DeLillo discussion

Has anyone here read Ratner's Star? If so, did you like it?

Yes, I read it a long time ago, and loved it. A group of scientists and mathematicians are brought together to study and decipher some mysterious transmissions from the newly discovered "Ratner's Star." The "action" is seen through the eyes of a 14-year old math prodigy who was recruited for his project. The book is about the nature of knowledge and knowing, the pretensions of the academic class, and the difficulty of personal connection; all DeLillo staples. I was a math major as a college undergraduate, so I especially liked the math/science aspect.

That's interesting. I really liked the book, but I found a lot of the jokes to be easy to identify, but difficult to understand.

As a math man, would you say that most of the math-related diatribes were totally bogus? And did you pick up as much potty humor as I did? I want to say this was probably the most sarcastic, absurdity-laden novel I've read by Delillo. Definitely not the same DNA as his other writing.

I read it a LONG time ago, but ... I think any "potty humor" was intended to reflect the perspective of the teenaged protagonist, and I thought the math related diatribes were intended as parodies of academic disputes. (The old joke goes: why are conflicts in academia so intense and acrimonious? because there's so little at stake.) I think DeLillo's point, in part, is the more you study something, the more you name it, categorize it, etc., the less you really understand it. I do find it of a piece with his other (I guess his other earlier) work.

This thread prompted my to do a little googling, and I found this wonderful interview:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16...

It compares the (then) new novel The Names to Rantner's Star. These two happen to have been my two favorite Don DeLillo books for nearly decades (now Falling Man has jumped up to join them). It was nice to see him equate them.

Oh, I didn't realize this was behind a wall, here's an excerpt:


October 10, 1982
A TALK WITH DON DELILLO
By Robert R. Harris

[...]

Mr. DeLillo's new novel explores how Americans work and live abroad. The protagonist, James Axton, a ''risk analyst'' for a company with C.I.A. ties, becomes obsessed with a bizarre murderous cult whose members select their victims by their initials. Mr. DeLillo describes ''The Names,'' along with ''Ratner's Star,'' as a book that was especially difficult for him to write.

''The main character,'' he says, ''resisted realization for a longer time than other characters have. It wasn't until I went away for five or six months without doing any work on the book that James Axton came alive for me. Before that, he seemed to resist entering the sentences I was writing. And every time I began to write about the cult I seemed to enter a period of anxiety. I'm not sure whether this was because I was having trouble bringing the cult members to life or whether I simply didn't want to face the reality of what they did. I wasn't sure I could be equal to the mysteriousness of the murders they committed.

''A writer can be perfectly happy with the character he creates who happens to be a mass murderer if the writer feels that his creation has been successful. But in this case, it simply didn't work that way. The characters themselves made me wish I'd decided to do a simpler novel.''

Like ''Ratner's Star,'' a book in which Mr. DeLillo says he tried to ''produce a piece of mathematics,'' ''The Names'' is complexly structured and layered. It concludes with an excerpt from a novel in progress by Axton's 9-year-old son, Tap. Inspiration for the ending came from Atticus Lish, the young son of Mr. DeLillo's friend Gordon Lish, an editor.

[...]