4 ms·
The Genius of Don DeLillo’s Post-Underworld Work (2016)
- polytely 6y agoI have only read Point Omega and The Angel Esmeralda but I've really enjoyed them. Which of his books should I read next? Are there any other authors adjacent to DeLillo that are worth checking out?
- desku 6y agoI very much enjoyed, and would recommend, White Noise and Mao II. As for adjacent authors, I think I'd probably list: David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, Franzen and Roth.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoWhen it comes to post-Underworld DeLillo, as far as I am concerned his major novel of that period, and really the only work that sticks in the memory after a few weeks (and I have read them all) is Falling Man. If you are asking about books from any period of his output, then White Noise can be recommended, I personally see it as his greatest achievement. Underworld gets a lot of hype due to its sheer length but I don’t find it particularly impressive or moving.
- vajrabum 6y agoFalling Man seemed to me to capture what happened to the American psyche post 9/11 better than anything else that I've read. As far as I can tell we're collectively still falling.
- hanklazard 6y agoPynchon, if you haven’t read him. Start with The Crying of Lot 49.
- alberto_ol 6y agounderworld (his masterpiece), white noise, libra
- liminal 6y agoThe prologue to Underworld is amazing and can stand alone as a story in its own right. If you like that, then you're likely to like the rest of the immense book. White Noise is the obvious other recommendation. I also really enjoyed the Body Artist (and it's very slim).
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoI’m a big fan of DeLillo, but I absolutely hated Zero K - his worst writing by far. It was a vapid, childish presentation of cryonics, dressed up in a bunch of confused themes around vanity and selfishness. I was so excited for DeLillo to write based on that premise, and so disappointed at the result.
- Bodell 6y agoI completely respect your opinion on this and would agree that Zero K is jarring if your a fan of his earlier work. However, I quite enjoyed it. It was short and to the point. It also reminded me quite a bit of my own experience walking through the hospice ward in the days leading up to my grandmothers death. The namelessness of it, the religious iconography, even the traveling to a distant place (AR) and sleeping there in the hospital. Because of this I feel it was not so much a book about cytogenetics but how living people deal with death. The cryogenic part of it could easily be supplanted with our religious beliefs that we will die and wake up in a better world.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoI think it was exactly this idea that made the book fail in my eyes. Cryonics is patently not similar to religion in the sense of being comforted by myth or iconography and stories about waking up in a better place. Representing wealthy cryonics customers as if they were borderline cult members is more like surrealism than drama. People who actually put money on cryonics overwhelmingly believe it’s got a super low chance of working and that the world you might wake up in is just as likely to have endemic social problems and suffering as our current world, or possibly even be far worse in a lot of unsettling ways. People who care about cryonics spend time obsessing over crazy philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and far future forecasting ideas. They don’t go into it lightly with some fluffy ideas of waking up in a peaceful utopia. As a result, the characters in Zero K just don’t work. Their mix of naïveté but hyper progressive awareness of scientific possibility, while also being wealthy titans of industry for decades, simply doesn’t exist inside the same person at once unless the characters are just purely vehicles for allegory and symbolism, which is hardly what has made DeLillo’s other works notable.