I gave up on John Henry Days . Things did improve, but near p. 100 one of the aging junketeer journalist characters launched into a rave about what it was like in the old days of covering the Stones, the youth, the nostalgia, the teen spirit, and it was a little too much for me. I had an inkling the passage was designed to be tedious to give the character some form but "supposed to be tedious" and "tedious" are too close to each other, so that was that. I gave up reluctantly. Because my step brother wanted me to read it. And he bought it for me, and he’s broke.
Anyway, as I was going out the door for the weekend I had book panic since there was nothing in my bag to read (as in a commitment-book – I did have two literary reviews) so I stood at the bookshelf quickly fingering the spines in search of something I hadn’t read that was at least mildly interesting and I found Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I don’t know where this book came from. I don’t remember buying it, and I thought I might never read DeLillo. I think this book fell from heaven. It is fantastic.
Monday, May 14, 2007
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2 comments:
i loved white noise when i read it back in the day. i recall liking 'end zone' even better, even though its supposedly sports related. its been a long time since delillo for me though. hopefully his forthcoming book will be better than his last two. ;)
i come to the delillo party admittedly late. i have many ordinary excuses, one of them being that i was afraid.
what i love about White Noise is not only the prose, the story and all the genius props but also the characters and the dialogue, which is real and frequently hilarious. Everything reminds of something or someone that I know, or of myself. I just got through the part where the protagonist and his wife "argue" about who is more afraid of death. The college professors are also funny, how they try to out-talk and one-up each other. It's like eating lunch with a table of recent princeton political science graduates. Tedious and almost absurd in a cave-manish way. I'll back off that....
anyway, I did hear that Falling Man is not very good. So I'll go on to something other of his next.
cheers
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