Bones, Scapel, Sutcher, Oops! Book

Looking down at Krok's comment (comment number 1 and the only comment as I write these words), I have to agree. Maybe not with the ultimate ranking of DeLillo novels, but this is a remarkably under-appreciated work.

I doubt anyone has been paying attention, but I've been on a very slow and only periodically remembered task to read all of the DeLillo novels leading up to Underworld with the rough theory that Infinite Jest is a response or homage or a something to the pre-Underworld DeLillo. I meant to read them in order, but I realized I don't own Players yet, and the most recent troll on Karen's review of Underworld, made me want to dive back in to my mini-mission and I guess it's ok to skip a book, as long as I go back to it before I read Underworld.

DFW updates from this book? Some similar themes, but nothing really new. The film that everyone is after feels like The Entertainment in the way people are reacting. Besides some characters feeling sort of similar to ones that DFW populates Infinite Jest with there wasn't anything as overt here as in Great Jones Street or End Zone (you can find my reviews for these in my shelves, I'm too lazy to link to them even though this is probably costing me a few votes). I've been a lazy and distracted reader lately so I might have missed things.

The book? It's quite good. After Ratner's Star, which made me want to stab my eyes out with a rusty screwdriver rather than continue reading the book, this was great. I have some complaints, it feels a little underdeveloped. I think it's good as it is, but I feel like he could have done more with the characters, he has so many really good characters here but they are given a really limited amount of space to live in. This should have been his first BIG book, he had the story and the characters were more than just a series of quirky shadows spouting stylized dialogue like too many of the ones that populated RS. Maybe that is IJ's debt to this book, DFW gave the story line of the 'film' room to develop, I'm sort of grasping for straws here and I just thought of that, so I'm not sure if I stand behind it.

Ignoring RS and not having read Players, I'm still going to say that DeLillo's early / 1970's work is great. Jimmy Cline, etc. made a comment on Karen's above mentioned review (he's not the troll), he said, "I'm just conjecturing here, but it seems that his work does not age well at all, and that when his pomo navel-gazing gets at all over the top, the critics just pounce on him like rabid dogs. This is about Underworld, so I can't weigh in on that book, but I would say that DeLillo's early work is going to age quite well, he plays with some post-modern tricks in these early books, but he is more interested, it seems, in creating his own overly stylized version of America and the author, DeLillo, never appears to be making any appearances. Compared to the work of say John Barth, which mostly has aged as well as some hideous Park Avenue woman with too many face lifts and botox injections, there is still a freshness to the early (non RS(why is this one DeLillo's favorite early novel? Why?!?!) work. These early novels are quite good, maybe not developed as fully as they could be, maybe they could be longer and the themes delved into a bit deeper, the characters given some more room to stretch their legs and all of that, but they are still (in my not-so-humble opinion) some of the highlights of that dreary decade known as the 70's when authors appeared in book jackets wearing awful turtlenecks and people had key-parties and swinger orgies in between group readings of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Now on to the 1980's with DeLillo.

Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.

She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.

Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.