Great Jones Street

by Don DeLillo

A troubling satire of the romantic myth of stardom and the empty heart of rock and roll, more relevant than ever in our celebrity-obsessed times.

Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling force he is trying to escape.

DeLillo’s third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture’s obsession with the lives of the few.

Genres: Fiction, Music, American, Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Novels

249 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Jones Street – Don DeLillo’s novel published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series where a young rock-and-roll artist seals himself off in a Lower Manhattan down-and-out apartment. Well, there’s the occasional visit from his girlfriend and members of his rock group and hawkers connected with a Happy Valley Commune yammering about a future miracle drug, enough visits to keep his sharp edge very sharp and enough visits to possibly drive a crazy boy crazy.

And here's our man, the one and only Bucky Wunderlick, musing on the mystical nature of his girlfriend and soulmate, the incomparable Opel: "All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language." A batch of reasons why this novel by Don DeLillo is fab:

THE BOX MAN, AMERICAN-STYLE
Within months of publication of Great Jones Street another new novel hit the shelves addressing many of the same themes: The Box Man by Japanese novelist Kōbō Abe, where the nameless protagonist surrenders his previous identity and conventional routine to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Great Jones Street and The Box Man – so into yourself, so “society get out of my face.” At one point in DeLillo’s novel, girlfriend Opel tells Bucky about a new underground counterculture group: “The return of the private man, according to them, is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man.” Oh, Opel. Oh, Bucky. Oh, Box Man. This is so 70s! Sidebar: I recall watching a 1970s newscast where a university student wore a black cloth over his head down to his shoes and walked around campus calling himself “the black bag.” Actually, I thought this guy really cool.

POETRY
At one point, Bucky reflects: “Alone I lived in the emergency of minutes, in phases of dim compliance with the mind’s turning hand.” And here’s another of his rock-and-roll reveries: “Euphoric with morphine we’d be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were.” It’s as if Bucky’s words could have been excerpts from Alan Ginsberg’s many page beatnik slam-poem “Howl.” And there are numerous other such Bucky rant-lines for fans of DeLillo’s poetic, philosophic prose.

THE WRITER IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE
“Some writers presume to be men of letters. I’m a man of numbers.” So says the novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer Fenig, who lives in the apartment on Great Jones Street right above Bucky and who is a writer obsessed with seeking fame and knowing the ups and downs of the writer’s market better than a seasoned stock broker knows Wall Street. Don DeLillo, you sly dog, putting a writer who might be the shadow side of yourself in the apartment above your protagonist.

ROCK-AND-ROLL, THE NEW MODERN ART
In an interview, Bucky pontificates how when people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there, but through his music, he makes people move. WOW! The one and only Bucky Wunderlick, shining star, prime mover, kinesthetic force, creator of a new political-erotic-mystical art form that, as sculptor Claes Oldenburg insisted, does more than just sit on its ass in a museum.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY
Again, Don DeLillo fans will not be disappointed since many are the zingers hurled at contemporary American society. For example, how TV programs are interrupted and announcers sound close to insanity, their voices soaring, as they report on the impending snowstorm: heavy snow, deep snow, drifting snow, big fluffy white flakes are falling and will continue to fall from the sky. (I myself am always both amused and amazed at the panic snow arouses in the media). And, again: Bucky has issues with his hard-earned money having to work . . . no, no, no, he did the work; he wants his money resting in nice big green stacks in some cool bank vault. He’s told in so many words: so sorry, Bucky, like it or not, your rich ass is tied into the American financial world!

BUCKY’S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
Inserted into the first-person narrative is the Superslick Mind-Contracting Media Kit featuring The Bucky Wunderlick Story told in various news clips, song lyrics and Zen-like enigmatic responses to interviewers. All very fitting since Bucky’s words have that ring of rock-and-roll truth, when he states further on in the story, “Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape.” Yea, baby! Hearing such wisdom I have to ask: What’s the sound of one Bucky turning at thirty-three and a third, second cut, side one, third album?

THE FIGURATIVE DEATH-IN-LIFE JOURNEY
Bucky wants us to know his solitary journey on Great Jones Street is only the literal way of looking at things. Figuratively, he tells us, he lived in a remote monastery with the lamas of Tibet, being guided through the mysteries of the highest levels, the most esoteric planes of death. That’s what he came to know. Death-in-life.

Oh, how cool is that! Thanks, Don D. You rock!

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Human thought moves in mysterious ways…

What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas

The borderline between the sixties and the seventies of the last century was the time of freaks so Great Jones Street is a freaky postmodern mystery.

All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language.

Rock musicians were the only almighty and omniscient prophets of the epoch…

For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily.

But pushers and movers and shakers kept pushing and moving and shaking those freaks just to make more money… So trashy artistes created trashy pop culture greedily cannibalized by covetous trashy consumers.

Read your Kafka. Read your bloody Orwell. The state creates fear through force. The state uses force eight thousand miles away in order to create fear at home.

Well, probably any time is the time of freaks and trash.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a couple of disappointing DeLillo reads recently, Great Jones Street had the feel of a DeLillo on the verge of hitting his peak years. In 1979, when asked about how he came to write about a rock star, DeLillo said: "It's a game at the far edge. It's an extreme situation. I think rock is a music of loneliness and isolation.... A man with a half-shattered mind, alone in a rented room." And that's exactly what he gives us. His third novel is narrated by the revered and temporarily retired American rock star Bucky Wunderlick, who is so burned out and eaten up by the insanity of the demands upon him that he's holed up in a tatty room on New York's Great Jones Street attempting to recuperate from the wounds of fame, and plot out a new direction for himself as an artist. But of course, things aren’t allowed to go as smoothly as that. Dropping out of his group's national tour at the height of his fame, we meet him as he secretly sets up a weak imitation of a life outside his public identity, and DeLillo describes the pre-art-scene neighbourhood exceptionally well; they evoke exactly the aura of quiet, pensive, anguished lives going on in an atmosphere of industrial emptiness that suits the events that promise to take place. A kind of eerie, post-destruction silence, pervaded by an air of panic. His manager pleads with him to get back on tour, crazed fans bang on his apartment door, and on a more sinister level he and his band become the targets of a Charles Manson style cult. Bucky claims to be doing nothing at Great Jones Street, but The Happy Valley Farm Commune (an earth-family whose goal is to return the idea of privacy to American life) thinks that his nothing is actually really something. This comes as no surprise to Bucky because he already assumes that his legion of followers will think his disappearance from the tour is not merely a withdrawal, but rather a period of playing the waiting game. We learn he has an elaborate retreat in the mountains, complete with recording studio, that is famously hard to get to. But that is part of the problem: it is famous. The mountain retreat appears in the novel in flashbacks only, in an interview for a magazine that is held here before Bucky abandons the tour. In this interview, it is revealed, through the presence of Bucky's ever-present aides that even in his supposedly hidden retreat, he is always surrounded by people vying for his time, attention, and presence.
The novel is one of the more serious works to be written about Rock and roll, and I would even go as far to say that it's frightening, as DeLillo dishes out images of doom, death and decay, turning it into a sullen and cautionary tale about the price of fame and the high risks of living the artistic life.
I did find the story convoluted a bit towards the end, and wish certain characters, like Opel, Bucky's doomed lover, featured more, but this work is less dense, and grounded in more of an emotional way than some of his other novels. A solid 4/5

[7jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weird novel, but I kept feeling like this was an older relative of Cosmopolis, and happens in New York like that book, only a couple decades earlier (circa 1971-73, from winter to very early spring). This is DeLillo's third novel, and should, in my opinion, be approached like a movie that flows and doesn't go too strictly from A to B. I mean, some things are left open-ended a bit and the way people talk may read oddly. I did find myself loving the book from around midpoint on.

It tells of how a Dylan-Jaggerlike figure of a singer, Bucky Wunderlick (now there's a name!), a skinny, somewhat sarcastic and detached sort of person, finds himself burnt out and decides to leave his band mid-tour, moving to a Great Jones Street apartment in East Village, New York. His desire is just to chill and see when he again feels like popping up and continuing his career, but finds he just won't be left alone. His manager, Globke, wants Bucky's remaining music, the 'Mountain Tapes', wrapped in a package, and various people want another, similar-looking package that comes in his possession, that holds inside a new drug that's quite new in its effect on people. Much confusion is the result, as the packages go wandering.

This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce... the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produce, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets.
RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAPPLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY.

There's more important people around that just Bucky, like of course this Globke with his wife, Michelle, who is interest in all things East, like Upanishads. Azarian, the former guitarist of Bucky's band who is considered the 'next-prettiest', a proud but nervous figure with interest in black music. Opel, Bucky's girlfriend with a restless spirit who travels in warm countries like Morocco (a version of Anita Pallenberg perhaps?), who only briefly reappears as she dies pretty soon after quite sudddenly.
Various members of a commune called Happy Valley: Skippy, a messenger/drug dealer girl; Bohack, a sort of leader with sometimes homophobic edge; Chess, the keeper of the community's greenery. This commune is very important in regards of the drug plotline.
Eddie Fening, a writer that lives upstairs, walking back and forth to be inspired, with various writing ideas and a series of exactly-same looking clothes (and his coffee, tomato soup and crackers). Hanes, Globke's assistant with betrayer's spirit and a feel of desperation. Dr. Pepper, a mysterious figure navigating the crime world, sometimes in disguise, and one who can turn the drug into useful form. Watney, a former musician turned shady business dealer, and a Brit.

And we get to see some lyrics of his band's work as well as his Tapes' lyrics - all very, very bad poetry (I mean, their biggest hit is called 'Pee-Pee Maw-Maw'? XD ). I bet they were written bad very intentionally so *cough*

You really do get a feel of the apartment: phone stays disconnected for a while (then Bucky likes to listen to the empty tone, and a radio left there likewise), the weather (mostly snow, later also rain), the fewness of the food - the hunt for coffee at one point and Bucky prepares a ready-made noodle soup once, the bathtub, the bubblegum cards left behind in a bag, etc. It all feels wintry and grey, but not despairing, more like observing, peaceful, "time of prayerful fatigue". The fire station nearby, the homeless and the drunks and the older people. The underground, the streets and the bus back home. Lots of walking and looking around.

In a millennum or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovely at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pigeon lofts and chimneys...

The drug, with its effect of turning off the ability to communicate verbally and be nothing but passive does have something to give to Bucky in the end - although he is forced to take the drug to test the effect, as a result he has a good excuse not to go on 'tour' as the Tapes are released. And he can pretend he can't talk even after the effect of the drug goes away, so he can have his peace at his flat. And as I finished the book, leaving Great Jones Street behind, I began to miss it. Yes, the people talk pretentiously. Yes, the lyrics are bad. Yes, the plot is odd and even slow, even digressing a bit. But it's a wonderful experience, at least for me, this book. An odd early gem. :)

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don DeLillo, born in 1936 in the Bronx district of New York, is an American writer. Author of short stories, plays, screenplays, and articles, he is best known for his novels. However, unfortunately, Great Jones Street, his second novel (1973), was not translated by us until 2011. And let's say it right away, it's not his best, even for me, who is an admirer of this writer.
Don DeLillo is not always an easy-to-read author, so with this novel, either you'll get hooked from the first pages, or you'll give up right away, and in this case, you'll join those who see it as big nonsense, which I can understand, but I didn't dislike it.
Let's try a summary of the plot: Bucky, the narrator, a rock star in the grip of a spiritual crisis, abandons his group without warning and goes to hide in the seedy apartment of his girlfriend, Opel, who is absent, located on Great Jones Street in Manhattan, New York. He wants calm and solitude, but he will be surrounded by a pack of undesirables of all stripes, eager for various reasons to bring him back into the world that continues to turn inexorably.
Some, like Dr. Pepper or Bohack, want to get their hands on a mysterious package given to Bucky by a third party. It may contain a new drug with unknown effects of great interest to the Happy Valley farming community, split into two rival factions. Globke, his manager, wants him to get another package (!) containing recordings/demos made by Bucky in his chalet in the mountains.
As the reader ventures – it is the case to say it – in the novel, he has the distinct impression of reading the confessions of a paranoid drug addict. Bucky is the literary synthesis of all the symbolic figures of rock, stars of the star system: crushed by a world celebrity, unwittingly becoming a kind of messiah for a public eager for the slightest of his gestures, his slightest word, or any belch. His existential crisis resembles a depression tinged with paranoia, which gives his words a questioning echo for the reader: Who are these people who contact him and hold a particularly twisted, even incomprehensible language? Is it a pure invention of his brain or a distortion of reality? Is he on a chemical trip?
This fact is why reading this novel is complex. Either you let yourself be carried away by these ramblings that will stun you with the overflowing imagination of Don DeLillo, or you give up. Suddenly, we are entitled to ask not "How can we read that? but rather, How does a writer manage to 'write that?" But beware, this three-dimensional balancing act is not to be taken lightly! In this verbal delirium, slip theories and attempts at explanations (which we will accept or not).
Of course, behind the form lies the substance. The writer is not content with swinging stories at the bite-me-the-knot for free. He brings out the heavy artillery to denounce. I quote in bulk: rumors and the manipulation of words (he predicts Twitter?), conspiratorial paranoia with this drug which would be a creation of the government to deprive its opponents of language, the economy market ("If there is not yet a market for a lambda product, a new market automatically develops..."), the media, a particular success ("Megadeceit. Big mouth. Unimaginable insults. Pious lies to the small week. Pukes of all kinds. Betrayal of friends that we brag about. These are the things that give you stature in this industry.")—the relationship between art and money. In the middle of all this (modern Society), Man (Bucky) is a prisoner of his role/habit (rock star).
The novel, although not the author's best work, is understandable given its status as his second effort, and it is complex yet charming for those interested.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to be dropping some Infinite Jest spoilers throughout this review. So don't read this review if you haven't read Infinite Jest. Seriously, don't read this review. Or read it until I say I'm going to drop a major DFW spoiler (not really I ended up not being nearly as spoiler-ific as I thought I would be, but there is till a major thing said that I believe knowing would make a first reading of Infinite Jest less interesting).

I have a new theory about Infinite Jest and maybe others have had this theory too, or maybe I'm just full of shit, but I think a key to understanding parts of Infinite Jest might be the early works of Don Delillo. I haven't read all of the early Delillo novels yet so this is only a working theory, but my general thesis is that in at least some of the novels from White Noise and earlier there are themes that DFW is specifically dealing with. Delillo's second novel End Zone I would suggest is some of the inspiration for the Tennis Academy in DFW and may even suggest eschaton as a response to scene where one of the characters talks about football and war by saying football isn't a metaphor for war, war is war it needs no metaphors. Maybe one day I'll write my review for End Zone and go into the book a little more.

Delillo's third novel, Great Jones Street is about a rock star who runs away from the tour he's on with his band, packs it all up and moves back to a small studio apartment in the East Village. A bunch of themes are going on in the book, stuff about the nature of celebrity and revolt and music and things like that, but also in the book is a mysterious drug that is mostly referred to as The Package. The Package is stolen from a government lab by some dirty hippies who give it to the main character to hold on to. The hippies are part of a commune called Happy Valley who believe that privacy is the most important freedom worth fighting for, and that privacy is being stripped away from the American (or Amerikan as they might write it) people. They have invaded on the privacy of the counter-culture rockstar hero who is in the process of trying to escape from the shine of the public (that is simplified but go with it) and it's the existence of The Package that drives much of the action in the book. No one knows what The Package will do if you take it but everyone knows that it's got to be heavy shit and everyone wants it. It's from the government so everyone figures that there has to be some kind of serious war / terrorist use that the drug could be used for, but that it must also be some kind of super-amazing new drug that will radically alter something. No one knows what, just that they want it.

The competing groups who want The Package will go to any lengths to get it in their possession, but unfortunately for them the goods are no longer in the hands of the rockstar. Unfortunately for the people looking for the elusive Package and for the main character who can't even just hand over the goods and have everyone leave him alone.

That is all a really idiotic book report version of the part of the book. Now here comes the DFW spoiler. Turn your head, or don't, but if you think you'll ever read Infinite Jest turn away now!

The Package is similar to The Entertainment in Infinite Jest. It is just as elusive, just as sought after and just as cloaked in mythology and speculation. Also the characters who everyone thinks would have access to the grail of sorts in both books are just as clueless to it's whereabouts and ultimately become victims to the item in question. In Great Jones Street The Package is a drug. At the end of the book (this isn't a spoiler, or it should be but it's on the back of the fucking book, seriously) the drug is discovered to mess with the language part of the brain. Someone taking the drug has language literally removed from them, they no longer have access to being able to speak they are still aware of the world but they lack the ability to experience the world in language, or at least to express anything. The rockstar is given the drug and falls into this state, but ultimately to his own despair language returns and he eventually goes back to normal after a few weeks.

One of the big mysteries in Infinite Jest is what happened to Hal. There are quite a few valid theories about what could have happened to Hal. DFW leaves clues all over the book pointing to a few different solutions to the question, and I don't think there is a definite answer, but the Hal of the books first chapter is in the same state as Bucky (the rockstar) is while he's being affected by The Package. With someone as meticulous and aware as DFW, and knowing that he had read Delillo I can't help but wonder at the similarities, even to the way that the two items, The Package and The Entertainment are referred to in their respective books. I would like to say that Hal ingested The Package, and that if that were the case he'd eventually regain his use of language and end up being ok (this is a whole other topic, was Hal ever ok? and then there is the Wittgenstein aspect of language and what would it mean in a Wittgenstein sense to lose the total use of language, what would that make us and the world around us? What does that mean for a concept of the self? And can we even be thought of as a self without the use of language? What would we be then? And since there is the difficulty of interiority and exteriority throughout Infinite Jest does the loss of the use of language not only trap one's self (and do we have a self without the other's gaze, and the language implicit in that gaze?) but also liberates the self in a crypto-Buddhist sort of way? But more importantly Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein because this points back to Broom and it's language that is at stake with The Package (but of course I'm drawing conclusions where there isn't even explicit relations)). Equating the two through their respective uses in the two books could it be said that Hal is a victim of the The Entertainment? Maybe The Entertainment isn't so entertaining as much as numbing that it shuts down the language part of the brain. The part of the brain that would say I'm hungry and drive a human to go eat, or that would say, stand up, and you'd stand up and leave. What is the ultimate in entertainment if it is not stupefying?

This is all just conjecture, but I'm going to continue on reading through the early Delillo to see if I can find more ways to talk out of my ass.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fame Puts You There Where Things Are Hollow" (1)

This is often regarded as one of DeLillo's lesser novels. However, I can't agree. It continues and anticipates the subject matter for which he has become famous as well as his clipped and precise writing style.

If you're uncertain whether this book might be for you, I urge you to read at least the first chapter (three pages), if not also the last two chapters. The first chapter in particular contains some of the best and most exhilarating writing in DeLillo's career:

"Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic."

Don't you love phrases like "somber renown" and "erotic terror", not to mention "rueful nostalgia" and "convergent destinies"? DeLillo is great at personalising and emotionalising abstraction. Here, he does it within a framework that could well be a Tarantino film. John Travolta could play rock star Bucky Wunderlick, and Uma Thurman his girlfriend Opel Hampson.

There's much speculation that Bucky is derived from Bob Dylan, who dropped out of the mainstream after a motorcycle accident in 1966 and then recorded "The Basement Tapes" (which weren't released officially until 1975).

At times, Bucky reminded me of John Lennon after the breakup of the Beatles (except Bucky's American) and Lou Reed after the breakup of the Velvet Underground. I think of the Velvets, because Bucky's unnamed band's third album is described as noise (as was "White Light/White Heat"). (2)

Ultimately, however, DeLillo's portrait of Bucky is so complete we don't need to worry about his inspiration. Bucky is an archetypal rock musician circa 1973.

To the extent this is a rock 'n' roll novel, and a good one at that, it's broader significance lies in the fact that the music industry at the time was a microcosm of capitalist society at large.

Bucky walks away from his audience, a crowd, the public, his legend, his fame, his celebrity at its peak. Just as David Bowie turned his back on Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and their legion of fans in 1973.

Like his fans, Bucky has lost his sense of identity in the crowd. He and they have become manifestations of "mass man", none of them any longer an individual with authenticity and integrity.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide

On stage, Bucky had already started to rebel against his status. His music had become mere noise and was played at such volume that it alone could almost kill or injure members of the audience. Still they worship him all the more. Their secret wish is that he too will die, preferably onstage and by his own hand, in their presence, a rock 'n' roll suicide.

Remember that this novel was published in 1973, just a few years after the premature deaths (3) of Jimi Hendrix (1970) and Jim Morrison (1971).

The audience expects the performer to take them to a place of greater danger, to the edge of the void, where death is possible, if not probable. Music, experienced in a crowd, confronts us with the experience of our own death or the experience of mass apocalyptic death.

By walking away and breaking the pact with his audience, Bucky seeks out silence, an absence of or escape from language (which is itself the vehicle for social manipulation and control). He escapes, in order to become an individual, a private man, again. His departure is a quest for revolutionary solitude.

Know Your Product

The middle chapters concern two packages and the products within them.

One product is "The Mountain Tapes" (Bucky’s primitive recordings of 23 unaccompanied, almost imbecile songs recorded soon after his escape).

His manager is desperate to release the tapes and get Bucky out on the road again. The tapes are yet more product that will satiate the musical appetite of his audience and the financial appetite of his corporate backers.

The other product is some massively strong drugs that have been stolen from a secret U.S. Government installation, where they have been developed to "brainwash gooks and radicals". They affect the language sector of the brain.

A number of groups are trying to get their hands on the drugs, so that they can distribute them within the so-called counterculture.

At various times, Bucky has the packages with him in Opel’s apartment in Great Jones Street. He receives many visitors looking for one or other package. In the end, they both get stolen, the tapes by his manager, the drugs by a faction of the Happy Valley Farm Commune.

"A Return to Prior Modes"

Bucky’s manager convinces him to go back on the road. However, in the last chapter, in a scene reminiscent of "Infinite Jest", the Happy Valley Farm Commune prepares to kill Bucky or force him to commit suicide, although he actually takes a sample of the drugs and survives, speechless, wordless and wandering the streets of Manhattan, thus missing the chance to tour the Mountain Tapes:

"This was my double defeat, first a chance not taken to reappear in the midst of people and forces made to my design and then a second enterprise denied, alternate to the first, permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language. Several weeks of immense serenity. Then ended...It's just a question of what sound to make or fake."

Although Bucky is still alive, he is survived yet again by rumours that circulate amongst his followers. Meanwhile, he reconstructs his own language, starting with the word "mouth":

"Soon, all was normal, a return to prior modes."


NOTES:

Note 1:

From the lyrics of the David Bowie song, "Fame"

Note 2:

The name of Bucky’s management company is Transparanoia Inc. I was never sure whether his unnamed band was also called Transparanoia.

Note 3:

Hendrix and Morrison were both 27 at the time of their deaths. Bucky is 26 during much of the novel.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Doors - "When the Music's Over" (Live in 1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7KRV...

John Cale - "Heartbreak Hotel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6cU9...

The Saints - "Know Your Product"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qatJH...

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxWS1...

PJ Harvey - "Big Exit"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94y1...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4kTM...

Captain Beefheart - "Abba Zaba"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTo7O...

Allen Willner - "Pee Pee Maw Maw"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfqrh...

Tom Waits - "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkOMi...

Something For Kate - "Transparanoia"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiEVZ...

The Jam - "That's Entertainment"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-H0u...

"Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude"

Luna - "Great Jones Street"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBVi-...

Featuring Sterling Morrison on guitar


October 26, 2016

[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Americans persue loneliness in various ways. For me Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain."
- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street



A good DeLillo, just not a great one. I read this on a flight from SF to Phoenix. While there were parts of it that I loved (again and again DeLillo can throw out a sentence that seems almost electric; a prose version of a perpetual motion machine), he also tried several experiments with this novel that seemed wasted, or perhaps foul balls. Let me list a few:

1. Lyrics - Please GOD don't inspire any future prose writers to suddenly want to fill their novels with lyrics. I understand that this is tempting, especially when writing about a rock legend. However, writing the lyrics of a famous, god-like, rock star is HARDER than writing a good sex scene. That wire is a tricky one to walk.

2. Sex - DeLillo isn't bad at writing sex scenes, but he's not particularly great.

3. The Ending - a real whimper. I'm not sure the book ever was skipping at 4stars or 5, but the ending definitely didn't raise it up in my estimation. If I were to drop this book next to its peers by DeLillo, it would fit closer to Point Omega, Cosmopolis, and The Body Artist. All good books, but none great are GREAT Delillo.

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notte alta, acqua che cade

“Eravamo come angeli che si davano ospitalità a vicenda nell'assenza di qualsiasi desiderio, inebetiti da una passività comune a vagare alla deriva tra particelle subatomiche. L'amore delle menti dovrebbe vivere oltre la vita materiale. E forse è così, come se ciascuna mente fosse una stella di neutroni, invisibile se non agli occhi della teoria, che impone la sua forza di gravità allo spazio per trovare un'amante”.

Great Jones Street è la storia rovesciata di una ricerca di libertà: un musicista celebre si ritira in un piccolo appartamento newyorchese e si isola, cercando così di smitizzarsi e tenersi nascosto, spogliandosi al minimo della leggenda e della fantasia di sé stesso. Naturalmente il mondo, reale e massmediatico, continua a portare contro la rockstar le sue zone di pressione, la gravità che impedisce di riconciliarsi con l'orrore anonimo, di resistere alla verità del fatto che egli si sente classificato nella categoria delle cose. Suoi vicini di casa sono l'anziana madre di un ragazzo disabile e un vecchio scrittore fallito, artefice di letteratura impossibile, su pornografia e finanza. L'energia è la forza dell'universo e Bucky sente un dolore solitario, opaco e senza radici: ad assediare il suo equilibrio arrivano numerosi antagonisti, che ruotano tutti intorno al “prodotto”, una droga fantascientifica che agisce sui centri del linguaggio inaridendo la facoltà di parola, e dall'altro lato sui misteriosi e segreti nastri della montagna, giovanili incisioni acustiche del cantante che contengono la sua anima più sincera, oggetto taumaturgico per l'avido mercato discografico. Così si sviluppano i pensieri e le narrazioni di De Lillo, orientate tra fama, eccesso e insania: l'uomo massificato non è libero; bisogna costruire spazi interiori. È l'unica direzione rimasta per costruire. Il male è un movimento in direzione del nulla. Spesso gli avvenimenti potenziali sono più importanti di quelli veri, nell'universo delle multinazionali come in quello delle comunità. L'uomo ha un retaggio di violenza nato insieme al pensiero astratto; quando abbiamo iniziato a pensare in astratto, abbiamo compiuto il passaggio dall'uccidere per mangiare all'uccidere per le parole e le idee. Forse la violenza insensata porterà a qualcosa di nuovo. Per ora siamo alla violenza per il nulla. Nulla a cui aspiriamo, in una quieta e paranoica disperazione: dove sciamani digitali manipolano informazioni e ordiscono complotti con la chiave della nostra incoscienza”.

“Collegare gli strumenti agli amplificatori, e poi sentirci percorrere il sangue da quel ronzio ben augurante di corrente elettrica, dare al pubblico il sangue che desiderava, vergini cieche nude su piedistalli di polistirolo, venditori di medicine antiche, maestri della trance, stoici neri che esibivano al mondo i buchi nelle vene, assassini di lama e di veleno, e i cervelli fondevano nel nostro sound sinuoso, in un ululato elettrico e le vecchie urlavano sulle sedie a rotelle, i bambini travestiti da donna, i banchieri dementi, i mercanti di vino e gli stupratori di bambini, i mistici in calore, i ragazzi traslucidi che palpavano le tette alle mogli dei missionari. Folle che si accalcavano una contro l'altra, incatenate a una storia invisibile, e i più giovani di quel pubblico erano ben consapevoli che fra i bisogni umani ce n'è uno superiore a tutti gli altri, vale a dire il bisogno di essere illetterati in un mondo di parole che si cancellano da sole”.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read 16 Delillo novels so far. His literary cobbling definitely intrigues me. The sense of place, the weird characters saying off-the-wall things. The long, unnecessary, wandering, plotless sections of simply intriguing writing.

My ranking of Delillo so far:

1. Underworld
2. Americana
3. Cosmopolis
4. The Angel Esmeralda
5. The Body Artist
6. White Noise
7. Mao II
8. The Names
9. Zero K
10. Point Omega
11. Great Jones Street
12. Players
13. Libra
14. Falling Man
15. Ratner's Star
16. The Silence

Most people could disagree and come up with their own rankings. I think the reader brings something to Delillo, interprets his aesthetic and appreciates his writing on different levels.
I'll be tracking down and completing his final remaining works with trepidation and a touch of sadness. I will have to return to Ratner's Star, having been disappointed. Then I will return to Underworld, having been enraptured. Is he a genius or a clever collagist?

My guess is he writes sentence by sentence, stringing together thoughts, characters, scenes. The themes bubble beneath the surface, but the subtle dance of his point is often elusive. You can always be assured that he will crisply construct elegant phrases, and incorporate many universal emotions and pointed comments related to the zeitgeist.

This book is only marginally about a rock group, a drug, a commune, writer's complaints, and many other side topics. There is a near constant refrain of social commentary. Delillo's books teach us a little bit more about being human, with all of our flaws, misconceptions, and compassion. Taken together, I think his body of work is more compelling than most other American authors, and comparable to Cormac McCarthy's, or Steinbeck's.

A true original, like Pynchon, who placed style and sentence precision above plot. Yet, I believe that most of his books fall just short of masterpieces due to their unfocused approach. Occasionally, whole sections fall flat to me, or certain books require an uneven amount of effort, with dense, impenetrable monologues abutting cinematic descriptions. This could be a failing in me as a reader, and proper appreciation of the hidden nuances may come with time.

This is as good a place as any to start with DeLillo. But I think Angel Esmeralda is the more perfect distillation of his powers.

[João Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Jones Street - Manhattan - Nova Iorque

Publicado em 1973 “Great Jones Street” é o terceiro romance do escritor norte-americano Don DeLillo (n. 1936).
Bucky Wunderlick, o narrador, é uma estrela do rock, que abandona o seu grupo musical no meio de uma tournée, num conflito existencial, insatisfeito com a sua vida, com a sua fama e que se refugia, incognitamente, num apartamento, sem mobília, em Great Jones Street, uma rua situada em Manhattan, Nova Iorque.
Bucky quer “desaparecer” - “Sou apenas uma velha e cansada figura do mundo do espectáculo… A indústria discográfica deu cabo de mim.” - mas sente-se pressionado a “voltar” pelo seu agente musical Globke, pelos outros membros da sua banda e pelos executivos da sua empresa Transparanoia.
Durante esse retiro emocional Bucky acaba, inesperadamente, por se envolver com uma organização denominada “Comuna Agrícola do Vale Feliz”, detentora de uma nova droga, em fase experimental, com propriedades e com uma intensidade inimagináveis, ultrapotente, e com um conjunto de “figuras” mafiosas, que se movimentam num submundo complexo com dúbios interesses.
É neste relacionamento complexo que Don DeLillo joga habilmente com uma prosa reflexiva, simultaneamente, irónica e sombria, com o silêncio e a obscuridade de Bucky, interligando as diferentes subtramas de um enredo que revela alguma complexidade.
A caracterização que Don DeLillo faz das personagens secundárias é brilhante, destaco duas pela comicidade e pelo excesso: o agente musical Globke, desajeitado, grotesco, engraçado e o falhado escritor Ed Fenning, o vizinho de Bucky do 1º andar, “… Poeta. E romancista. Escrevo livros policiais, escrevo ficção científica. Escrevo pornografia. Escrevo séries para televisão. E peças de um acto.”.
“Great Jones Street” é um livro que revela uma escrita elegante, mas intransigente na sua complexidade, com excessos linguísticos, revelações inesperadas e uma imaginação fascinante.
“Great Jones Street” é recomendável para os fans incondicionais de Don DeLillo e para quem se interessa pela temática das estrelas do rock, entre a lenda e as suas vidas privadas, a euforia do sucesso e da fama, quase sempre efémera, da impossibilidade pessoal das escolhas e da privacidade, e dos rumores persistentes e das relações complexas entre um público que os venera e a indústria discográfica.


Don DeLillo (n. 1936)

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Set in the early seventies, a famous rock star abdicates and retreats to the dereliction and sanctuary of the titular Great Jones Street,NY..The themes and ideas are interesting,fame,privacy,freedom,the media etc.The characterisation is poor and the plot descends into the absurd.However the descriptive writing particularly in the opening chapters is excellent.I had higher expectations from a major writer.Two stars,maybe two and a half.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book that made me understand just what's so disconcerting about DeLillo. See, the guy writes weird shit, but a lot of writers write weird shit that don't give me the same prickly feeling the best DeLillo does. No, what makes DeLillo such an odd writer is the combination of the weird shit he writes about and his chilly, almost journalistic tone, and this novel combines the both of them to the fullest effect out of what I've read so far. This particular volume ties reclusive rock stars, drugs, linguistic theory, and domestic terrorists as though it was casually commenting on the weather, complete with the usual exchanges featuring humor so deadpan it's sometimes hard to tell when you're meant to laugh.

And it's a little rough around the edges. The rock lyrics presented don't quite come off as rock lyrics, although they're interesting as both social commentary and examinations of language. They have a Jim Morrison feel, which will probably send half the people who read this but haven't read Great Jones Street running to them and the other half running from it. There are also moments where DeLillo gets so lost in expressing his ideas and drawing connections that he forgets to tell a story or develop his characters, leaving you with conversations between people about passing underwear all around the country.

So (and I bet End Zone is the same way), it's in some ways a retreat from Americana, and in other ways an advance. The characters still need work from a developmental perspective, but he's worked out how to make them fascinatingly strange without tumbling into Ratner's Star's excesses. You get masters of disguise, writers of porn for children, unscrupulous businessmen, and of course, domestic terrorists and our reclusive rock star. It's no masterpiece, but it sure is a fun ride.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quietly unnerving downward spiral.

In his ongoing survey of modern America, DeLillo's third book saw him looking at art and commerce through the lens of rock music and celebrity. One gets the sense that the narrator, rock star Bucky Wonderlick, having fled the stage mid-tour and retracted into a cold, empty apartment in a Lower East Side that was still both of those things (compared to its scrubbed, crowded modern counterpart), is somewhat paralyzed by his need to fully consider and understand what his actions mean, after years of skirting such introspection in favor of the constant sprint onwards. But his inactivity itself becomes a sort of action and ideology (and an unconsidered one, at that), as well as perhaps another marketing angle in his music career. All of these things twist the book up into a plotline and send it on its way.

Despite the fairly direct and active plotting this time around, as with most DeLillo there's a lot of depth and beauty to incidentals, from the sounds of the downstairs neighbor dreaming to a hallucinatory burning fire station. Unfortunately, the bracing austerity of Wonderlick's thoughts and activities (as well as of DeLillo's prose, scalpel sharp even without the complete rhythm and poetry of his more recent work) are undercut by the steady stream of visitors required to advance the story, a drugs-and-cults-and-paranoia arc which seems far less interesting than the tone and central setting.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Fame puts you there where things are hollow." David Bowie.

My third DeLillo and by far my least favourite. It's about a reclusive rock star and his involvement in a big time drug deal. It's thus a novel that explores underworlds. Unfortunately, too often, I found the writing pretentious. It's not though put me off reading more of him.

[Костя Жученко · Rating 5 out of 5]

Дон Делілло продовжуючи пошук нових тем для дослідження, цього разу приходить до роману про рок-музиканта, де музика не головне. Сам герой Bucky Wunderlick (чи існує цікавіше та веселіше ім'я в творчості Делілло?) виступає просто у ролі падаючої зірки. Причому шлях падіння обрано ним самим. А точкою приземлення виступає квартира на однойменній вулиці Ґрейт-Джонс-стріт.
Це історія, що увібрала в себе купу актуальних тем та проблем. Як глобальних на рівні всієї країни, так і приземлених до рівня пари поверхів. Малопопулярна вулиця стає умовним центром Америки, а події роману немов психоделічна платівка Боба Ділана, що обертається на осі, якою виступає квартира.
Сам же Бакі Вандерлік, немов голка, що прямує доріжками по цій платівці, продовжуючи створювати звучання життя, від якого так втікав. Цікаво, що в фіналі, коли платівка завершиться, то його чекає шипіння поступово переходяче в тишу (чи спойлер це?))

Дон Делілло зобразив зіпсований світ, де втрата моралі призводить до руйнації колективності. Ця країна дещо хворіє. В інтерв'ю Адаму Беглі про "Ґрейт-Джонс-стріт" Дон сказав: "Хвороби на вулицях, божевільні люди, які розмовляють самі з собою, культура наркотиків розповсюджується серед молоді. Ми говоримо про початок 1970-х років…"
І що іронічно, ці слова актуальні для будь-якого року.

Між наркотиками та музикою в романі часто виставляється знак рівно або приблизно рівно 🙂 До того ж на місці знаку може стояти й звичайна людина, що знаходиться немов на роздоріжжі між впливами. І те і те в романі виступає мегалоДОНом, що поїдає людство. "Акули шоубізу" та "акули наркоринку" знають як знищити пересічну людину. А краще її собі приручити.
Вплив та контроль - головні панівні сили сучасного світу. Хтось та на чомусь сидить (розваги, хобі або звичайні наркотики), а як так, то тим кимось можна керувати, головне знайти точку впливу Й першими це зроблять ЗМІ на службі у будь-кого: кровожерливої країни, медіа-гіганта, звичайного злодія тощо.

Квартира на Ґрейт-Джонс-стріт постає точкою перетину подій й виглядає як певне лобі, куди приходять американські грішники на дуже умовну сповідь. З цієї квартири лунає поступово затихаюча музика, десь на фоні проглядає пінчонівська параноя, а у вікні чітко видно силуети Джаґґера, Леннона, Моррісона та Ділана, які не співають, а просто між собою розмовляють.

[Ligeia · Rating 4 out of 5]

la privacy, il successo, la droga e la fuga da se stessi...

Bucky Wunderlich, una rockstar che parla come Bob Dylan, decide di mollare a metà un tour con la sua band e di nascondersi in un appartamento lasciato libero dalla sua ragazza del momento...naturalmente essendo un libro di DeLillo il povero Bucky verrà coinvolto in cose losche e avvicinato da strani personaggi che gli parlano di una droga definitiva da lanciare sul mercato e dei suoi Nastri della Montagna, al momento dati per perduti, ma di cui presto spunteranno le tracce...si tratta di un racconto cattivo sulla scia di Cosmopolis, ma non altrettanto definitivo...leggermente più vago circa le motivazioni, ma senza dubbio molto più tormentato circa la fuga da se stessi e il tentativo di definire la natura umana...

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second Don DeLillo novel. The first one I read and liked a lot is "Libra." DeLillo had the right tone to the whole Lee Oswald story - and more likely the truth. There is something very journalistic about the writing of that book - almost a documentary. I almost feel the same way with "Great Jones Street." He captures a certain aspect of New York that I find truthful - and the narrative of a legendary rock figure who decided to disappear in the middle of a major tour is interesting. Like why Oswald even exists on this planet, we wonder the same about the lead rock character Bucky Wunderlick. At first I thought this character is based on Syd Barrett - but I think that is too British for this very American themed writer. Bob Dylan is more likely - especially after his supposed motorcycle accident that seems more myth than true - or... We just don't know, or we will never know. The plotting of the book is not that interesting, but the characters are amusing. The whole political gangster aspect is not as interesting as Bucky sitting in his apartment on Great Jones Street, and commenting on his disappearance from the world. Retreating from one's world or going into another world is an interesting commentary on how one lives on our planet.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am of the very-late-Gen-X cohort, born in 1979. Sometimes I like to think of myself as part of the Kurt Cobain "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" generation, but naturally the world always has been and always will be teeming with young people who hate themselves and want to die. In high school I was primarily into poetry, literary fiction, cinema, and indie rock. There was no internet to speak of. You encountered things because they were available, written-up in magazines, or you had followed some clandestine trail of breadcrumbs. All complicated by the fact that I only really had one or two friends with any taste at all. You would go into a bookstore in the 90s and they would often have most of the DeLillo Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks. If you were the kind of young fellow fond of poetry, literary fiction, cinema, and indie rock back then it is practically unthinkable that you would not get around to DeLillo. That being said, I only read two DeLillos in high school, AMERICANA and WHITE NOISE. I actually had some weird obsession with AMERICANA, his debut, before having read it, going so far as to special order it from a small bookstore where they often gave me discounts, and liked it even more than I liked WHITE NOISE, which everybody loves, in part no doubt because of its relationship with cinema, which I would go on to study in academia. UNDERWORLD came out during my first year as an undergraduate and I bought the hardcover. It struck me as clearly the finest work of contemporary fiction to have been published during the years I had been sufficiently cognizant to appreciate such matters. I even thought it superior to Pynchon's MASON & DIXON, which I loved very much (Pynchon was my hero) and which had come out a few months previously. Since UNDERWORLD I have read every novel DeLillo has subsequently published excluding FALLING MAN, reviews of which turned me off sufficiently to have caused me to thus far avoid it. I like THE BODY ARTIST and especially POINT OMEGA significantly more than most people seem to. ZERO K is solid but not nearly his finest hour. COSMOPOLIS is mostly extremely strong but is marred by much of the "Benno" material, most of which was carved off for David Cronenberg's extraordinary movie adaptation, which is an insanely underrated masterpiece and one of my very favourite movies of the twenty-first century (after Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, Chantal Akerman's LA CAPTIVE, and Bruno Dumont's CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915). Reading GREAT JONES STREET, DeLillo's third novel, I thought of Cronenberg's film frequently, offering as it did a chance to hear so much of DeLillo's very singular dialogue spoken aloud, with those very precise clipped rhythms, punchy counterpoints, musical repetitions, and all that heady riffing, all these things already amply in evidence in DeLillo's remarkable early fiction. GREAT JONES STREET belongs to a subgenre of literary novels dealing with fictional rock stars, usually massively famous ones, a list of examples of which would invariably contain works like Thomas McGuane's PANAMA and Salman Rushdie's THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET. DeLillo's rock star is named Bucky Wunderlick. He has walked away from a tour midway through and decamped from Huston for New York City, his hometown, isolating himself in “prayerful fatigue” in the apartment of his absent lover Opal. New York, so often one of the principal characters in DeLillo, "seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” I though of Joseph McElroy's 1971 novel ANCIENT HISTORY: A PARAPHASE, published two years before GREAT JONES STREET, a novel whose eponymous "paraphase" is achieved when the first person narrator briefly drops out of his life to inhabit the empty New York apartment belonging to another man. GREAT JONES STREET might be said to depict Bucky's paraphase, although we cannot be certain until the end if his sequestration is temporary or a prelude to some form of permanence, a sort of fossilization. I also find it telling that GREAT JONES STREET was published the same year as GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, and other readers may likewise see something eminently Pynchonian in, among so many other things, the name of the consortium of holding companies vouchsafing Bucky's business interests etc., his version of the Beatles' Apple Corps, which happens to be called Transparanoia. There is no mistaking the specter of mind control, spook meddling, MKUltra and whatnot. Much of the narrative revolves around a nexus of interests converging upon Bucky who for a time is in possession of a package, containing some mysterious drug apparently; many parties want to take possession, representing governments, businesses, a bifurcated countercultural groupuscule, and rogue agents. That the world of rock music is subsumed within these other domains speaks to the cultural moment, post-'68, post-Altamont, the horizon discernibly darkening. Rock music is more connected to violence, fascism, and perverse methodologies of crowd control than it is to anything emancipatory or utopian. This is a space between Abbie Hoffman's naive assertion that the counterculture ran rock bands instead of politicians and the rabid aggression of punk, a pervasive sense of co-option and defeat underpinning this. If Bucky has isolated himself in the apartment on Great Jones Street, he nonetheless receives many visitors and varied communications. Take Watney, ex rock star himself, once the frontman of the grotesquely (and all too appropriately) named Schicklgruber (the real surname of Hitler's paternal family), now a kind of secretive operative in service to insidious concerns, who declares: “You’re not the underground. Your people aren’t underground people. The presidents and prime ministers are the ones who make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom. The corporations. The military. The banks. This is the underground network. This is where it happens. Power flows under the surface, far beneath the level you and I live on. This is where the laws are broken, way down under, far beneath the speed freaks and cutters of smack.” There is the upstairs neighbor, the writer Fenig, who avows: “Fame. The perfect word for the phenomenon it describes. Amef. Efam. Mefa.” There is the Transparanoia underling and drug parcel go-between Hanes who muses: “A junkie’s death is beautiful because it’s so effortless.” In one chapter, evoking for me William Gaddis's THE RECOGNITIONS, depicting a party in the Great Jones Street apartment, a Morehouse Professor of Latent History at the Osmond Institute, who turns out not to have been what he seemed, prompts: “The Nile once flowed into the Amazon. We have sediment to prove it. What dreams did it carry? How much of the blood and poetic impulse of all of us?” And then there is the lithe lover Opal, who shows up for awhile, and whose staunchest belief is that evil, the bottom line of rock music and of the historical moment, "is movement toward void.” The drug at the center of the story would appear to be one which incapacitates and zombifies. Euphoria would not appear to be one of its side effects. It too is evil, mimetic of rock music, a product eminently suited to the culture on display. Buddy sees suicide as "nearer to me than my own big toe.” Loss of privacy and the desire for its reclamation are at the center of things. DeLillo has always been concerned with the individual's relationship to the malign human mass. GREAT JONES STREET, emblematic as such, is about ennui, but it is a keen novel, kinetic, and tremendous fun. It is garrulous and grim, written with panache. It precipitates a giddy high and leaves a metallic aftertaste, like you've had a gun in your mouth or perhaps just good old fashioned blood. It is in possession of a frank and annihiliating genius. Atomizing genius. "One by one, repacked in our sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing."

The beast is loose
Least is best
Pee-pee-maw-maw
Pee-pee-maw-maw

[Marcello S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una giovane rock star rintanata in una stanza squallida si trova ad aver suo malgrado a che fare con una comune agricola facilmente alterabile e lo sviluppo di una droga sintetica. Mentre valuta se e come tornare in pista, ci sono persone che a turno vanno a trovarlo, con richieste diverse. Parte così così, poi si assesta in linea con altri suoi libri di metà anni Settanta (Cane che corre, Giocatori).
Al solito: cupo, freddo, cerebrale. Trama sbilenca, che sembra non andare a parare da nessuna parte. Lo stile e la precisione delle frasi vengono prima di tutto, giustamente. Ha diversi punti memorabili, in particolare quando entra in scena il vicino di casa scrittore, Fenig (la storia della pornografia per bambini è una fucilata), alternati a capitoli di vuoto mistico. Direi ovvia fonte di ispirazione per David Foster Wallace. Preferisco End Zone, uscito l’anno prima.  

[74/100]

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me begin by saying that the first chapter of this book is a 5-star chapter. No doubt about it. And the first sentence...yeah, that's a 5-star sentence.

"Fame requires every kind of excess."

What a perfect way to begin a first-person novel about an aging rockstar/one-man-zeitgeist. And one amazing feat of this chapter--and the book as a whole really--is that, despite how few details he reveals, we believe that our narrator, Bucky Wonderlick, has bathed in the putrid, holy waters of this excess.

In fact, he has given everything to this excess. He has imparted "erotic terror to the dreams of the republic." He "feeds himself on outrage" which includes "hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs."

This is the man who wants to talk to us for the next 265 pages about why he left in the middle of a tour to hole up in a rundown apartment on the titular "Great Jones Street." And believe me, I want to listen.

But more specifically, I want to listen most when he actually treats the reader like a confidant. While I enjoyed all of Bucky's semantic riddles that he weaves with members of the media, managers, and desperate band members (think an even more glib and witty version of Dylan circa "Don't Look Back")I felt a bit disappointed down the stretch that DeLillo never allowed his creation a real sense of human vulnerability. I can't imagine him actually having had a childhood. It's also impossible to think how he first got to where he is now.

In his effort to make Bucky a soul-drained wanderer in a hyper-real media culture, DeLillo might have actually drained the man's soul, which leaves us mostly with a very clever satire, punctuated with moments of entrancing darkness. I can see how this might be enough for some readers. The sentences alone are glorious. Yet, without spoiling too much, our hero has a non-reaction to a very important death, only a passing interest in another very important death, and no interest whatsoever in having an actual conversation with anyone. I felt myself wishing to have just a few moments of the kind of x-ray a true rock tell-all promises.

Though, in its favor, add a nice drug-related payoff down the stretch, the best band manager in fictional history, and a hilariously sad hack writer who haunts the upstairs of the building.

There was much to like here. It's just hard to fall in love with cleverness and bile. Especially bile. But I suppose Bucky has lost his capacity for love, and it might have been too much to ask to wish I felt a heart beating in his tale.

[Matteo Fumagalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rock e vuoto.

Un romanzo strano, dal cuore profondamente dondelilliano, che parla di creatività, linguaggio, stasi e alienazione. Sospeso, ma allo stesso tempo rumorosissimo.
Tra quelli che ho letto, il suo più pesante e faticoso (me lo sono trascinato per almeno un mese), ma che viaggia sempre a livelli altissimi e che, terminata la lettura, lascia annichiliti.
Il finale, fortemente evocativo, non so perché, mi ha ricordato il cinema di Antonioni.

[Perejfm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me pasa un poco también con DFW, a veces se siente una genialidad y otras un chapa. Lo jodido es que creo que tiene que ver más conmigo que con el libro. Hay que estar bien metido para disfrutar de las sutilezas del lenguaje de Don De Lillo. Supongo que también tenía muchas expectativas con este autor, pero tampoco siento que me haya llenado tanto.

Me gusta sobre todo la capacidad de dar voz a gente estúpida de manera inteligente. Es un humor fino, no de carcajada sino de complicidad . Es mirar a tu hermana de reojo después de que algún familiar lejano diga la mayor barrabasada jamas imaginable.

También tiene partes muy bien escritas casi poéticas, sobre la decadencia, lo feo, lo desagradable. Bueno además de las multitudinarias criticas a la industria de la música, corrompida constantemente por el dinero, es casi siempre paródica pero siento que se parece más a la realidad de lo que creemos.

Otro punto que no me termina de convencer es que la constante ironía me hace no conectar con el protagonista(Buck) y mucho menos con cualquier otro personaje. La ironía es una constante protección que impide realmente saber cómo se siente Buck. Si que tiene algunos momentos de sinceridad cruda al principio pero más allá lo siento todo muy artificioso. También puede ser que sea una manera que tiene de proyectar el personaje, un ser apático, anodino y consumido por su vida. Y normal, no hay casi ni una sola buena persona en todo el libro. Todos se sienten despreciables, como si el autor se estuviera riendo de ellos constantemente. Opel es la única que se salva.

Otra cosa que me ha pasado es que era incapaz de situar los personajes, por lo que se convertía constantemente en un diálogo del personaje principal con alguna persona aleatoria a la que tampoco no sabía muy bien qué atribuirle. El que si me hacía mucha gracia y puede que sea un tanto controvertido era el vecino escritor, ese si era una parodia al escritor vanguardista insoportable, un vende motos. Pero hay algo tierno en ese fracaso, ese camp que tanto le gusta a Esty(soyunarpingada) y Junior. Ese deleite de ver a una persona diciendo completas barbaridades. El escritor ha sido mi Karla Sofía Gascón. Solo os digo que estaba intentando crear un nuevo género de p*rnografia para niños. Lo gracioso no es el género, sino el como se las apaña para intentar justificar tal barbaridad.

Os dejo con una última cita final despreciando el mercado, que eso siempre gusta:


“La enorme rueda gira y da vueltas y petardea, acelerándose y lanzando por los aires a todo el que no consiga agarrarse bien a ella. El mercado es espectacular, es tan luminoso como un centenar de ciudades, da vueltas y más vueltas y por todas partes hay figuritas que intentan agarrarse a él con una mano pero que acaban lanzados a la noche circundante, al silencio, al vacío, a la oscuridad, a la cuenca, al cráter, al foso.”

[Sam Bakhshalian · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism.”

[Hanako · Rating 3 out of 5]

there's a lot of great stuff in here...it's definitely thought provoking and meta! i think some of DeLillo's writing was rather indulgent than meaningful, but his prose was entertaining.

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got bored with "satires" after suffering through The Recognitions, written by one of DeLillo's heroes William Gaddis. It's so bloody easy to point out how absurd something is. So easy to pile up them words. Showbusiness is full of nonsensical horrors? The beating heart of The Market is a dark one? THANKS, DeLILL. WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT YOU, M8.

Someone else can locate the essence of this story, the one that makes the jokes funny (I never laugh at DeLillo) and the admittedly quality writing actually work. When a character dies in the middle of a stream of consciousness rant and none of the characters react in any way, how is the reader supposed to give a shit? What is that trying to say?

DeLill, aka the Whitest Writer of All Time, is just not for me. I might check out Libra at some point when I've forgotten that I actually don't like this guy, and White Noise is meant to be a classic. Maybe. I forget that he has really good premises, but when you describe things the way he does––with this flat uncaring tone, where every bit of sensory awareness is tinged with the fart-smell of an unconscious un-appreciator––it's enough to ruin any premise. It's always that disappointment, of wanting to hang out with someone cool and remembering they're just a cunt.

This book sucks.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

First person narrator opens with “fame requires every kind of excess” (1), in his role of “imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic” (id). This is apparently an “Extreme region, monstrous [!] and vulval [!!]” (id.). He takes it upon himself, however, to return “the idea of privacy to American life” (17), a way to “pursue loneliness” (19). His intentional withdrawal from the public is held out by one silly communard group as exemplifying “the old idea [NB] of men alone with the land,” pursuing privacy, without which “there is no freedom” (60). Their doctrine intones that “the return of the private man […] is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man” (id.), a nietzschean, heideggerian, or marcusian objective, surely.

It’s similar in some ways to the writer in Mao II and the violent radicals in Players, which the former novel will place into concordance with writers and artists; we are told of a guy who has “been trying to create pressure along a fault with a series of very delicate TNT explosions,” to create an earthquake, “the greatest work of art ever achieved” (77)—very much Mao II, Point Omega, The Body Artist. To the commune people, however, “Mass man isn’t free” (194). Part of that might be because of the “sensory overload” (252) inherent in mass communication, the nihilism in Baudrillard’s semiurgical overload.

Similar to Americana, which has a cute discourse on asceticism, narrator “became a half saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain” (id.). And ‘bodily economy’ is definitely a thing, such as in one character, “horribly disfigured in a gruesome accident,” whose “face is being reconstructed with the skin and bone taken from volunteers. His voice is not his voice. It belongs to a donor” (22).

Radical corporeal disaggregation is not the only bodily economy; rockstar narrator notes that one corporation with which he does business “markets facsimiles”:

Everybody under contract has his or her facsimile. It’s one of the terms in the standard contract. Once you sign the contract, you’re obliged to live up to the terms [which sounds like an agambenian eidos zoe, a rule that coincides without remainder with a life?]. This is basic to a sound contractual relationship. At this precise moment in duplicate time, [another guy] is getting his toenails clipped in Waldorf Tower. You’ve been conducting an interview with his facsimile. (24)

‘Bodily economy’ apparently includes the production of simulacra. (Others think however that “the body is an illusion” (237), so there’s that.)

The focus on privacy extends further to history: “The professorship deals with events that almost took place, events that definitely took place but remained unseen and unremarked on, like the action of bacteria or the rising and falling of mountain ranges, and events that probably took place but were definitely not chronicled” (75). We are told, like in RSB, that “potential events are often more important than real events” (id.).

Further agambenian interest in one character’s claim that “I don’t do anything […] People use me for whatever they want” (43); “I’d rather be used than use others. It’s easy to be used. There’s no passion or morality. You’re free to be nothing” (45), which is curiously consistent with the notions of Aristotelian slavery described in The Use of Bodies.

In that vein, narrator’s neighbor, a writer, is “working in a whole new area,” “pornographic children’s literature” (49) (which makes him something of a terrorist, consistent with Mao II). Not only does he believe that there’s a market for such a thing (“a new market automatically develops around the material itself” (id.), a decent parody of facile bourgeois microeconomics assumptions) and that “it has an Aristotelian substratum” (50) (yeah, wtf?), but also “without grownups there’s a purity” (id.): “tremendous sadism in evidence. Really vicious stuff. All rendered in terms of the classical forms of reversal, recognition, and the tragic experience” (id.). Some sort of bodily economy there, I suppose?

The writer will eventually evolve away from this, coming to believe that “every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism” (224), which is interesting insofar as “it reduces the human element.” Overall, not so different from the narrator, who, in his role as a rockstar, wants to “injure people with my sound. Maybe actually kill some of them” (105). (Another, by contrast, “didn’t arouse the violent appetites of the young as much as it killed all appetite, caused a dazed indifference to just about everything” (154), which is far more regular.)

The threads of privacy and bodily economy come together in narrator’s contemplation of his return to the public:

It was an evil thing to consider, allying myself with the barest parts of mass awareness, land policed by the king’s linguists, by technicians in death-system control, corporate disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry. (68)

Eventually it results in a self-estrangement: “unfamiliar with my own body” (136). (Some fear that ‘do not resuscitate’ orders are “the true beginning of the killer state” (156), which is pure Homo Sacer.)

Otherwise, stuff happens. Standard DeLillo marginal notes on postmodern conditions, such as the notion from Underworld that we’ve got all this waste to manage: “In a millennium or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archaeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel” (209)—good to remain optimistic! (That magnum opus might productively be read through this novel’s principle that “The true underground is the place where power flows” (231); as with the professor of hidden events, supra, “power flows under the surface” (232).)

Recommended for those always emerging from hotels in timeless lands, secret feculent menaces, and readers who think that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was them.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://5cense.com/17/534.htm

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

The superbly named Bucky Wunderlick is a rock star turned recluse, walking out on his band at the height of their fame, holing up and tuning out in a dilapidated flat on Great Jones Street, New York.

Wild rumours of his whereabouts soon start to circulate as Bucky seeks retreat behind his own myth: 'I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain.' Whatever that means.

Bucky is a hybrid of Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop - he even has a legendary set of low-fi recordings called the 'mountain tapes', whereas his live shows are all about sound and abandonment.

His sudden disappearance and the attendant rumours also mirror Dylan's own withdrawal after his motorcycle accident. As one journalist notes, "The accident thing was interesting to us, ideologically. An accident for somebody like you is the equivalent of prison for a revolutionary."

Delillo is about as impressive and infuriating a writer as any I have come across, often in the same sentence. In this novel in particular he really lets fly in both directions at once. The below example is typical, with my own commentary in brackets:

'We lived in bed as old couples rock on porches (nice), without hurry or need (fine), content to blend into benevolent materials (a bit vague and pretentious, but passable if left at that), to become, for instance, wood'. (God help us!)

As for the character of Bucky himself, despite thinking in the same portentous and powerful yet basically meaningless phrases as Delillo, he remains - intentionally no doubt - something of a blank.

Instead, all the noise is made by the various players who can't leave him alone and continually invade his privacy - Globke, his manipulative manager; Azarian, his paranoid co-songwriter; Watney, a cynical English singer who has sold his soul to the corporate machine; Fenig, a struggling writer who lives upstairs; and (no kidding) Dr. Pepper, a shady chemist.

Those and others compete to secure either his sounds or his silence, spouting the most extraordinary gibberish at him during a plot in which the mountain tapes get mixed up, not withot symbolic significance, with a package of dangerous drugs.

I decided to give Great Jones Street a reread after the recent announcement of the much-awaiting official release of Bob Dylan and The Bands astonishing Basement Tapes. Would I get more out of it this time? Would it reveal deep secrets to me?

Not really, no. Delillo is much too obtuse for anything like an honest to goodness rock n' roll revelation. In addition his own attempts at writing song lyrics sucked for the most part.

But it is a great drug novel, full of paranoid images and the insane monologues of highly stimulated imaginations.

Ultimately however, too much of nothing.

[Brady · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ironico, visionario, globale e sottovalutato.

"Il male è un movimento in direzione del nulla". Bucky Wunderlich è una rockstar che si muove in direzione del male; un male inteso non come morte, ma come trasformazione. Bucky si sta trasformando, lo sente, lo percepisce, e come un animale al capolinea, sceglie il posto in cui passare il tempo che gli resta (le mura della casa della sua fidanzata in Great Jones Street, a Manhattan, dove si ritira insieme alla sua band mentre è all'apice del successo) prima di approdare ad uno stadio della vita successivo . Si sottrae alla forza risucchiatrice di una generazione che lo ha incoronato icona degli eccessi e che vorrebbe ancora vederlo protagonista sulla scena. Per il pubblico è evidente l'importanza di avere un punto di riferimento, ovunque esso sia e sotto qualsiasi forma, che lo aiuti ad illudersi che nulla possa davvero cambiare. Ma Bucky non crede più all'importanza di servire quell'illusione. Accarezzerà comunque, per un breve periodo di tempo, l'idea di tornare a calcare i palcoscenici del mondo; gli si prospetterà la possibilità di propinare al pubblico alcuni inediti "canti della montagna", suoni giovani, scritti in età giovane, che non torneranno più e che per vari motivi, si perderanno.
Durante questa presa di coscienza che lo porterà ad inevitabile sbandamento, qualcuno proverà ad approfittare della sua condizione ed allora entreranno nella storia giornalisti spietati a caccia di notizie sensazionali e membri di una misteriosa comunità agricola che tenteranno di piazzare una droga dagli effetti misteriosi.

Sarà tra le vittime degli eccessi di cui cantava, predicando come un cattivo maestro, che Bucky cercherà se stesso dopo essersi smarrito - dopo aver perduto il suo ruolo in una società da cui si è sempre più distaccato e da cui ormai ha preso le distanze. Le voci sulla sua presunta fine si moltiplicheranno e tra le più seducenti prenderà corpo - proprio in chiusura - quella che lo vorrebbe a compiere "buone azioni, tra vagabondi e sifilitici, santo patrono di tutti gli individui che ascoltano il canto dei misteri delle sirene lungo il fiume e subito dopo tornano a dormire tra i fumi del vino ai confini meridionali della città".
Un libro straordinario sul genere umano e sulla società portato avanti col solito linguaggio ironico, visionario e globale di De Lillo.