Here is a song for this review. I like the original better, but this cover isn't too shabby either:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX7QAn...I'm going to throw out an idea. Maybe it's not really a good one, or true or maybe it's something that's obvious, which all of the above are probably the case for most of my ideas but here it goes: when you get right down to it, America is a country without history. Instead we're a nation of stories and myths. We have the stories of the founding fathers that people like Glen Beck cry over, we're white-washers of what Manifest Destiny entailed a la Rush Limbaugh on his day before Thanksgiving show of his past year, we're glorifiers of larger than life figures like Big Bill Haywood and Alexander Berkman (I don't want to leave the radicals out of my theory here). As a general consensus we mythologize. This is nothing new, just looking at writers from the early part of the 20th Century like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson we see the lie of middle America torn apart. We see the good moral backbone of our country exposed as being as vapid as the coasts (which we already knew to be cesspools, those immigrants soiling our soil). In our hearts I like to think we all know that there is no mythical 'America', that the heartland isn't pure, that westward path isn't an escape from anything. That the same hardships, the same bullshit, the same whatever you want to call it, is here and there and everywhere. Maybe it is just called something different. Not that things can't be better somewhere, but there is only another here. I'm going to ignore those lost young souls of middle America who come East to populate places like Brooklyn and free themselves from the provincialism of wherever they are from. Maybe they do find something better, we all have the chance of finding somewhere better. Those people aren't looking for America anyway, they are looking for a city. America isn't the coastal cities. At a certain point maybe most of us buy into the story of going West (which ever way West actually is). Maybe it's hardcoded into our DNA, since those of us of European descent are mostly all the descendants of people who packed it up and moved to the 'unknown' New World because they couldn't cut it where they were from for one reason or another. Happy successful people don't just pull up stakes and go to a totally foreign place to live the rest of their lives, severing ties, start afresh. Miscreants, dreamers, those unhappy with their lot in life, failures, the oppressed, people who have lives that are so awful that a big gamble on something new is better than what they are living in, rubes fooled by silly stories of streets paved with gold these are our forefathers. Not that I'm passing judgement. It makes me wonder if we aren't a nation of people that dissatisfaction is something we've inherited, and now we have no farther to really go. No more unchartered lands to explore. But coupled with the dissatisfaction are the larger than life stories of America. The stories that some of us can't live up to. Comparing ourselves to the stories we learn as history our own lives can be seen as failures. I don't know if any of this is making sense. In the post-WWII times going West, leaving the confines of the rigid East Coast is in a way synonymous with finding one self, with finding something more authentic. It's the lure of that schmuck Kerouac, that the real life is somewhere out there on the open road, in the purer towns, or whatever you think is out there that is not here. As if there is someplace that the real you can be found, at some Burning Man hippie bullshit Rainbow Festival or whatever better city or more real experience there is out there. Americana is an anti-On The Road. It's a journey of a fairly despicable protagonist, who is an almost Patrick Bateman like vacuum of a person (minus the ultra-violence towards anyone) who takes a cross country trip to 'find' himself through a trip through small town America and making a movie about himself. That is the quick plot overview of the book. I got to an impasse here. I had no idea what to write so I went to the grocery store. On the way I stepped on some black ice at the corner and fell. A man was behind me and instead of offering me a hand or even a word like, are you ok, or even walk around me he stepped right over me, lightly kicking. I stood up and called him a fucking asshole and he scurried across the street. I wanted him to slip on some ice himself and then maybe have a taxi or a bus run him over. I was thinking then when I was in the grocery store that this is the kind of thing that people think of when they think of New York and the kind of scene in a movie where the guy would then say, that's it I'm through with rude assholes, were moving to the country. And I thought of a winter about 15 years ago (wow that just made me feel really old), when I was living at home and delivering pizza. My parents were away, driving my sister down to school in North Carolina and we had a shit ton of snow. Like over a foot, and I had no idea how to use the snow plower, or maybe it was broken, we always seemed to have broken snow plowers back in those days. And I had to go to work so I went outside to dig my way out of the driveway. The plow had come by fairly recently so there was a big wall of snow at the end of the driveway that was kind of packed and heavy. Across the street was our elderly neighbor out with his snow blower. I was shoveling and kind of hoping he'd offer to help me with his snow blower, but I wasn't expecting it. Now this isn't the kind of heartwarming story about the man who lived in the country / now suburbs his whole life doing something nice. Instead at one point started to clear off an area that it was close enough to send all of the snow shooting right on to me. He could have moved the shooting thing to aim another direction but he didn't. Instead over and over again he kept shooting snow right at me, oblivious like (or I think it was oblivious). Two incidents of people being inconsiderate assholes in two different locales (of course there are lots of incidents of people being nice in both locales, but I'm in an annoyed / depressed mood right now so I won't talk about them). Return to talking about the book Greg. I'm not sure what to write about the book. Parts of it were really depressing to me, but not in any way I can put my finger easily on. The book is about 'finding yourself' but with the realization that finding yourself is always a pointless task since you're always right there with all the baggage and shit that comes with you. But that is cheapening the book, it's about much more than that. I really really liked this book. There were parts I didn't care for too much, but overall it was a great read. It has the energy and immediacy of a great first novel, where it is like the author is trying to jam as many themes and ideas into the pages of his book as possible, because he might not ever get another chance to get everything out. But he's not too heavy handed with everything he is trying to get across, some of the great subtly that is in his later work is already present here. There is something about the work that feels like it fits in with his latest book Point Omega, but it's not nearly as sparse and feels more like a young man instead of an older man's novel. I feel like there is a lot I want to say about this novel, but words are failing me and even the internal words that make up the never-ending inner-monologe in my head are faltering too. I want to read this book again at some point. I don't think I would recommend this to anyone though, there is too much of a chance that what I like about it so much is outside of the actual words on the page and that it's just the way the text touches on to my own thoughts that made me like it so much.
It seems that this has only entered the pop culture discourse as a sort of proto-American Psycho, based around the idea that its first segment is about the shallow nature of corporate America and the personality-free drones that make their fortunes within the confines of that system. I don't quite agree with that, because I think it ignores two key interlocking facets of this novel. For one, the "office politics" segment only lasts about a hundred pages, before David Bell (who most would hold as this novel's Bateman) hits the road. Secondly, Bell hits the fucking road. Bateman is content to ride the wave, to keep up with his double-life as corporate executive and mass murderer. Bell wants more than Bateman, wants more than to be a shallow, personality-free drone, and I think that makes him a more complex and therefore interesting character than Bateman. Then again, I prefer DeLillo to Ellis by a long shot, so what're you gonna do.Anyway, Americana is DeLillo's first novel, and it's astounding how much of his act he had figured out from the beginning. Like the man's more famous later works, it's haunted by the idea of death, features mass media heavily, and is full of deliberately awkward exchanges that might be off-putting to some but are hilarious and endearing to me. It's also more of a "concept novel," per se, than a "plot novel." DeLillo is that sort of author, after all. It also introduces his idea of using childhood events as motivators for later actions, a concept explored to its fullest in his two best novels, Libra and Underworld, and even has a bit of White Noise's suburban satire and Mao II's crowd dynamics. Granted, Ratner's Star also tried to do a lot of these things, but this book seems either more confident, more within DeLillo's early abilities, or both.Of course, there are downsides. Bell still isn't as terrific of a character as some of the fascinating people DeLillo would go onto develop, the desert island subplot is sort of useless, and the whole last act could probably have been done without. Despite all that, it's still a fine first novel that deserves to be remembered on its own steam and not just in relation to another, more famous book. I'm now a little more excited about early DeLillo than I was when I read Ratner's Star.
What do You think about Americana (1993)?
Exquisite. Prescient. An incredible debut from the best living American novelist. Like Mad Men's Don Draper, DeLillo's David Bell doesn't know who he is, and like Draper he is largely a fiction to himself and the world (though not as ostensibly as Draper). His journey of discovery tears him down while holding a mirror up to ourselves, our culture. The whole novel, for me, was a prequel to a single anecdotal story related by a secondary character (Sullivan) toward the end. What a writer DeLillo is. He is nothing shy of a genius. No detail escapes him. The story drags a bit in the second act, but I didn't care. I already know who I'm dealing with. DeLillo will reward me. I can't believe I save this for last. Read it. Read it. Read everything the man writes. And for the record, nobody writes about baseball like Don DeLillo.
—Vincent Louis
Americana von Don de Lillo - eine Enttäuschung Leider ein typisch amerikanscher episch breiter "Roman", komplett ohne Aussage, Tiefgang, Verstand, voll mit Gedankensprüngen und sinnlosen Hintergrundgeschichten, eines nach dem anderen. So wie die freundliche klischeehafte oberflächliche amerikanische Lady, die völlig geistlos aber höflich permanent vor sich hinplappert, nur um die Stille, vor der sie sich so fürchtet, mit sinnfreien Phrasen und Gschichtln zu füllen.Und das nennen die Kritiker dann ein großes Werk mit einzigartiger Handschrift, ein fesselndes Stück amerikanischer Zeitgeschichte? Je blöder, unverständlicher und pseudointellektueller, desto besser? Also ich verstehe das gar nicht. Ein Roman sollte doch eine Aussage vermitteln!Ach ja - was auf fast 500 Seiten passiert, ist in ein paar Sätzen erzählt: Typen in einer Fernsehanstalt spielen blöde Machtspielchen und tun die meiste Zeit nur so, als ob sie arbeiten würden. Mann fährt herum filmt ein bisschen und brät mit Vorliebe Frauen mit Freund an, um sein kleines Ego etwas mit Selbstbewußtsein aufzuwerten. Mann hat Sex, Filmcrew erzählt so nebenbei kryptische Familiengeschichtln, sinnloser Film wird fertiggedreht. Basta! Wenn Ihr noch irgendwo ein bisschen mehr Substanz aus diesem grauenvollen Machwerk herauszuzeln könnt, seid bitte so lieb schreibt und erklärt es mir, denn ich habe wirklich nicht mehr gefunden. Bedauerlicherweise habe ich noch einen ganzen Stapel wichtiger amerikanischer Literatur zu Hause herumliegen, den ich Zug um Zug abarbeiten möchte, und ich fürchte mich jetzt mittlerweile schon sehr davor ;-)
—Alexandra
Delillo's debut novel from the early 1970s. You can see the rudiments of some of what he went on to develop in his more famous later novels. The astonishing word explosions are here a plenty " he was laughing in an exaggerated manner, overdoing it, creating the laugh as if with ceramics". There are some wonderful free-form streams of consciousness, part poetry, part jazz, particularly in the ravings of a radio disc jockey.But for all that, the book does not quite hold together. Unusually for Delillo, the protagonist is a fully-fledged character, in this case New Yorker TV Executive David Bell. His character arc of a successful man stripping himself back trying to find the authenticity of experience, reminded me very much of the protagonist of the later "Cosmopolis". But there the unburdening takes place over a much shorter time, during the course of one day, while here the quest for authenticity itself is as much without as within; the "Americana" of the book's title. Part 1 of the book is a wonderfully acerbic and accurate portrayal of office politics and paranoia and strictly defined gender roles, before the onset of the digital age and greater equality for women. Jockeying for positioning, fear of the sack, illicit sexual relationships with secretaries and yet the women holding all the true power within the office, because they hold information on everyone. The nature of the office prankster too is wonderfully imagined. Part 2 is Bell casting back into his childhood and is perhaps the part that didn't work for me. Not because it wasn't beautifully rendered within a wholly believable psychology, but because it stuck out from the flow of the rest of the book through being an extended flashback. yes it helps inform some of the later book, but not significantly enough to merit being here I felt.Part 3 sees the beginning of a purposeful road trip with 3 companions, that slides over into a vanity project for Bell as he stops off on route to shoot a personal film other than the one on the Navajo Indians he is supposed to be doing. This was an interesting extended metaphor, as the film is to stand for Bell's own interiority, but is utterly abstract where he is grappling to pin his own gnawing hollowness down. The aimlessness of the characters from the Mid-West town he employs to act out his words in the script only reinforces his agonising distance from nailing his own psyche down on celluloid.Part 4 is a truly aimless road trip towards Texas, as Bell has sacrificed everything now. His friends are returning to New England. He has foregone the navajo assignment and surrendered his job back East. This section seemed to be framing the state of the nation emerging from the 60s, with Hippy casualties still clinging to alternative lifestyles.So not entirely convincing, but serving notice of Delillo's huge talents that were fully realised in later novels.
—Marc Nash
