482
PARTISAN REVIEW
FASHIONABLE DESPAIR
PLAYERS. By
Don Delillo.
Knopf. $7.95.
Is it possible
to
sustain a whole novel about depression?
Nausea
is the great work on that unpromising subject, and the narrator
of Beckett's trilogy remains un£laggingly morose through several
hundred pages; but far more books induce depression than evoke it.
Don DeLillo's novels manage to do both. His interpretation of the
prevailing contemporary mood concentrates on nihilism stripped of
any Dostoevskian
brio,
and his characters are usually young New York
"professionals" -the same people who read the "Home" and "Family
Style" sections of
The New York Times
(a more contented lot, to my
mind, than DeLillo would admit). DeLillo's novels purport to be a
somber chronicle of decadence and desperation in the modern world;
they are "heavy, " to borrow the parlance of his characters. But the
despair in his novels is fashionable despair, and the people depicted in
them could have been drawn by William Hamilton, the New Yorker
cartoonist whose only subjects are humorless, affluent, sophisticated
Easterners-only there is not a trace of irony in DeLillo's work, five
ponderous novels that have been overpraised.
Exhibit A:
There was a vein of murder snaking across the continent
beneath highways, smoke-stacks, oilrigs and gasworks, a casual
savagery fed by the mute cities, by fluid drained from the numb
hollow eyes of all the hospitals, and I wondered what impossible
distance must be travelled to get from there
to
here, what language
crossed, how many levels of being. The city eats itself, its own broken
bones, until nothing remains but the unbearable breath of disease.
submit that this passage, from
Americana,
DeLillo's first novel, is
bathetic, strident, orotund: in short, bad prose. But there is worse: " My
feet were still up on the chair. There was an outside chance that if I
stayed in that position long enough I might find
wisdom~
that ability
to perceive dispassionately the eventual horror of all human conduct."
This labored epiphany, like an earlier reference to cocktail parties as
"the essence of Western civilization," exemplifies what Sartre called
"bad faith": obsessed with nothingness, a void that threatens to rob life
