BOOKS
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of significance, DeLillo dilutes the anguish of his characters by
depriving them of will.
And his prose reflects this poverty of motive. Numb and lifeless,
laden with abstract formulations, it is the prose of an intelligent writer
who lacks any talent for feeling. DeLillo can only explore emotions
with a remorseless rhetoric that he mistakes for precision, as if
le mot
juste
were a mathematical formula. Here I must introduce Exhibit B, a
description of sex from his latest novel:
This left and right. Leg, index finger, testicle and breast.
This crossing over. The recomposition of random parts into some–
thing self-made. For a time it seemed the essential factors were
placement, weight and balance. The meaning of left and right. The
transpositions.
This sort of elaborate, fastidious diction appears to mean more than it
does, and deserves banishment to Pseuds' Corner, that venerable
showcase of ostentatious prose in
Private Eye,
the British humor
journal.
What are DeLillo's novels about? I have procrastinated over this
question because their subject, it should be evident by now, is
Angst,
angoisse,
anomie. David Bell, the narrator of
Americana,
is a "child of
Godard and Coca-Cola" -an appropriate reference, since the imagery
of DeLillo's novels resembles nothing more than Godard's films.
Disillusioned with his work as a television producer in New York, Bell
embarks on the obligatory drive across America, an excuse for trotting
out those convenient emblems of America's fabled impersonality:
motels-"There is a motel in the heart of every man, " he claims–
anonymous sex, aimless conversation in bars. But to hasten ahead:
Great Jones Street,
DeLillo's second novel, concerned a decadent rock
'n roll star;
End Zone
was about football , and culminated in a
theoretical peroration on the game that would have perplexed both
Roland Barthes and Howard Cosell; and I simply could not finish
Ratner's Star.
Disheartened by the blurb, which informed me that the
plot revolved around a fourteen-year-old mathematical genius and
Nobel Laureate whose favorite axiom is "Keep believing it, shit-for–
brains, " I waded gamely through a few complicated treatises on
physics, and began to wonder if DeLillo had missed his vocation; his
books are crammed with recondite
lore-End Game
features a dis–
course on military strategies in the event of nuclear war-but are they
novels? Perhaps he should have been a phenomenologist.
