This is the third time I’ve read Americana. I really need to work on the Thesis Monster, and it had been a year since I’d read the book, so I figured rereading it would be a good start. I loved it the first two times: it was probably my favorite DeLillo book (hovering there with White Noise). This time, though, I was bored out of my mind. Michael Douglas narrated it in my head (a la Wonder Boys), and he just droned on and on.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my love affair with Don DeLillo is permanently over. The turning point is when I was researching the Thesis Monster and realized that he just writes the same book over and over: some dude with postmodern angst is running away from identity-creating media to find his own identity. Okay, that’s not exactly the case with all of DeLillo’s novels, but they’re all basically about the same thing.
So much for the DeLillo Binge.
As much as I didn’t enjoy Americana this time around, there are things about DeLillo that I still do love. His language is beautiful. If I could make myself sit down and write a novel, I’d want it to sound like his.
Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the galop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps. Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation.
DeLillo’s style is beautiful. It’s just that I’ve become as jaded as the characters in his novels. David Bell would have no interest in reading Americana.
So. On to the Thesis Monster. Now, as reconnected with the novel as I can be, I have no excuse not to write. My outline is done: all I have to do is fill in the blanks between quotes. Because that’s what the Thesis Monster is: a series of quotes. The postmodern problem.
I’ve made a schedule of sorts. On weekday mornings, I work on the Thesis Monster, and that’s that. I’ve never been good for much after lunch, so the afternoon is mine. If I can be productive in the mornings, it’ll be done soon, and I’ll never have to look at it again. I’ll also be done with academia, which is another – much scarier – issue. But I have some time left.
This afternoon, I’ll ride my bike up to Palmer‘s, water some plants, and try to tackle The Moviegoer. I hated it when I read it at least ten years ago, but I change my opinions of books pretty frequently. The weather is nice, and I’m looking forward to propping my feet up and giving Walker Percy a second chance.
In other news, the Shreveport Library Book Sale was last Saturday. I usually don’t buy much of anything since everything is so disorganized and it’s so crowded. Here’s what I got this time:
I discovered once I got home that I already had The Poisonwood Bible, so I donated my copy to Charlotte. I haven’t read any of them.
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