NP DeLillo

[David Casseres]

I liked Ratner's Star too, but I would have a hard time explaining
why.  What I remember vividly: the vast airliner called a Sony 747,
and the ball game with ever-mutating rules, much like Calvinball in
the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip -- I wonder which came first.

On 6/3/06, Gabriel Jones <panopticnerve at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ha - Ratner's Star remains my favorite of DeLillo's and is still one
> of my favorite novels of the last 50 years.  So, tastes differ.  And I
> can understand why some people might not like it, but to describe it
> objectively as a 'stinker': well, golly, I'm told there are folks who
> think Gravity's Rainbow is a failure too.
>
> There is a consistent sense of claustrophobia to his work, yes, as a
> way to search out how discourse shapes consciousness - what it makes
> possible, what it limits, and the awareness of what's been left out by
> our discourse systems that we can't quite comprehend.  Ratner's Star
> is the most extreme form of this - it's a much richer novel than I can
> do justice to in the 2 minutes I have here, but there's a lot going on
> re: language and scientific knowledge & how they shape our perceptions
> and relations.  This stands as an odd contrast to the detachment that
> his style also reflects - that we are both part of and outside of
> discourse.  There's a lot on language games, on phenomenology, on
> consciousness.  I also think it's hysterically funny.
>
> it reminds me a lot of Dr. Strangelove in both examination of systems
> (of society, of consciousness, of technoscience) in all their
> dysfunction and pathology as well its remarkable black sense of humor.
>
> 'Great Jones Street' I thought was quite good too.
>
> 'White Noise' strikes me as pop DeLillo - nifty, breezy, clever, radio-friendly.
>
> The first section of 'Underworld' (published separately as 'Pafko
> Against the Wall') I would put in any time capsule to say to future
> civilizations say: look at what we were able to do.  The rest of the
> novel, not so much.
>
> His last two left me cold, especially 'Cosmopolis.'
>