IVIV Chandler

[Bekah]

I looove DeLillo.    My favorites in order:

Underworld
The Names
Libra
Mao II
Falling Man
Running Dog
The Body Artist
White Noise
Cosmopolis
(I have the early ones on my shelf unread - there's a new one,  "Point  
Omega" coming the first part of next year.

Themes - paranoia including terrorists,  media and its relationship to  
perception of reality, disintegration of the family, consumerism,

The following is snipped from the Wiki article on DeLillo - from the  
section Themes and Criticism:

Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis,  
Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace have cited DeLillo as an  
influence. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four  
major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon,  
Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the  
classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." Asked if he  
approves of this designation DeLillo has responded "I don't react. But  
I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American  
novelist."[9]
Critics of DeLillo allege that his novels are overly stylized and  
intellectually shallow. Bruce Bawer famously condemned DeLillo's  
novels insisting they weren't actually novels at all but "tracts,  
designed to batter us, again and again, with a single idea: that life  
in America today is boring, benumbing, dehumanized...It's better,  
DeLillo seems to say in one novel after another, to be a marauding  
murderous maniac—and therefore a human—than to sit still for America  
as it is, with its air conditioners, assembly lines, television sets,  
supermarkets, synthetic fabrics, and credit cards."[10] George Will  
proclaimed the study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra as "sandbox  
existentialism" and "an act of literary vandalism and bad  
citizenship."[10] DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but  
being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least  
to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad  
citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what  
power represents, and often what government represents, and what the  
corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to  
mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job."[10]

Bekah


On Aug 19, 2009, at 12:48 PM, John Carvill wrote:

> 2009/8/19 Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com>:
>> Liked Libra and Underworld a lot. I always thought that Stone based
>> his movie more on Libra than the Garrison book.
>
> Ah, looks like there's a consensus on Libra!  Interesting comment on
> Stone's JFK. I think I read a quote from De Lillo, when asked what he
> thought of Stone's film, he replied, "It was like Disneyland for
> conspiracy theories." Not entirely sure what he meant by that but I
> took it as a negative.

http://web.mac.com/bekker2/