Carl > Recent Status Updates

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!

“Winter sport.”

Chapters like XXVI-XXVII are how EH grabs me. Like war itself—according to my Vietnam vet friend Sam—AFtA drags us through long stretches of quotidian boredom, then a page makes us pay attention differently. XXVI breaks into insight when Lt. Henry and the priest discuss victory and defeat; XXVII dismisses abstractions and endorses the concrete (184-185), then a page of battle before a long bit on sleep and food.

One might call Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood justice-fantasies (like revenge-fantasies, only the ultimate victims are truly evil characters who didn’t suffer enough). Well, I’m getting a similar vibe from this extremely funny novel that — like both films — has an extremely dark historical underbelly.

Was DeLillo influenced by Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49? W.A.S.T.E. becomes literal waste, and the mysterious search for a potentially unknowable proof remains, along with the cast of interlinked characters. The humor has dissipated—the 90s are not the 60s, after all—and the adultery has a darker tone, plus it’s wrapped in philosophy. Everything kind of is. Pynchon might roll his eyes.

It’s not entirely fair to judge a book before it’s over, but the dialogue — which is often a marvel in The Sun Also Rises is not working for me here. I get that the repetition and banality are part of the design. Still, it’s rather diluted compared to the often funny and revealing TSAR conversations. (See?: “rather.” He’s got me using Hemingway dictionary.)

The thinking and linking here create deep impressions, but the avoidance of action is getting on my nerves. The prioritization of internal thought (complemented by the attention to language) becomes an affectation. Often fascinating, often even compelling, but still affected.

Hyperlinks: I wonder if DeLillo styled this 1996 novel on the then-relatively new (first visual web browser was 1994, right?) idea of hyperlinking. Each character kicks off a new one, kind of a book version of the proverbial internet rabbit-hole.

I appreciate the Hemingway prose style, but it seems more exaggerated and less controlled here than in The Sun Also Rises, which I find exquisite. Both books start gradually; I’ll give this one a chance, too.

I don’t mind the sassy modern banter, but some of the figurative language leaps awkwardly out of context (e.g., “back-alley dental surgery”? I guess such a thing can happen even on a fantasy planet populated mainly by skeletons).

A whiff of Hunger Games-style competition, but with much more crudeness and mystery.

Muir is comfortable taking her time with exposition: in case you’re wondering, it arrives in page 83, so be patient, dear reader!

More Coover-ian stuff: the wild cataloguing of flying objects—an urban litany, Whitman but sped up into the 20th century—blitzed out in polysyndetons and asyndetons and juxtaposition. Even the sexual images (Coover’s would have been humans, not a Brueghel painting) and the news. Such an astonishing capturing of intensity, of “a memory with protective power” (58).

Hugely evocative and energetic, making me think of Coover: the references to the Dodgers’ and Giants’ origins (Superbas and Bridegrooms) carries a flag reminiscent of the wildly underappreciated The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., while the congregation of world events in the opening chapter smacks of the Uncle Sam chapters of the similarly under-recognized The Public Burning.

A fascinating and tense story. The fact of slavery still raises such disbelief: how could purportedly decent civilized people have ever believed this “peculiar institution” was anything but a moral abomination?

>Potential spoiler< It’s especially surprising to learn that they knew where she was almost the whole time she was in New Hampshire. Fortunately, their first gesture at recapture was not a brutal one.