Carl > Recent Status Updates

Such catholicity in its intelligence!

149: Charles’ critique of Victorian conventions
151: yearning for “a world without the tyranny of specialization”
152: “You do not bring the happiness of the many by making them run before they can walk.” (A lesson modern schooling is learning painfully, thanks to inundations of technology.)

I’m curious how this book will resolve itself. It doesn’t seem to be leading up to anything in particular, other than something about the ball, which seems likely to bear a big dollop of anticlimax. But you never know!

So much to appreciate about this novel, which I’m rereading after 35ish years (it’s like new). The narratorial style is extremely engaging; I love the knowing, wry tone, as it dips from 1867 into mentions of the start of World War 2, McLuhan, Proust, British “mods,” Brecht, and so on.

Jaggedness

Still loving the book; this comment is more about me as a reader:

It’s kind of a curse to notice errors in a book, in this case a typo (the “p” missing from “disappear”) and a misspelling (of “euthanized”) within a 10-page spread. It’s hard to be perfect as an editor, but I’ve read hundreds of books in which I’ve seen no errors. Maybe spellcheck didn’t exist in 1983, when this edition came out.

I just looked at IMDB to see who was cast in the early 1980s movie version of this so-far-mesmerizing detective story. I had imagined a James Coburn or Lee Marvin as Osborne and Brian Dennehy as Kirwill, and damned if that’s not who they cast (Marvin and Dennehy, to be precise). Their casting director was a genius.

DeLillo writes what is so obviously literary fiction (in his case perhaps most characterized by internalization and gradualism and coyness). I’ve been thinking about this book and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which has its New York and its broad expanse if time and its Jewish artist — even its own Saks/Sachs/Sax. This one requires much more patience from its readers, that’s for sure.

Novels like this one foment disgust at Soviet Communism as powerfully as could anything Tom Clancy put together. Solzhenitsyn still tops that chart, though.

I wonder if this droll, clever farce of a spy novel was intended to answer the question “What would the opposite of a James Bond story be like?” Perhaps it is irony that the main character is ridiculously pretending to look for Communists in Cuba in a book published one year before Castro took over. (One can only appear so foolish if one is in fact marvelously prescient.)

I suppose every detective has to make some sort of mistake, to prove his humanity and open gaps for rising tension. But there’s a point beyond which the guy’s stupidity becomes just plain old irritating.

Is the story yanking me along? Yes: 200 pages in a day speaks for itself.

Are there issues that bug me about the writing (efficiency, parallelism)? Also yes. Characterization (characters suddenly using language that doesn’t fit them, extreme stereotypes and overly effusive switches)? Also also yes.

The title has suddenly shown up three times: in German in the Eisenstein film title (which seems to be apocryphal), in the brief allusion to the 1927 gangster film (which is IMDB-confirmed as real), and in a p.466 reference that seems casual but of course is not.

A curious style for dialogue, especially for a book so attentive to the idea of Connection: conversations in which the interlocutors don’t quite seem to be responding to each other or answering each other’s questions.

Joins Stoppard’s Arcadia as the only places I have seen reference to the obscure landscaping term “ha-ha.” Of little consequence, but, hey, I’m only 20 pages into an 800-page book!