Oh DeLillo

Posted 17:53, 19 August 2017

Lately I picked up a copy of Don DeLillo's White Noise and could barely put it down. I'm not much for American writers (so shoot me), and even less for male American writers, but somewhere in my random access memory was a flag saying "read this". The jacket blurb states this "highly acclaimed novel tells the story of Jack...head of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill". A siren call to my sense of the inappropriate. Reading it was a great deal of fun, some of it serious fun as opposed to funny fun.

It woud be fair to say I am desperate to read more DeLillo. He is after all "America's greatest living writer" and has won a ton of prizes for every thing he has ever written. When I looked at his other titles I saw that I had in fact read (and loved) Falling Man, and look at the fabulous cover designs by artist Noma Bar. Win-win.

   

Published in 1985 (here is a link to NYT review at the time) it is still relevant. Here's Murray, Jack's colleague, lecturer in "Car Crash Studies". "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."