Don DeLillo, bless his heart. He certainly does try, but he just strikes me as one of those writers that I can admire but not quite bring myself to like. Then again, when you’re a writer who insists upon writing what he sees and experiences (and this is the best kind of writer, no doubt), and you live in a world of relentless corporate capitalism where ideas and even people can be bought and sold, the books you write are going to be far from attractive. They will tell you an unvarnished truth, certainly … but sometimes I like the novels I read to whisper a sweet lie into my ear.
As far as I can tell, Don DeLillo’s fictional concerns have been much the same for the last generation – at least since “White Noise.” To me, who admittedly has read only three or four of his books in a very nonsystematic way over a period of about a decade, this can result in an overall impression that the books are much the same, with only the characters really being changed out. The same themes continue: technology and the ways that it eerily impinges on personal privacy; how enormous wealth flattens the world and turns everything into an object for buying or selling, what life is like in a Miltonic vision of greed, chaos, and soul-squandering. You know, the usual.
In DeLillo’s defense, his prose style has been carefully and meticulously honed to do precisely what he wants – to flatten the reader’s sense of abhorrence or shock or glee, to any human emotion, and to make us unaffected. While no one would ever accuse DeLillo of being a “funny” writer, this does occasionally result in some jarringly humorous results, or what John Updike appropriately calls “lobotomized” examples of dialogue at the beginning of the novel when Eric Packer, the protagonist, tells his chief of security that he needs a haircut: “I want a haircut.” “The President’s in town.” “We don’t care. We need a haircut. We need to go crosstown.” “You will hit traffic that peaks in quarter inches.” “Just so I know. Which President are we talking about?” Dialogue like this would almost be funny if it weren’t so purposefully stilted and plastic.
The style isn’t the only thing that makes this novel difficult. Eric Packer makes it even more so. He has the gross self-satisfaction of a rich, brainy international investment banker who would just as easily crash the yen as save it. All in a day’s work, right? Obviously, we’re not meant to engage with Packer – that would, after all, work at counterpurposes with DeLillo’s overarching goal - and that’s one of the things that makes reading about him difficult. He’s a cipher, a stand-in for certain values and traits. Instead of a person, he’s the gigantic hot mess you get when you combine the hubristic confidence in the ability of man’s ability to overcome his own limitations with technology crossed with a clear sense of entitlement and airs of immortality. In short, as I said above, he’s not the most inviting human being in the history of literature; in fact, if anything, what kept me reading was my pure revulsion at how someone’s life about could mediated so much by the quiet hum of abstract technology, and so little by the feelings and concerns of others.
DeLillo might be our Weeping Jeremiah, one of the great American writers living today who can so presciently see where our technology-obsessed world is carrying us. But at least for me, that doesn’t make his writing enjoyable or engaging. But then again, he already knows this.
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