> I ask him what attracted him to writing, whether he studied literature or was stirred by certain authors or books. "No, no," he says, "I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation, I don't know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."
There are many writers who deserved the Nobel prize but never received it. Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Proust, Tolstoy, to name a few. The prize has been so consistently politicized over the years that it's hard to see it as a measure of much of anything other than how much a bunch of Swedish academics happen to like that author.
If it were up to me I might pick Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy over DeLillo for a Nobel prize, but there are many other worthy non-American candidates
This is exactly the opening argument of the article, and the writer's response (in part) is, "Nevertheless the Nobel continues to exceed the Booker, the Pulitzer, and all other literary awards in its prestige, global impact, and ability to tip the scales toward immortality."
How many Nobel prizes have been so far? 120 or something like that. For more than a century of literature. By definition there will be great writers left out.
I don't know, maybe it is someone's fault if a system with arbitrarily defined rules expressly made for awarding those who deserve recognition doesn't award all those who deserve recognition?
Nobel Prize is just some dude who wanted to do something nice with money he made selling dynamite. There's no reason to imbue it with responsibility for picking which authors deserve to be immortalized.
Sure, it may be too much to say it's someone's "fault". My point is just that even the people who give Nobel prizes probably agree that the aforementioned authors deserve getting something at least very similar to it, they just didn't get it because of some fake scarcity that implies someone else deserved it "more". So although no one has any obligation to change the tradition, it might be a good idea to do so.
My sons first multisyllabic word was “OK Google.” 15 seconds later the Google Home was unplugged and it’s still sitting on the mantel unplugged two years later.
> That book mentions a baby whose first word is “Toyota.”
Been a while since I read _White Noise_. If my memory "serves", it's not "Toyota" and it's not a baby's first word but a meditative focalization of one of the characters on the Toyota model "Corolla".
The protagonist hears his daughter talking in her sleep:
She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.
Toyota Celica
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more.
From the article: "[White Noise]... represents better than any other literary text just how apocalyptic dread has become the inescapable ground note of everyday life."
Without expecting anything or even knowing DeLillo, I bought a cheap faulty copy of "Libra" a few years at a train station bookshop. It is a brilliant novel for reasons I am not nearly eloquent enough to describe, and I very much doubt that the point DeLillo wanted to make could be phrased in less than the novel's 400 pages (which I think is true for most (if not all) great novels and the main reason why I was always extremely sceptical of anything resembling the classic "write down what the book is about" exercise in school).
I had the exact same experience with DeLillo. The opening scenes with the boy travelling in trains with his face glued to the window as the train "smashed through the darkness" got me since I used to travel by suburban trains a lot. From there, a portrait of a man emerges that's the opposite of the usual biography. Biographies tend to be portraits drawn with a strong hand, dark pencil, clearly outlined, full of details and colors and leave no ambiguity. If intimate moments are at one end of the spectrum and their consequences are the far other end, DeLillo moves between the two like only a true craftsman can.
Of course, there is a gimmick in the book. I didn't realize that at first. I don't remember at what point and like usual gimmicks it hits you and you react as you realize whose story this is.
As an engineer, I live in a world full of definitions and determinate actions and consequences. Literature is what I have access to that constantly reminds me that there is more that meets the eye and truths are relative. Don DeLillo's literature ranks right up there.
>As an engineer, I live in a world full of definitions and determinate actions and consequences. Literature is what I have access to that constantly reminds me that there is more that meets the eye and truths are relative
It's a truth I dreadfully came to realize over the last few years. Not about literature, although that is a great way to figure it out and enforce the sensation, but about the world. Ideas, things that I took for granted for so long with my scientific and data nurtured mind no longer have the same hold. Like a glacier that forever seemed eternal they are now melting but not have not yet melted completely, I cannot see what's behind the glacier. That's were the dread comes in.
I read American Tabloid first and then Libra after learning that Ellroy cited it as a spiritual inspiration. I also enjoyed American Tabloid more. Libra is a character study of Oswald and a piece of post-modern fiction (about as much as I can say without spoiling things). Tabloid is more straightforward in terms of literary techniques, the plot is more compelling, and in my opinion bigger in scope - it tries to look at the whole system that would bring such an assassination to fruition (meaning, America itself). More than any book I've read it captures a "dark" vision of America - one driven primarily by violence, racism, greed, paranoia, hypocrisy, and corruption. It's got everything - Hollywood, the mob, CIA, FBI, Hoover, Hughes, Hoffa, Vegas, the Kennedys, Cubans, the Klan, and more - and yet it doesn't feel overstuffed. Definitely one of my favorite books.
I have never read DeLillo, but reading this makes me think not that he deserves a Nobel prize, but that the author of the article should stop holding the Nobel prize in such high regard. It's like being outraged that your favorite film didn't win an Oscar.
The first DeLillo book I ever read was Ratner’s Star, inspired by the many quotations Clifford Pickover interspersed throughout his mid- to late-nineties works.
One such quote haunts me to this very day: “No definition of ‘science’ can be complete without a reference to ‘terror’.”
Every book before Underworld is more like White Noise than they are like Underworld. Libra is probably the best one. If you like (American) football, then "End Zone" is good.
He's probably my favorite living author (although to be honest I mostly read books by long dead authors). I've read a few. I think Libra was the best one. I also read Falling Man, Cosmopolis, and The Body Artist. He has a wonderful writing style.
I've been trying to get through Ratner's Star for years. It's not bad but I suppose it's just not the most compelling.
Libra is great /if/ you are interested in historical fiction - specifically focused around the assassination of JFK. Mao II is one of my favorites, examination of terrorism and political violence, psychology, meaninglessness, etc...If you want something totally different Zero K is basically sci-fi.
I enjoy reading something that is written by someone passionate about the topic, and I enjoyed this perspective, but I disagree based on my admittedly limited experience with DD.
I've read white noise and zero-k, and found both underwhelming. To be fair, I read these after having read most of DFW work - which I find far superior - which probably spoilt it for me.
I didn't find the prose good enough to make up for the lack of a story. Nor the themes that interesting or well explored.
Based on the same limited exposure to DeLillo, I'd agree with you.
"Zero-K" was so boring, I dropped it maybe 75% way through. In general I enjoy both genre and "literary" novels, but Zero-K felt deliberately anodyne: meandering minimalist pseudo-scifi optimized for the sensibilities of the "New Yorker" readership.
As someone who loves to read but has no formal background in Literature, I'm very intrigued by the ways in which people rank authors so as to find the one most deserving of some award. The article provides a handful of criteria, including things like "striking and realized style", "consistency of excellence".. how are these measured? Can reasonable people disagree? I don't mean to say that it's all arbitrary. I have this feeling that it's not, but at the same time it's impossible to directly quantify or measure in a manner persuasive to everyone. I have no idea if Delillo is deserving or not, but the discussions sounding who is and who is not, what criteria are used, and how authors are measured against those criteria are the most fascinating part to me.
I'd heard GR was so great, tried to read it, abandoned it just a few pages in. Having watched too many award winning/artistically acclaimed films too, I now know to stay away from them. Seems they're more about the critics getting one up on someone than is it actually worth spending time on.
It's amazing but a pretty tough intro to Pynchon. If you're going to read him I would recommend "The Crying of Lot 49" (a fun short novel) or "Slow Learner" (A set of short stories). "Inherent Vice" would maybe be a fun one to start with too.
It's not for everyone in any case. One of my best friends jokes about the fact that every time I say I like a book, for a while she would buy it, read a chapter, hate it and not read any more.
there's a few points where people tend to give up on it. i myself stopped reading it twice at the giant cocaine adenoid, and again when the man chases the harmonica into the toilet. never finished it.
The opening scene of Underworld, enacting a baseball match, is some of the most electrifying writing I've experienced (& I dislike spectator sports, and know zip about baseball).
I completely disagree. I think Don Delillo has an unbelievably cool writing style (especially how he only writes one paragraph per page and makes sure his words LOOK AESTHETIC in addition to conveying meaning). But DeLillo has essentially zero significance in American culture.
No millennials read or connect with his work, and only very few boomers do. I find Delillo’s work largely hostile to readers that don’t share his exact super-wide frame of references and age.
I like DeLillo but the idea of giving him a Nobel is an absolute joke, save the Nobel for artists who actually influence other artists and cultures. DeLillo just doesn’t have much influence and his highly verbose style is transparently hostile.
I suppose you think Olga Tokarczuk or Svetlana Alexievich are more popular with millennials?
David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom both have called Delillo one of the greatest living authors. I and quite a few other people I know in my age range (mid-20s) have enjoyed him without sensing his work is irrelevant to our demographic. Even his denser works like Underworld read like a 'pageturner' relative to his contemporaries like Pynchon or even Wallace. Let alone other writers in the canon like Dostoyevsky.
My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic. Zero K specifically felt like a fan fiction version of William Gibson's non sci-fi stuff like Zero History. And most of what he is trying to convey he just says outright in a 3rd person omniscient voice.
I actually think he is very culturally relevant and influential but I sense that if you were to evaluate his writing through the lens of academic comparative literature like the Nobel Prize committee (not the standard literature should be held to imo) it would fall short of most other laureats, Bob Dylan notwithstanding
> My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic.
Could not agree more.
Bob Dylan and DFW deserve Nobels, IMO. Both of those guys have fans of all generations.
I feel like DeLillo is a “writer’s writer.” People like DFW applaud him, as you point out.
I just don’t agree that DeLillo has anywhere near the amount of influence as, say, DFW.
I’m frequently amazed how large and diverse DFW’s fan group is.
DeLillo seems to only appeal to writers. His work is very obscure, even within educated niches.
Nobel prizes, atleast in Literature, are given for a body of work and bodies of work take decades to create. Every decade, approximately, is different and every generation is very different. American literature has often been blamed for being insecular and very focused on the American way rather than having a universal appeal. I do not pass judgment on that but I will say that only writers that can appeal to fundamental societal truths, dig deeper into the superficial differences and unearth commonalities in the human condition will be considered great.
If the so-called millenials are not reading DeLillo, the onus is not on DeLillo to say things that appeal to them. Rather, the onus is on them to figure out what DeLillo is saying and see if they identify with him.
(Edit: I am not American and english is not my first language. I like American literature among others.)
Another American white man receiving the Nobel for literature? <- This will be the headlines in the Guardian. Why not pick African or Asian writers who don't write in English and aren't famous?
My point is that no matter who the Committee in Sweden choses, there will be people writing how stupid that decision was.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
> I ask him what attracted him to writing, whether he studied literature or was stirred by certain authors or books. "No, no," he says, "I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation, I don't know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-de...
And yeah, he should get the Nobel.