. His prose is animated by the subconscious – what is described as a weakness ("plotlessness") can also be seen as his greatest strength, which is that his works navigate a terrain below where most novels care to operate. Whether or not you enjoy this style comes down to personal taste and to what it is you're after as a reader. But Americana ranks for me as one of the most useful books to read if you want to learn how to write properly about what a mediascape developing at the speed of Moore's law does to individuals' speech, psyche, politics, intellect, and relationships.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

earing

INTO THE VORTEX

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2010

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"Into the vortex of the cliche'" David thinks his wife will lead him. Later, Sullivan tells David, the main characdter, "David, you're a lovable cliche' " What are these references to a "cliche' " but a sly authorial nod to the greatest cliche' of all, the wriging of the the "great American novel". And yet, where's there's smoke there's fire, where there's a cliche' there's something that initially prompted it. And while DeLillo may make fun of the "great American novel" he comes tantalizingly close to writing one.

It's a sneaky novel, sneaky in that writing about the American experience, trying to make some sense of whether it is more a dream of innocence or a nightmare of technological power which has waged 20th century wars across the planet. It ends by deciding "the literature I had been confronting these past days [were] archetypes of the dismal mystery" The novel ends in "silence and darkness", David leaving arguably a low point in American history and culture, the place where JFK was assassinated in Dallas, and returning to where he began, New York, a "falling man" [interestingly, the title of his later post 9-11 novel} involved in advertising, the world in which "words and meaning were at odds".

Advertising, it is stated, moves the viewer from the "first to the third person", suggesting that American's relentless material success has removed authenticity from the experience of the individual and diminished his existence by making him into a consumer, a person who fulfills himself only by viewing images and trying to emulate them. A camera shot is described of a group of ladies with shopping bags, "a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof that they have been alive?" America, then, is a land of infinitely multiple and created images. To consume these images is to forget that you are a human being, that you are alive. Purposefully, most of this novel uses the third person; "David Bell" cannot continually exist as an "I" - he has been corrupted by America.

There are a number of fleeting references to James Joyce whose "young artist" could only escape the moral and artistic death of a corrupt Ireland by going into exile. It is no accident that early in AMERICANA, David Bell does use the first person, "I" and mentions that he too is in exile, "It's time to run the film again. . . not much to do on this island." The act of trying to solve the mystery of America, its contradictions and paradoxes, finally is overwhelming, and all one can do is to cinematically (the art form most developed in America) run the film again, take one more look at the images, and then . . . the rest is up to the reader.

3 people found this helpful

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J. Aaron Bellamy

Another dull and lurid year

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 10, 2000

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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.

13 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

The Outsider

Leave It All Behind

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

DeLillo's first novel is stranger even than his later novels. It starts off conventionally (for him) as a story about a young man who rejects success and decides to quit his job and make his own films. It has some great sections and is fascinating but goes badly off the rails in the final act.

An acquired taste, I enjoy his elliptical storytelling and his challenging prose. I don't think this novel represents him at his best. That came in the 1980's and later with White Noise, Underworld and other better, regarded novels. You can see the editor and publisher scratching their heads at this one, it is so good in parts and frankly, dreadful in other parts.

One of my favourite writers, at the beginning of his career, bursting with talent, but not the same judgement as the fully mature writer.

2 people found this helpful

Mr M Rochfort

Over rated rambling fantasy, aptly named.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 25, 2021

Verified Purchase

Relentless. Macho nonsense. Can’t be bothered to think of any other words to describe this desperate fantasy world. So there!

Harvey case

Classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 11, 2021

Verified Purchase

DeLillo captures the American dream, in all its fragmented reality.

W J Smith-Bowers

The Great American Novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

The novel brought fiction into the cinematic world - addressed the issues of America at the start of 1970’s and the nature of fiction. It’s alive and well in 2018.

José Gómez Burgos

*****

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 4, 2020

Verified Purchase

*****

One person found this helpful

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