I will grant that it's an entertaining book, and yes, it certainly did have some powerful sentences. What you noted is certainly extremely important and I fully accept that justification for the choice of language used, only I think, as you said, that DeLillo forgot the reader (good phrase). Compare to something like Nabokov's Pale Fire, which has a similar sort of narrator (super pretentious faux literary executor of Shade's estate) underlying the particular language used, but in which the reader is most definitely not forgotten.

The biggest problem with White Noise is how the style sometimes draws attention to itself through cheap jokes. It's really a shame because much of the writing is truly beautiful. I love, for example, the description of the station wagons entering campus at the beginning of the novel. But then you get into the dialogue and it's just really bad. Unlike most I don't have a problem with every character speaking through DeLillo's voice per se--especially when they still maintain a distinct sense of identity like they do in Mao II--but White Noise contains dialogue like ""Did they wear hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?" Of course that line in particular is famous for it's badness and most of it isn't quite that egregious, but a book often held to be one of the greatest of the second half of the 20th century should not be allowed to have a joke quite that awful in it. It--and moments like it--convey a very smug sense of self-satisfaction that I don't think is backed up by any significant formal architecture; it's all just surface-level postmoderny pyrotechnics. I'm pretty sure DeLillo's a writer who starts his books with no clear idea of where they are going, and I think it really shows in White Noise, because you can almost see his maturity as a prosesmith improve as the book goes along. The problem is that by the time his prose has improved, you're already feeling deadened by all the aesthetic mistakes from earlier and you're just finishing the book to finish it. Or at least that's how it worked for me. Mao II has moments of pretension, but overall it's a much better book because every word in every sentence in every paragraph feels like its part of an interlocked thematic and tonal system. I also found that it improves when you look up the various sorts of socio-cultural events and phenomenons it is concerned with, while I remember the reverse happening with White Noise. I've also recently reread the first chapters of Libra and Underworld just to get a taste of how soon he started to improve after White Noise and how long that improvement sustained itself, and the answer is quickly and long. Both of those opening sections are far more powerful than anything in White Noise, imo.

On a different subject, I read some of the one star reviews of Finnegans Wake on goodreads yesterday, and my god, every single one of them is just awful. The most egregious one was someone whose main criticism was basically quoting a critic (who said something to the effect of: the greatness of the book lies in its openness to interpretation*) and then offering this luminous critique: if someone is going to write a book, they should SAY SOMETHING. Ugh. Stupid stupid stupid. I wonder if Nabokov actually has an extended discussion of why he hated Finnegans Wake, since it would be nice to read a criticism of the novel that doesn't amount to someone giving up because the language is hard, and then saying stupid things trying to pretend they have a deeper criticism. So far I've only seen Nabokov's critique-in-passing of the novel. I know roughly what his critiques are (and they're the right, interesting kind), but I'd love to see the substance of them. Or the substance of any criticism that actually engages with the work on its own terms and finds it faulty from there.

P.S. Here is a great argument in favor of the book. Read aloud:




*Depending on how this interpreted, it could well be true, but if it's interpreted as this reviewer interpreted it, it is partially true but substantially false.

Bold: I had no idea is what thought that highly of, and by no means agree. Though I would guess it has to do with...
Italics: Maybe because the postmodern elements are so obvious it seems like an obvious choice to bring up in discussions of postmodernism (especially if you're making a distinction between early and late postmodernism)? I noticed that and to be honest it didn't bother me but that may be because I was just thinking of it as a random postmodern book than one that was that highly thought of; DeLillo was just recommended to me by my creative writing professor and that's the first I heard of him, so I allowed it some badness I otherwise wouldn't have. I felt the same way about the jokes in the family conversations as I did about the supermarket; he should have just used them less.

Again I really enjoyed it even with the flaws. So Underworld is much better?

DeLillo's a huge name in American literature of the second half of the 20th century. Harold Bloom, for example, included him in his list of the four greatest living American authors (the others being Pynchon, McCarthy, and Roth).

Yeah but my university barely offers any courses dealing with any novels after the 1940s, and sometimes my individual research doesn't lead me to certain people.

Fair enough. I ran into DeLillo early on in my exploration of literature. I think it went Palahniuk -> Bret Easton Ellis -> DeLillo.

And I think the only classes in which I read any significant amount of American post-war literature were these two creative writing workshops I took, both with the same professor, who made it a point to expose her students to stories, poetry, novels, memoirs, etc. that have been published in the last few years. Which makes sense - if you're going to be a writer, you should learn about the current milieu in the publishing world, who publishes what, what people are looking for, and generally what people are writing about so you can be part of some cultural dialogue or something.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Anyone who complains about great literature not being written today (as I have before) is just wrong and ignorant. I have not had as intense an experience reading a short novel since I first read The Great Gatsby in high school. I am often disappointed in the yearly literary prizewinners, but this absolutely deserved the Booker. I'm going to have to read more Barnes. I don't even want to discuss what the book is about because I went in knowing nothing and was better for it. I'll just say that it's the most profound examination of selective memory and the way we can deceive ourselves about our own character that I have ever encountered in literature, and one of the best "man looks back upon his life" stories ever. If Wild Strawberries can be a classic in the film world, then this--which is much much better--should in fairness count as an even greater classic in the literary world. And you can read it in two and a half hours. Just amazing, and beautifully written. Highest recommendation.

=] i've read 10-1/2 chapters, porcupine and arthur & george. and seems we own sense of an ending too.

http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/books-that-shaped-america/


nostalgia attack/10

Finished Richardson's Emerson bio, started Nietzsche's Genealogy.

Last night I finished Endgame and started The Sound and the Fury. The summer of re-reads, apparently.

Why Read the Classics?
By Italo Calvino, Translated by Patrick Creagh
The New York Review of Books
Volume 33, Number 15 · October 9, 1986
http://whumspring2010.files.wordpress.c ... alvino.pdf

Sat down with A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter in Barnes and Noble today. Don't confuse this for the plethora of sentimental fluffy Jane Austen bandwagon shit. Because of its innovative blend of memoir and literary criticism, it really gets to the heart of what makes Jane Austen a genius and worth reading (especially from a 21st century male perspective) in a way that more acceptable, sophisticated academic work will never be able to do. At the very least reading the first chapter will do you some good.

Here's a good interview with the author:

Q: Can you describe your initial resistance, as a young graduate student, to reading Jane Austen?

A: Like a lot of men, I thought Austen was chick lit: soap-opera romance, fluffy and boring. When a friend of mine heard I was writing this book, he said “I expect a lot of sex and dating advice.” It was an understandable assumption, and my friend’s, no doubt, was based on all those movies—the ones with the beautiful gowns, and the beautiful homes, and the beautiful actresses. The ones with all the swoony music and the lush, romantic lighting, the ones that leave out everything that Austen had to say to us except the love—and then, don’t even get the love part right.

Q: What most surprised you about yourself once you discovered Austen's novels and started examining your own life?

A: If you had told me, when I was eighteen or twenty or twenty-five, that the most important writer I would ever come across would be Jane Austen, I would have said you were crazy. Why should half a dozen novels about provincial young English ladies, published in the 1810s, make any difference whatsoever to a Jewish kid in New York in the 1990s? But I learned that books aren’t written by groups, and they don’t belong to groups. They’re written by individuals, speaking to individuals, and they belong to anyone who loves them.

What was Austen saying to me? Well, first of all, what an idiot I had been about so many things--about pretty much everything to do with relationships. And that I had so much to learn from seeing things from a woman's point of view. But most of all, finally, I think, that I didn't have to be afraid to learn things about myself--didn't have to be afraid, in other words, to be wrong. Aside from all the specific lessons, I think the largest message was simply that I no longer had to be so armored, so defended, so defensive. And that's made it easier to admit mistakes and be vulnerable and keep on growing.

Q: Is that when you came up with the book’s subtitle, How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter?

A: Well, a while ago, I was interviewing for a job as an English professor. At the very end, the head of the hiring committee posed a question that she must have been dying to ask me the whole time. Glancing down at my resume—I had written my doctoral dissertation on The Novel of Community from Austen to Modernism, published a book entitled Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, and was planning a study called Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston—she asked, "So what’s with you and Jane Austen?"

I wanted to give her a good answer. But how do you explain your deepest attachments? I tried to muster an intellectually sophisticated response, something about the purity of Austen’s prose or the brilliance of her satire, but it didn’t feel right, and besides, I’d already given enough answers like that. Finally, I just blurted something that I’d already been telling myself for a long time. "Well," I said, "sometimes I feel like everything I know about life I learned by reading Jane Austen."

Q: What drew you to write this hybrid of memoir and literary criticism?

A: I've been writing about literature for a general audience for a long time, as a book critic. Actually, the fact that I was more interested in doing that than in pursuing scholarly work is the reason I decided to leave academia. The memoir part is new for me, though, and it's been an interesting challenge: a technical challenge to blend the two and a personal challenge to be so candid in such a public way. The second part is a little frightening. As for why I decided to write the book this way, well, the idea was to convey the lessons I learned by reading Jane Austen, and I realized pretty quickly that the best way to do that would be to actually talk about how I learned them, not just explain them in some kind of abstract and impersonal way.

Q: What do you think her books have to say to contemporary men and women in want of a relationship?

A: Ha! Great question. The first thing I think she would say is, don't settle. Then, marry for the right reasons: for love, not for money or appearances or expectations. But most importantly--and this is what I talk about in the love chapter, the last chapter--don't fall for all the romantic clichés about Romeo and Juliet and love at first sight. For Austen, love came from the mind as well as the heart. She didn't believe you could fall in love with someone until you knew them, and then what you fell in love with was their character more than anything else--whether they were a good person and also an interesting one. So I guess that means, date someone for a while before you commit, and don't get so carried away by your feelings that you forget to give a good hard look at who they are. As for sex, it's not so clear she would have disapproved of sleeping together before marriage. I think she maybe even would've liked it, as a chance to learn something very important before it's too late.

Q: What do you hope your book will bring to people who aren't already Austen fans?

A: Well, first of all, if they aren't already Austen fans because they have the kinds of preconceptions I did, I hope it helps persuade them to give her a chance. I've imagined the book, in part, as a kind of introduction to her novels. It's not exhaustive or anything--and I think that people who are already Austen fans will find new ways to think about her novels--but it does lay out the basic situations in each book and some of the most important ideas she was getting at. No spoilers, just enough to whet people's appetites. And finally, of course, I want people to see that she isn't just for women. I would love it if the book helped introduce more guys to her work.

Q: What is your favorite Austen novel?

A: I knew people would ask me this. The weaseling answer is that I love them all, though it's also true. Certainly whenever I'm reading one, that's my favorite. But if I had to pick just one, desert-island style, it would have to be Emma. Not just because it was my first and will always have a special place in my heart, but because I really do think it's the best, the one where she put it all together: the brilliant sparkle of Pride and Prejudice, the emotional depth of Persuasion, the fun, the humor, the superhuman cleverness. There really is nothing else like it.

God, you're going to make me read her again and like her, aren't you?

Anyways, going out of town and bringing along certain Beckett and McEwan books for my reading pleasure. Also Kitcher's book on Finnegans Wake.

Goodreads > Atonement > Filter reviews by 1 star > Sarah's review > *suicidey emoticon*

Sometimes I think there are about four literate people in the world.