Americana
Don DeLillo
1971
Americana is a tough book to review. I finished it a few days ago and have been mulling it over and over in my mind. I’m not sure that there is a single theme that one can pull out of the novel around which to frame a review – but let’s try.
The novel revolves around a period in the life of early-middle-age David Bell in which he embarks on a road trip. He’s a network executive, brilliantly positioned, but filled with confusion and more than a bit of self-loathing. He’s divorced, but good-looking and eligible, and has several relationships underway at the same time in that early-70’s sort of swinger way. Yet he’s unhappy, unfulfilled, stifled perhaps. I’ve read other reviews that talk about the narrator’s alienation – and that rings true. He’s in the system, of the system (his father is an ad man), and yet he finds himself outside the system. He dwells on the origin and meaning of anonymous, semi-subversive memos that are circulated around the office. He’s obsessed with who’s in and who’s out. He’s concerned with his own place in the system, and analyzes all the subtle office-political cues for signs of his in-ness or out-ness.
So, a third of the way through the book, he sets out on a road trip, ostensibly to film the Navajo in Arizona, but his plans go (unintentionally?) awry. He and his friends stop in a small town called Fort Curtis and Bell becomes obsessed with making a personal film, a subversive film, a work of art that is intended to defy all convention, using local townspeople as his actors.
DeLillo writes, in Bell’s voice:
The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning. I like to touch the film. I like to watch it move through the projector. This is my success.
He tarries too long in making this film and eventually supposes that the network has fired him; which brings us to the last section of the book, the conclusion of his road trip with a new wildcat businessman named Clevenger. They double to Arizona, where Clevenger operates a test track, and he offers Bell a job. Then comes one of the strangest scenes in fiction, where the test track crew, including Clevenger and Bell, get drunk and have a surreal orgy with some local women that stop by the garage. Bell is pulled in several directions – he attempts to fight the humiliation forced on the women, while simultaneously fighting his own urges. The better half of his nature wins out, and the end of the book sees him setting out on a return trip to New York.
What’s to love? The prose – tight, descriptive, fluid. The characters – all of whom have a fully-fleshed out third dimension; their own secrets, worries, cares, enthusiasms.
When I first got done with this book, I thought of two other books: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, which I just got done reading a couple months ago. It’s obvious that DFW was influenced by Americana, especially the idea of “The Entertainment”. The second book that came to mind was Falconer, by John Cheever. The style of the prose reminds me of Cheever, and DeLillo’s weary-but-affectionate handling of his main characters, warts and all, is very similar.
I’m tempted to re-read Americana again, soon, because some important part of me believes that I really didn’t “get it”. Some books are like that – you read them once, and come away with a furrowed brow; you read it again, and the puzzle pieces start to fall into place. Sometimes a third reading is in order. It’s certainly well-written enough to make a second read an enjoyable experience; and I really want to get past that feeling that I Just Don’t Know Everything DeLillo Intended To Express.
Of course, that general feeling – that I’m just not seeing things correctly – could be more properly attributed to my general personal sense of ennui, the sense that I’m not in the place I want to be, that there are things out in the world that I should be doing and people that I should be spending time with. Given that context, maybe it makes sense that I’m struggling a bit interpreting a novel about a disaffected young professional.
Last part of the review – this book has whetted my appetite for the two other DeLillo novels I’ve just recently purchased – White Noise and Underworld. I’ve heard spectacular things about both.
I’m curious – if you’ve read the book, what did you make of it? Love it? Hate it? Other?