Americana

by Don DeLillo

Book Overview

"DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country American nightmare doesn't have a dull or an unoriginal line."--Rolling Stone

The first novel by Don DeLillo, author of the National Book Award-winning White Noise

At twenty-eight, David Bell is living the American Dream. He has fought his way to the top, becoming a top television executive who has captivated America's imagination through the images on their flickering...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140119485
• ISBN13: 9780140119480
• Release Date: July 1989
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 377 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great start but he's still a work in progress

I've been reading Delillo's stuff out of order so I really haven't been able to get an idea of his artistic progression over the course of his novels. Which isn't key to enjoying them but it's a thing I like tracking. I'm not sure how much it matters though because this, his first novel, actually reads much better than the last one I read (Great Jones Street) that comes along later in his career. As far as I know this was his debut novel and shows that he more or less emerged fully formed from whatever writing crucible that he came from. The writing is as sharp as it ever was, the prose near flawless, each sentence effortlessly spinning out uncanny descriptions of the surroundings or a snapshot of the character's mental state that achieves a weird kind of detached beauty. If one were to go by the writing alone, the book would be brilliant because there's never a missed or wrong note at any time. However, there is a caveat and this is what proves it to be a first novel. Namely, the plot isn't all that tight. What I can tell concerns a TV executive David Bell, a man in his late twenties who is living the cynical dream of the decade. But something makes him want to get out there and see America, and so he takes on an assignment with a camera crew to go make a film, forcing him to go cross country. And that basically is what the plot entails. You can tell Delillo is attempting to make a big statement about the country, or at least the mental state of it at the time. All the characters talk in his usual half-despairing, half-humorous dialogue, like they know things are falling apart but can't help but find it funny, or are past the point of caring. But on a whole the book doesn't hold together with any strong central theme, it comes across as a bunch of detached episodes kept together purely by the strength of Delillo's writing. And if his writing wasn't as strong as it was, this book would have been terrible because a lot of scenes are aimless, or take the "look at how detached and cynical we are" motif and drive it right into the ground, or simply don't make any sense at all when connected to the larger plot. There's room for digressions (the bits about David meeting his wife are pretty good, as are the sections about his parents) and the looseness does give the story a certain charm that his tighter, more focused works don't have, the sense that he was willing to try anything. But for all the memorable moments, it doesn't really add up to anything, there's no haunting theme to stay with you after the book is done, even though you'll probably enjoy it while it's being read. That said, it does show promise, it has a strong and consistent voice and shows that right out of the starting gate he was already sorting out what his major themes would be. I found it very readable but don't expect any kind of grand statement. That's still to be found later, in more accomplished works.

Delillo's first masterpiece

Don Delillo is an amazing writer. His prose, and the ideas contained in his novels, are so powerful they sometimes make me stop and catch my breath, and that's not hyperbole. I can't think of another contemporary author that moves me so much, with the possible exception of Saul Bellow. Reading his novels is pure joy, it's a wonder on every page, it's magic. I don't say that often.I read somewhere that "The Names" was his first great novel, so I picked up "Americana" expecting to read the work of a budding author showing only flashes of brilliance. I found the writing and ideas expressed in "Americana" to be as fresh, brilliant, and moving as in any other book of his I've read. Delillo writes beautiful, highly intelligent novels that are also page-turners, and that's a rarity. He is, quite simply, a completely original American novelist, and "Americana" is a wonderful first novel.Delillo should win the Nobel prize for literature some day, and I'd be very disappointed if he doesn't.

Fantastically Readable and Utterly Relevant

Over the course of his career, Don DeLillo has grown into a force of literature. Several of his eleven novels, among them White Noise and Underworld, seem destined to become classics. I've read these books, as well as all of the others in his canon, and admire them greatly. But ultimately, Americana, his first book, is the one I keep coming back to. It is a brisk novel, brimming with tight, controlled prose, and on the surface, not a lot seems to happen -- some board meetings in the offices of an advertising agency, a road trip, several lengthy monologues read as dialogue from a movie script. Subsequent examinations, however, reveal its many complex layers. All of the classic DeLillo themes are present -- advertising, paranoia, American mythology versus reality -- and explode fully formed onto the page. The story chronicles the exploits of a young, self-involved advertising executive who retreats into the heart of America with his camera in an attempt to discover what, if anything, lies beneath the series of images that define who we are and the country we live in. DeLillo's command of the language is remarkable from the first page as he filters the chaos of Christmas in New York City through the ennui of the ironic narrator, David Bell. It has often been said that DeLillo writes "idea books," meaning that he is less concerned with characters (though the characters in his books are always memorable) than the large and complicated issues of modern life (fear of death, fear of life, the nature of terror). If this is true then Americana sets the gold standard for much of what has followed from him since its publication in 1971. Which leads me to my final point: Although this book is almost thirty years old, it reads as if it were written last month. DeLillo's perceptions about our image-obsessed American culture are perhaps more relevant now than ever before (despite the flood of recent fiction that has tackled this very subject). And this, it would seem, is one of the true tests of any novelist, to make the necessary connections to a time and place but also create a work that's timeless. Americana (unlike, say, DeLillo's End Zone or Great Jones Street) achieves this. If you have any interest at all in the work of Don DeLillo, you would do well to begin your study here.

Meet Huck Finn's evil twin

Though rambling and at times aimless, though missing the technical virtuosity of "Libra" and the sodden comic dread of "White Noise", Americana remains my favorite book by Don Delillo. The novel is a retelling of Huck Finn, in the persona of an all-around Golden Boy and very dead soul named David Bell. Bell, like Huck, lights out for the territory, but instead of a burlesque and edenic frontier, he finds a graveyard of flickering images, of a country at the end of its reel, spinning, flailing, disintegrating, full of phantoms. Twain's daguerotype of a giggling boy's swampy adventures is re-rendered by Delillo as a faithless young man's journey through an empty celluloid desert. Super-good.

Delillo writes books that make me laugh outloud, to tears.

It has been a long time, but it was the first book i picked up by this extraordinary author, and in the three days that followed, i took vacation time to finish everything he wrote to that point, like some spooky, outragious, but all-too-real charater he creates. I stayed up all night with Americana, rereading, like a dog in front of a television, looking for a sign, trying to figure out how he does it; punctuation, usage, phrases just the way you hear them, the way you think thoughts. Boo! ....Now i wait for his next book like somereligious nut looking for a sign. ....The way it was for"White Noise," coming back from the book store on a Cambridge bus, laughing out loud like a refugee from McClean Hospital two doses short of a good day. Well insured upper-middle americans dropping their designer children off at the College on the Hill. (I can't belive i paid all that tuition). ....If you live in nyc, please read about Bucky Wonderlick, the rock star who I believe still lives on "Great Jones Street" trying to get it up for his next recovery/comback, the character who opened my eyes to the bankruptcy of modern Rock n Roll, and the a-holes that Jim Morrision et. al. were. And the death of his girlfriend, the saddest thing i ever read. ...."Libra," and i quote: "seven seconds of light and heat that broke the back of the American Century," extraordinary, and true like Occam's (sp?) razor. Kennedy's fate for what it was, the begining of the end, like Tattoos and noserings. ......Read them all....Bring tissues. ...If you put a monkey and a typewriter together for 4 billion years, it would not come to this, not even close. It must be aliens in his head! This stuff is the good S__t!