One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg, 07 Nov 2007
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.

Love this book..., 20 Jun 2007
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.

Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!

While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com

One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg, 07 Nov 2007
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.

Love this book..., 20 Jun 2007
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.

Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!

Masterful, 30 Sep 2008
Every now and again, you pick up a book by an author you haven't read before and within 100 pages or so, you know that you'll be seeking out all their other books when you finish this one.
This happened to me with Philip Roth, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon and it had just happened with Don DeLillo.
This is not an 'easy read' but it will richly reward those who stick with it. DeLillo's prose flows so beautifully as to actually relax you as you read, creating a complex and colourful world.
This is among the most successful uses of the time-travelling narrative I have come across, it feels natural to the flow of the story and never feels like a gimmick.
The baseball thread throughout ties things together beautifully although I would recommend non-US citizens spend 2 minutes reading about 'The shot heard round the world' so that they realise the significance of the opening chapter.
Highly recommended.

Blown Away, 21 Aug 2008
The opening chapter blows (you) away. Published three years before 9-11, this is a riveting multi-focal account of a baseball game incorporating historical and fictional characters, which climaxes with thousands of pieces of paper floating down from the stands and characters hanging from walls before falling to earth as they drop to invade the pitch. Creepily prescient for a "Great American Novel" about the Cold War and after.

The next section cuts promisingly to the desert and a modern artistic community painting B52s in dry storage, observed from a hot-air balloon. A cast of believable characters emerges, the dialogue is sharp and the scenes visualise well but then what else? Loads of men beefing and joking about this and that; 'under'-themes of conspiracies and waste (garbage managers, sewage, radioactive deserts); women who enter in order to generate a little desultory adultery.

This is a man's world and a man's book written as a literary giant killer (the anxiety of influence for the author; the anxiety of not having read the new Ulysses for the reader).

After 300 (/800) pages of great writing but little sign of a plot, I just stopped. So I'd agree with Mr B.

Mindblowingly awful, 16 Aug 2008
Heres's the easy bit. It cost me £2 from Oxfam.
Here's the hard bit. Trying to convey how simply awful this "tour de force is".
You know the old adage.."Difficult to read....etc"? Well, this really was a struggle to achieve the 200 odd pages before I decided that I'd get more satisfaction out of de-fleaing the dog.

Storyline...I still have no idea what the inane ramblings were supposed to be saying. You read a paragraph, then spend 5 minutes trying to work out
a) Who he is talking about
b) What he is talking about
c) What relevance this has at all to do with the story
d) Why bother with this any longer

The writing...Now I'm no writer (certainly not one that can produce a worthy prose as you have already seen), but the grammar here is simply diabolical. Endless (and I really do mean), endless sentences strung together by miriads of commas- whole paragraphs! Oh yeh. The "modern American writer". That means endless drivel.

Congratulations to anyone who has managed to finish this epic. Because you are either numb to the core by now, or verging on insanity.


I'd give this a zero. But there's no "zero" option,and its a nice cover picture, so I'll give it a 1. And a short throw to the bin. Utter garbage


This book has just about everything, 30 May 2008
So much of society is condensed in this novel. Just about every sentence dazzles. DeLillo manages to dig deep into our lives and present one of the most staggering works of fiction I've ever read. Non-linear, dense with words that zing off the page, this is worth staying with for the ultimate rewards.

Brave and brilliant...in parts..., 19 Apr 2008
If you seek a fast read, don't read this. If you yearn for thrilling adventures, glued to the page, unable to tear your eyes away, then don't read this. If, however, like me, you are sometimes more than happy to be drawn into a rambling saga of life, observations that seem to pinpoint aspects of existence that we are all familiar with, and yet somehow never put our finger on...then perhaps Underworld is for you. This is nothing but a brave book. DeLillo paints a vast canvas, almost a series of images tied together in the loosest way, and yet he does it with such charm, and with such great passages of prose, that it is hard to put it down. I think this book is like Guinness or camembert -an acquired taste, and you either have that taste or you don't. I do, at least in the main, and I savoured the reading of this book over a couple of weeks. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it for the sheer breadth and scope of this epic view of contemporary American life.

One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg, 07 Nov 2007
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.

Love this book..., 20 Jun 2007
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.

Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!

Masterful, 30 Sep 2008
Every now and again, you pick up a book by an author you haven't read before and within 100 pages or so, you know that you'll be seeking out all their other books when you finish this one.
This happened to me with Philip Roth, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon and it had just happened with Don DeLillo.
This is not an 'easy read' but it will richly reward those who stick with it. DeLillo's prose flows so beautifully as to actually relax you as you read, creating a complex and colourful world.
This is among the most successful uses of the time-travelling narrative I have come across, it feels natural to the flow of the story and never feels like a gimmick.
The baseball thread throughout ties things together beautifully although I would recommend non-US citizens spend 2 minutes reading about 'The shot heard round the world' so that they realise the significance of the opening chapter.
Highly recommended.

Blown Away, 21 Aug 2008
The opening chapter blows (you) away. Published three years before 9-11, this is a riveting multi-focal account of a baseball game incorporating historical and fictional characters, which climaxes with thousands of pieces of paper floating down from the stands and characters hanging from walls before falling to earth as they drop to invade the pitch. Creepily prescient for a "Great American Novel" about the Cold War and after.

The next section cuts promisingly to the desert and a modern artistic community painting B52s in dry storage, observed from a hot-air balloon. A cast of believable characters emerges, the dialogue is sharp and the scenes visualise well but then what else? Loads of men beefing and joking about this and that; 'under'-themes of conspiracies and waste (garbage managers, sewage, radioactive deserts); women who enter in order to generate a little desultory adultery.

This is a man's world and a man's book written as a literary giant killer (the anxiety of influence for the author; the anxiety of not having read the new Ulysses for the reader).

After 300 (/800) pages of great writing but little sign of a plot, I just stopped. So I'd agree with Mr B.

Mindblowingly awful, 16 Aug 2008
Heres's the easy bit. It cost me £2 from Oxfam.
Here's the hard bit. Trying to convey how simply awful this "tour de force is".
You know the old adage.."Difficult to read....etc"? Well, this really was a struggle to achieve the 200 odd pages before I decided that I'd get more satisfaction out of de-fleaing the dog.

Storyline...I still have no idea what the inane ramblings were supposed to be saying. You read a paragraph, then spend 5 minutes trying to work out
a) Who he is talking about
b) What he is talking about
c) What relevance this has at all to do with the story
d) Why bother with this any longer

The writing...Now I'm no writer (certainly not one that can produce a worthy prose as you have already seen), but the grammar here is simply diabolical. Endless (and I really do mean), endless sentences strung together by miriads of commas- whole paragraphs! Oh yeh. The "modern American writer". That means endless drivel.

Congratulations to anyone who has managed to finish this epic. Because you are either numb to the core by now, or verging on insanity.


I'd give this a zero. But there's no "zero" option,and its a nice cover picture, so I'll give it a 1. And a short throw to the bin. Utter garbage


This book has just about everything, 30 May 2008
So much of society is condensed in this novel. Just about every sentence dazzles. DeLillo manages to dig deep into our lives and present one of the most staggering works of fiction I've ever read. Non-linear, dense with words that zing off the page, this is worth staying with for the ultimate rewards.

Brave and brilliant...in parts..., 19 Apr 2008
If you seek a fast read, don't read this. If you yearn for thrilling adventures, glued to the page, unable to tear your eyes away, then don't read this. If, however, like me, you are sometimes more than happy to be drawn into a rambling saga of life, observations that seem to pinpoint aspects of existence that we are all familiar with, and yet somehow never put our finger on...then perhaps Underworld is for you. This is nothing but a brave book. DeLillo paints a vast canvas, almost a series of images tied together in the loosest way, and yet he does it with such charm, and with such great passages of prose, that it is hard to put it down. I think this book is like Guinness or camembert -an acquired taste, and you either have that taste or you don't. I do, at least in the main, and I savoured the reading of this book over a couple of weeks. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it for the sheer breadth and scope of this epic view of contemporary American life.

Feeble and empty-headed..., 01 Dec 2008
What is it about 9/11 that turns any book about it into an incoherent, smug, self-satisfied mess? Surely seven years after is enough time to make some kind of sense of what it was, what it meant, what it led to? This book has all the puffed-up intentions of placing the day into context, and making `profound' and `unsettling' observations that will have us all revising our views and stereotypes. What it delivers is lame; a feeble failure of a novel that angers with its' sheer incompetence.

Any book on any large event (see my review of Tin Roof Blowdown) struggles with a basic problem - the event is too colossal for individuals to really understand. Better, then, to tell it through several interesting individuals, rather than try to provide the whole sweep of it. Dellillo picks as his vehicles several of the most annoying, pretentious and dull characters you'll ever meet. Stupid monologue conversations that no human being would actually have; clever-clever references even from the ten-year-old kid; fractured ideas that have no currency in the real world. You simply cannot imagine these people ever drawing breath, in any context or at any time. Therefore, you couldn't care less what happened to them. All I wanted to do was jump in the book and punch them.

Allied to this is a foolhardy and frankly laughable attempt to `get inside the mind of the terrorist'. This is both too shallow and slight to actually be cohesive or relevant, but uses up too much of the book to make sense with the rest of the narrative. It is an unnecessary intrusion that advances nothing.

Why does no author actually have anything to say about 9/11? Is it lack of imagination? Lack of perspective? Lack of skill? Surely there's enough evidence of its' impact and reverberations for someone to say something that isn't either self-evident, or idiotically pretentious crap?

This book joins the legion of other books about 9/11 that purport to be terribly important, but are actually devoid of any insight whatsoever. Since it was trying to say something important about something important, its' failure is all the greater. It is a miserably tedious, empty, air-headed failure.


Look Elsewhere...., 29 Nov 2008
This novel is so badly written that at times it's laughable: 240 pages of vacuous pseudo-profundity resembling poetry written by a precocious teenager with no life experience. The characters are self-absorbed non-entities inhabiting clichés of lifestyle and character - eg: don't give a damn poker-player; twittering, anxious mother; shady art dealer astride the continents.

White Noise was great, thanks mainly to the humour, but this is another plotless exercise in self-reverence by this most overrated of novelists. The only thing more predictable than the book itself is the praise heaped on it by critics desperate to find something which only they can appreciate. To that end, what better than a novel that can turn the defining moment of our times into something so dull and uninteresting?

If you're looking for insight into 9/11, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a great novel, look elsewhere. In fact, whatever it is you're looking for, look elsewhere!



Great Thing, 26 Aug 2008
A disturbing history about the particular effects of a huge disaster in the small lives of some citizens.

how tragic, 15 Aug 2008
I'm a huge fan of delillo but this book broke my heart. Delillo has misjudged his material to such a degree that he's entered full on self parody. not only that but he's had the audacity to try to write from the perspective of a suicide bomber. The scenes are overblown, melodranmatic and pretentious. please Don, stick to what you know best, the banal in all it's complexity and leave the epic stuff to the historians and the hacks.

Terse, Quite Compelling Novel On 9/11 From Don DeLillo, 09 Aug 2008
For better or for worse, a literary cottage industry has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. This still recent horrific event - which ought to endure within the American psyche for decades, if not centuries - has become either the subject of several critically acclaimed novels, or a firmly entrenched background to the tales being spun by such gifted writers from Jonathan Safran Foer to William Gibson. Now one of the truly great writers of American fiction, Don DeLillo, has chimed in with "Falling Man"; a novel that is remarkable not only for its relative brevity, but also for delving deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers who witnessed the World Trade Center terrorist attack and are still coping with their psychological trauma years later. Quoting from its dust-jacket blurb, "Falling Man" is indeed a work of fiction that is "cathartic, beautiful and heartbreaking". Without question, it also demonstrates that DeLillo is still a worthy literary artist at the height of his creative powers; a keen observer of human nature in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. His latest novel also proves that DeLillo is an elegant storyteller delving into the lives of ordinary people who remain mentally imprisoned by the searing images and painful memories of that fateful, tragic clear blue September morning not so long ago. Without question, for these very reasons, "Falling Man" is one of the most impressive novels published this year.

DeLillo deftly weaves the narratives of three members of a rather unremarkable New York City family, whose lives remain touched forever by what they witnessed on 9/11/01; a dysfunctional American family which was tearing itself apart at the seams long before that September morning. We meet Keith as he stumbles through the grayish ash blizzard of building debris and human remains, soon after the collapse of the first World Trade Center building to fall, his face splattered by glass fragments and blood, pressing northward on foot towards Canal Street. Years later his estranged wife Lianne remains in a psychotherapy support group, reliving the grim memories of that day, recalling Keith's unexpected arrival at the Upper East Side apartment of herself and their young son Justin, whose hobby is to stare out of apartment windows, searching the skies with a pair of binoculars for more airplanes crashing into tall buildings like the World Trade Center towers. But is it really a hobby, or rather a phobia, brought on by witnessing the terrorist attacks from the window of a young friend's apartment not far from the World Trade Center? DeLillo's literary ambitions are so vast, that he takes us to an Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camp, and to Germany, allowing his audience to reside inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, right up to the final fateful moments of the terrorist's life. But this is an excursion that deflects from, not enhances, the powerful narratives he's created for his three main protagonists, and one that remains a rather facile effort in trying to explain the psychological motivation of one of the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers. It is also an effort that makes this figure sympathetic to the reader, as if his blind adherence to Islamofascism is one worthy of pithy; an effort that others, most notably John Updike, have handled far better.

One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg, 07 Nov 2007
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.

Love this book..., 20 Jun 2007
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.

Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!

Masterful, 30 Sep 2008
Every now and again, you pick up a book by an author you haven't read before and within 100 pages or so, you know that you'll be seeking out all their other books when you finish this one.
This happened to me with Philip Roth, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon and it had just happened with Don DeLillo.
This is not an 'easy read' but it will richly reward those who stick with it. DeLillo's prose flows so beautifully as to actually relax you as you read, creating a complex and colourful world.
This is among the most successful uses of the time-travelling narrative I have come across, it feels natural to the flow of the story and never feels like a gimmick.
The baseball thread throughout ties things together beautifully although I would recommend non-US citizens spend 2 minutes reading about 'The shot heard round the world' so that they realise the significance of the opening chapter.
Highly recommended.

Blown Away, 21 Aug 2008
The opening chapter blows (you) away. Published three years before 9-11, this is a riveting multi-focal account of a baseball game incorporating historical and fictional characters, which climaxes with thousands of pieces of paper floating down from the stands and characters hanging from walls before falling to earth as they drop to invade the pitch. Creepily prescient for a "Great American Novel" about the Cold War and after.

The next section cuts promisingly to the desert and a modern artistic community painting B52s in dry storage, observed from a hot-air balloon. A cast of believable characters emerges, the dialogue is sharp and the scenes visualise well but then what else? Loads of men beefing and joking about this and that; 'under'-themes of conspiracies and waste (garbage managers, sewage, radioactive deserts); women who enter in order to generate a little desultory adultery.

This is a man's world and a man's book written as a literary giant killer (the anxiety of influence for the author; the anxiety of not having read the new Ulysses for the reader).

After 300 (/800) pages of great writing but little sign of a plot, I just stopped. So I'd agree with Mr B.

Mindblowingly awful, 16 Aug 2008
Heres's the easy bit. It cost me £2 from Oxfam.
Here's the hard bit. Trying to convey how simply awful this "tour de force is".
You know the old adage.."Difficult to read....etc"? Well, this really was a struggle to achieve the 200 odd pages before I decided that I'd get more satisfaction out of de-fleaing the dog.

Storyline...I still have no idea what the inane ramblings were supposed to be saying. You read a paragraph, then spend 5 minutes trying to work out
a) Who he is talking about
b) What he is talking about
c) What relevance this has at all to do with the story
d) Why bother with this any longer

The writing...Now I'm no writer (certainly not one that can produce a worthy prose as you have already seen), but the grammar here is simply diabolical. Endless (and I really do mean), endless sentences strung together by miriads of commas- whole paragraphs! Oh yeh. The "modern American writer". That means endless drivel.

Congratulations to anyone who has managed to finish this epic. Because you are either numb to the core by now, or verging on insanity.


I'd give this a zero. But there's no "zero" option,and its a nice cover picture, so I'll give it a 1. And a short throw to the bin. Utter garbage


This book has just about everything, 30 May 2008
So much of society is condensed in this novel. Just about every sentence dazzles. DeLillo manages to dig deep into our lives and present one of the most staggering works of fiction I've ever read. Non-linear, dense with words that zing off the page, this is worth staying with for the ultimate rewards.

Brave and brilliant...in parts..., 19 Apr 2008
If you seek a fast read, don't read this. If you yearn for thrilling adventures, glued to the page, unable to tear your eyes away, then don't read this. If, however, like me, you are sometimes more than happy to be drawn into a rambling saga of life, observations that seem to pinpoint aspects of existence that we are all familiar with, and yet somehow never put our finger on...then perhaps Underworld is for you. This is nothing but a brave book. DeLillo paints a vast canvas, almost a series of images tied together in the loosest way, and yet he does it with such charm, and with such great passages of prose, that it is hard to put it down. I think this book is like Guinness or camembert -an acquired taste, and you either have that taste or you don't. I do, at least in the main, and I savoured the reading of this book over a couple of weeks. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it for the sheer breadth and scope of this epic view of contemporary American life.

Feeble and empty-headed..., 01 Dec 2008
What is it about 9/11 that turns any book about it into an incoherent, smug, self-satisfied mess? Surely seven years after is enough time to make some kind of sense of what it was, what it meant, what it led to? This book has all the puffed-up intentions of placing the day into context, and making `profound' and `unsettling' observations that will have us all revising our views and stereotypes. What it delivers is lame; a feeble failure of a novel that angers with its' sheer incompetence.

Any book on any large event (see my review of Tin Roof Blowdown) struggles with a basic problem - the event is too colossal for individuals to really understand. Better, then, to tell it through several interesting individuals, rather than try to provide the whole sweep of it. Dellillo picks as his vehicles several of the most annoying, pretentious and dull characters you'll ever meet. Stupid monologue conversations that no human being would actually have; clever-clever references even from the ten-year-old kid; fractured ideas that have no currency in the real world. You simply cannot imagine these people ever drawing breath, in any context or at any time. Therefore, you couldn't care less what happened to them. All I wanted to do was jump in the book and punch them.

Allied to this is a foolhardy and frankly laughable attempt to `get inside the mind of the terrorist'. This is both too shallow and slight to actually be cohesive or relevant, but uses up too much of the book to make sense with the rest of the narrative. It is an unnecessary intrusion that advances nothing.

Why does no author actually have anything to say about 9/11? Is it lack of imagination? Lack of perspective? Lack of skill? Surely there's enough evidence of its' impact and reverberations for someone to say something that isn't either self-evident, or idiotically pretentious crap?

This book joins the legion of other books about 9/11 that purport to be terribly important, but are actually devoid of any insight whatsoever. Since it was trying to say something important about something important, its' failure is all the greater. It is a miserably tedious, empty, air-headed failure.


Look Elsewhere...., 29 Nov 2008
This novel is so badly written that at times it's laughable: 240 pages of vacuous pseudo-profundity resembling poetry written by a precocious teenager with no life experience. The characters are self-absorbed non-entities inhabiting clichés of lifestyle and character - eg: don't give a damn poker-player; twittering, anxious mother; shady art dealer astride the continents.

White Noise was great, thanks mainly to the humour, but this is another plotless exercise in self-reverence by this most overrated of novelists. The only thing more predictable than the book itself is the praise heaped on it by critics desperate to find something which only they can appreciate. To that end, what better than a novel that can turn the defining moment of our times into something so dull and uninteresting?

If you're looking for insight into 9/11, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a great novel, look elsewhere. In fact, whatever it is you're looking for, look elsewhere!



Great Thing, 26 Aug 2008
A disturbing history about the particular effects of a huge disaster in the small lives of some citizens.

how tragic, 15 Aug 2008
I'm a huge fan of delillo but this book broke my heart. Delillo has misjudged his material to such a degree that he's entered full on self parody. not only that but he's had the audacity to try to write from the perspective of a suicide bomber. The scenes are overblown, melodranmatic and pretentious. please Don, stick to what you know best, the banal in all it's complexity and leave the epic stuff to the historians and the hacks.

Terse, Quite Compelling Novel On 9/11 From Don DeLillo, 09 Aug 2008
For better or for worse, a literary cottage industry has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. This still recent horrific event - which ought to endure within the American psyche for decades, if not centuries - has become either the subject of several critically acclaimed novels, or a firmly entrenched background to the tales being spun by such gifted writers from Jonathan Safran Foer to William Gibson. Now one of the truly great writers of American fiction, Don DeLillo, has chimed in with "Falling Man"; a novel that is remarkable not only for its relative brevity, but also for delving deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers who witnessed the World Trade Center terrorist attack and are still coping with their psychological trauma years later. Quoting from its dust-jacket blurb, "Falling Man" is indeed a work of fiction that is "cathartic, beautiful and heartbreaking". Without question, it also demonstrates that DeLillo is still a worthy literary artist at the height of his creative powers; a keen observer of human nature in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. His latest novel also proves that DeLillo is an elegant storyteller delving into the lives of ordinary people who remain mentally imprisoned by the searing images and painful memories of that fateful, tragic clear blue September morning not so long ago. Without question, for these very reasons, "Falling Man" is one of the most impressive novels published this year.

DeLillo deftly weaves the narratives of three members of a rather unremarkable New York City family, whose lives remain touched forever by what they witnessed on 9/11/01; a dysfunctional American family which was tearing itself apart at the seams long before that September morning. We meet Keith as he stumbles through the grayish ash blizzard of building debris and human remains, soon after the collapse of the first World Trade Center building to fall, his face splattered by glass fragments and blood, pressing northward on foot towards Canal Street. Years later his estranged wife Lianne remains in a psychotherapy support group, reliving the grim memories of that day, recalling Keith's unexpected arrival at the Upper East Side apartment of herself and their young son Justin, whose hobby is to stare out of apartment windows, searching the skies with a pair of binoculars for more airplanes crashing into tall buildings like the World Trade Center towers. But is it really a hobby, or rather a phobia, brought on by witnessing the terrorist attacks from the window of a young friend's apartment not far from the World Trade Center? DeLillo's literary ambitions are so vast, that he takes us to an Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camp, and to Germany, allowing his audience to reside inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, right up to the final fateful moments of the terrorist's life. But this is an excursion that deflects from, not enhances, the powerful narratives he's created for his three main protagonists, and one that remains a rather facile effort in trying to explain the psychological motivation of one of the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers. It is also an effort that makes this figure sympathetic to the reader, as if his blind adherence to Islamofascism is one worthy of pithy; an effort that others, most notably John Updike, have handled far better.

A piece of history worth treasuring..., 06 Mar 2007
I had to read 'Libra' for my university module on Contemporary American Fiction. I have to say I was impressed. I had not done much (if any) research on the assasination of JFK before reading the novel, so in part it has constructed my view of events.
The novel depicts the 'un-media-filtered' version of events, following Oswald from young boy, to man, to assasin... or was he? Don DeLillo gives you many angles on Oswald himself, giving you a chance to come to your own conclusions.
The meaning of the title itself- and I don't want to spoil it- at first seems a little 'corny', but given a second look, you can appreciate the multi-levels of meaning Don DeLillo is conveying.
This utterly compelling novel, I found confused some people, but I really enjoyed it. It takes an event in history, rips it up, and re-constructs it, playing with stereotypes, and challenging assumptions.
I'm not surprised DeLillo has received the positive acclaim he has for his novels. I liked it so much, that I went out and bought Underworld.

1988's Oswald-themed novel, 10 Mar 2006
DeLillo's breakthrough novel was 'White Noise', its follow-up 'Libra' was another classic and one of his key works alongside 'White Noise' and the epic 'Underworld.' These are DeLillo's works I think everyone should read - whether they'll like his other work I don't know. These are great american novels...

'Libra' will fascinate fans of James Ellroy's 'American Tabloid/The Cold Six Thousand' and Oliver Stone's 'JFK' (Stone was rumoured to have halted a film production of 'Libra' so it didn't clash with his Kennedy/Oswald work). DeLillo's epic looks at the conspiracy theory of the 20th Century and focuses on Oswald - I still have the yellow coloured copy from the late 80s showing Oswald with a gun on the front. To give much more away about the novel would spoil it - DeLillo takes in his interpretation of Oswald et al and creates a work between fact and fiction that ranks alongside Christopher Sorrentino's recent 'Trance' (clearly indebted to it), and several works by Norman Mailer - though I think this is superior to the latter's similarly themed 'Oswald's Tale' (while reaching similar conclusions...). An excellent book that more than warrants its reissue and a definite modern classic...

DeLillo at his best, 08 Jan 2005
The way the author links up the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (the Libra of the title) with the multiple and convoluted conspiracies to stage an assassination attempt is completely engrossing. Oswald's imagined life on its own is fascinating, and if the depiction of the workings of the CIA is anything like the reality, we should all have a long deep look at how our world works.

Unusually for DeLillo, the minor characters, mainly invented, are all brilliantly portrayed and the reader cares about how each and every one of them ends up. DeLillo's notorious way (or lack of it) with dialogue actually works in this novel (whereas for me it fails utterly in a novel like Underworld).

The assassination scene finally arrives after 400 pages of intrigue and is well worth the wait. It's so well written that the events seem to flash in slow motion across your eyes as you read.

The only bum note for me was the depiction of Jack Ruby, who is written as a kind of afterthought. The author is obviously constrained by the factual basis, but Ruby's own story could have been more thoughtfully interweaved.

A mesmerising novel, 27 Feb 2004
'Libra' is absolutely brilliant. Simply by the biography of Lee Oswald it is gripping and intense, but combined with the infamous conspiracies in which he may (or may not) have been involved, the probing descriptions of the agents, Oswald's wife and his mother it is a masterful novel.
You're constantly wondering what is fact and fiction, a device that is as clever as it is easy to employ on such a subject; The entire enigma of JFK's assassination is tightly woven into American fabric thirty one years on.
Delillo has created something powerful and moving with 'Libra' and I can't recommend it enough. It is a daunting trip into an incomprehenisble time in American history.

short.sharp.dull.sentences., 10 Jun 2003
Want to get into Delillo,because heard so much about him,and an excerpt of `Cosmopolis` impressed. But I couldn`t get past the style of `Libra`; short,sharp,dull sentences; declarative,not inviting,as if it was stage directions; no real colour or `lift` in the prose. I will try and read other work of his,but I like my prose to smoothly flow,and not be so `self-important`. He`s letting the fact that it`s an IMPORTANT story do the work of him telling the story. In fact this story is so big,nobody can do it justice. We`ve all SEEN the killing,so how can anything be more dramatic than that? For example,there will NEVER be great literature about September 11 or Princess Diana`s death because we`ve SEEN them (or the mangled car in the case of the latter). `Novels` are supposed to be `new` or `news`...JFK`s death is OLD,but then I`m not American..

One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg, 07 Nov 2007
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.

Love this book..., 20 Jun 2007
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.

Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!

Masterful, 30 Sep 2008
Every now and again, you pick up a book by an author you haven't read before and within 100 pages or so, you know that you'll be seeking out all their other books when you finish this one.
This happened to me with Philip Roth, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon and it had just happened with Don DeLillo.
This is not an 'easy read' but it will richly reward those who stick with it. DeLillo's prose flows so beautifully as to actually relax you as you read, creating a complex and colourful world.
This is among the most successful uses of the time-travelling narrative I have come across, it feels natural to the flow of the story and never feels like a gimmick.
The baseball thread throughout ties things together beautifully although I would recommend non-US citizens spend 2 minutes reading about 'The shot heard round the world' so that they realise the significance of the opening chapter.
Highly recommended.

Blown Away, 21 Aug 2008
The opening chapter blows (you) away. Published three years before 9-11, this is a riveting multi-focal account of a baseball game incorporating historical and fictional characters, which climaxes with thousands of pieces of paper floating down from the stands and characters hanging from walls before falling to earth as they drop to invade the pitch. Creepily prescient for a "Great American Novel" about the Cold War and after.

The next section cuts promisingly to the desert and a modern artistic community painting B52s in dry storage, observed from a hot-air balloon. A cast of believable characters emerges, the dialogue is sharp and the scenes visualise well but then what else? Loads of men beefing and joking about this and that; 'under'-themes of conspiracies and waste (garbage managers, sewage, radioactive deserts); women who enter in order to generate a little desultory adultery.

This is a man's world and a man's book written as a literary giant killer (the anxiety of influence for the author; the anxiety of not having read the new Ulysses for the reader).

After 300 (/800) pages of great writing but little sign of a plot, I just stopped. So I'd agree with Mr B.

Mindblowingly awful, 16 Aug 2008
Heres's the easy bit. It cost me £2 from Oxfam.
Here's the hard bit. Trying to convey how simply awful this "tour de force is".
You know the old adage.."Difficult to read....etc"? Well, this really was a struggle to achieve the 200 odd pages before I decided that I'd get more satisfaction out of de-fleaing the dog.

Storyline...I still have no idea what the inane ramblings were supposed to be saying. You read a paragraph, then spend 5 minutes trying to work out
a) Who he is talking about
b) What he is talking about
c) What relevance this has at all to do with the story
d) Why bother with this any longer

The writing...Now I'm no writer (certainly not one that can produce a worthy prose as you have already seen), but the grammar here is simply diabolical. Endless (and I really do mean), endless sentences strung together by miriads of commas- whole paragraphs! Oh yeh. The "modern American writer". That means endless drivel.

Congratulations to anyone who has managed to finish this epic. Because you are either numb to the core by now, or verging on insanity.


I'd give this a zero. But there's no "zero" option,and its a nice cover picture, so I'll give it a 1. And a short throw to the bin. Utter garbage


This book has just about everything, 30 May 2008
So much of society is condensed in this novel. Just about every sentence dazzles. DeLillo manages to dig deep into our lives and present one of the most staggering works of fiction I've ever read. Non-linear, dense with words that zing off the page, this is worth staying with for the ultimate rewards.

Brave and brilliant...in parts..., 19 Apr 2008
If you seek a fast read, don't read this. If you yearn for thrilling adventures, glued to the page, unable to tear your eyes away, then don't read this. If, however, like me, you are sometimes more than happy to be drawn into a rambling saga of life, observations that seem to pinpoint aspects of existence that we are all familiar with, and yet somehow never put our finger on...then perhaps Underworld is for you. This is nothing but a brave book. DeLillo paints a vast canvas, almost a series of images tied together in the loosest way, and yet he does it with such charm, and with such great passages of prose, that it is hard to put it down. I think this book is like Guinness or camembert -an acquired taste, and you either have that taste or you don't. I do, at least in the main, and I savoured the reading of this book over a couple of weeks. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it for the sheer breadth and scope of this epic view of contemporary American life.

Feeble and empty-headed..., 01 Dec 2008
What is it about 9/11 that turns any book about it into an incoherent, smug, self-satisfied mess? Surely seven years after is enough time to make some kind of sense of what it was, what it meant, what it led to? This book has all the puffed-up intentions of placing the day into context, and making `profound' and `unsettling' observations that will have us all revising our views and stereotypes. What it delivers is lame; a feeble failure of a novel that angers with its' sheer incompetence.

Any book on any large event (see my review of Tin Roof Blowdown) struggles with a basic problem - the event is too colossal for individuals to really understand. Better, then, to tell it through several interesting individuals, rather than try to provide the whole sweep of it. Dellillo picks as his vehicles several of the most annoying, pretentious and dull characters you'll ever meet. Stupid monologue conversations that no human being would actually have; clever-clever references even from the ten-year-old kid; fractured ideas that have no currency in the real world. You simply cannot imagine these people ever drawing breath, in any context or at any time. Therefore, you couldn't care less what happened to them. All I wanted to do was jump in the book and punch them.

Allied to this is a foolhardy and frankly laughable attempt to `get inside the mind of the terrorist'. This is both too shallow and slight to actually be cohesive or relevant, but uses up too much of the book to make sense with the rest of the narrative. It is an unnecessary intrusion that advances nothing.

Why does no author actually have anything to say about 9/11? Is it lack of imagination? Lack of perspective? Lack of skill? Surely there's enough evidence of its' impact and reverberations for someone to say something that isn't either self-evident, or idiotically pretentious crap?

This book joins the legion of other books about 9/11 that purport to be terribly important, but are actually devoid of any insight whatsoever. Since it was trying to say something important about something important, its' failure is all the greater. It is a miserably tedious, empty, air-headed failure.


Look Elsewhere...., 29 Nov 2008
This novel is so badly written that at times it's laughable: 240 pages of vacuous pseudo-profundity resembling poetry written by a precocious teenager with no life experience. The characters are self-absorbed non-entities inhabiting clichés of lifestyle and character - eg: don't give a damn poker-player; twittering, anxious mother; shady art dealer astride the continents.

White Noise was great, thanks mainly to the humour, but this is another plotless exercise in self-reverence by this most overrated of novelists. The only thing more predictable than the book itself is the praise heaped on it by critics desperate to find something which only they can appreciate. To that end, what better than a novel that can turn the defining moment of our times into something so dull and uninteresting?

If you're looking for insight into 9/11, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a great novel, look elsewhere. In fact, whatever it is you're looking for, look elsewhere!



Great Thing, 26 Aug 2008
A disturbing history about the particular effects of a huge disaster in the small lives of some citizens.

how tragic, 15 Aug 2008
I'm a huge fan of delillo but this book broke my heart. Delillo has misjudged his material to such a degree that he's entered full on self parody. not only that but he's had the audacity to try to write from the perspective of a suicide bomber. The scenes are overblown, melodranmatic and pretentious. please Don, stick to what you know best, the banal in all it's complexity and leave the epic stuff to the historians and the hacks.

Terse, Quite Compelling Novel On 9/11 From Don DeLillo, 09 Aug 2008
For better or for worse, a literary cottage industry has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. This still recent horrific event - which ought to endure within the American psyche for decades, if not centuries - has become either the subject of several critically acclaimed novels, or a firmly entrenched background to the tales being spun by such gifted writers from Jonathan Safran Foer to William Gibson. Now one of the truly great writers of American fiction, Don DeLillo, has chimed in with "Falling Man"; a novel that is remarkable not only for its relative brevity, but also for delving deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers who witnessed the World Trade Center terrorist attack and are still coping with their psychological trauma years later. Quoting from its dust-jacket blurb, "Falling Man" is indeed a work of fiction that is "cathartic, beautiful and heartbreaking". Without question, it also demonstrates that DeLillo is still a worthy literary artist at the height of his creative powers; a keen observer of human nature in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. His latest novel also proves that DeLillo is an elegant storyteller delving into the lives of ordinary people who remain mentally imprisoned by the searing images and painful memories of that fateful, tragic clear blue September morning not so long ago. Without question, for these very reasons, "Falling Man" is one of the most impressive novels published this year.

DeLillo deftly weaves the narratives of three members of a rather unremarkable New York City family, whose lives remain touched forever by what they witnessed on 9/11/01; a dysfunctional American family which was tearing itself apart at the seams long before that September morning. We meet Keith as he stumbles through the grayish ash blizzard of building debris and human remains, soon after the collapse of the first World Trade Center building to fall, his face splattered by glass fragments and blood, pressing northward on foot towards Canal Street. Years later his estranged wife Lianne remains in a psychotherapy support group, reliving the grim memories of that day, recalling Keith's unexpected arrival at the Upper East Side apartment of herself and their young son Justin, whose hobby is to stare out of apartment windows, searching the skies with a pair of binoculars for more airplanes crashing into tall buildings like the World Trade Center towers. But is it really a hobby, or rather a phobia, brought on by witnessing the terrorist attacks from the window of a young friend's apartment not far from the World Trade Center? DeLillo's literary ambitions are so vast, that he takes us to an Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camp, and to Germany, allowing his audience to reside inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, right up to the final fateful moments of the terrorist's life. But this is an excursion that deflects from, not enhances, the powerful narratives he's created for his three main protagonists, and one that remains a rather facile effort in trying to explain the psychological motivation of one of the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers. It is also an effort that makes this figure sympathetic to the reader, as if his blind adherence to Islamofascism is one worthy of pithy; an effort that others, most notably John Updike, have handled far better.

A piece of history worth treasuring..., 06 Mar 2007
I had to read 'Libra' for my university module on Contemporary American Fiction. I have to say I was impressed. I had not done much (if any) research on the assasination of JFK before reading the novel, so in part it has constructed my view of events.
The novel depicts the 'un-media-filtered' version of events, following Oswald from young boy, to man, to assasin... or was he? Don DeLillo gives you many angles on Oswald himself, giving you a chance to come to your own conclusions.
The meaning of the title itself- and I don't want to spoil it- at first seems a little 'corny', but given a second look, you can appreciate the multi-levels of meaning Don DeLillo is conveying.
This utterly compelling novel, I found confused some people, but I really enjoyed it. It takes an event in history, rips it up, and re-constructs it, playing with stereotypes, and challenging assumptions.
I'm not surprised DeLillo has received the positive acclaim he has for his novels. I liked it so much, that I went out and bought Underworld.

1988's Oswald-themed novel, 10 Mar 2006
DeLillo's breakthrough novel was 'White Noise', its follow-up 'Libra' was another classic and one of his key works alongside 'White Noise' and the epic 'Underworld.' These are DeLillo's works I think everyone should read - whether they'll like his other work I don't know. These are great american novels...

'Libra' will fascinate fans of James Ellroy's 'American Tabloid/The Cold Six Thousand' and Oliver Stone's 'JFK' (Stone was rumoured to have halted a film production of 'Libra' so it didn't clash with his Kennedy/Oswald work). DeLillo's epic looks at the conspiracy theory of the 20th Century and focuses on Oswald - I still have the yellow coloured copy from the late 80s showing Oswald with a gun on the front. To give much more away about the novel would spoil it - DeLillo takes in his interpretation of Oswald et al and creates a work between fact and fiction that ranks alongside Christopher Sorrentino's recent 'Trance' (clearly indebted to it), and several works by Norman Mailer - though I think this is superior to the latter's similarly themed 'Oswald's Tale' (while reaching similar conclusions...). An excellent book that more than warrants its reissue and a definite modern classic...

DeLillo at his best, 08 Jan 2005
The way the author links up the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (the Libra of the title) with the multiple and convoluted conspiracies to stage an assassination attempt is completely engrossing. Oswald's imagined life on its own is fascinating, and if the depiction of the workings of the CIA is anything like the reality, we should all have a long deep look at how our world works.

Unusually for DeLillo, the minor characters, mainly invented, are all brilliantly portrayed and the reader cares about how each and every one of them ends up. DeLillo's notorious way (or lack of it) with dialogue actually works in this novel (whereas for me it fails utterly in a novel like Underworld).

The assassination scene finally arrives after 400 pages of intrigue and is well worth the wait. It's so well written that the events seem to flash in slow motion across your eyes as you read.

The only bum note for me was the depiction of Jack Ruby, who is written as a kind of afterthought. The author is obviously constrained by the factual basis, but Ruby's own story could have been more thoughtfully interweaved.

A mesmerising novel, 27 Feb 2004
'Libra' is absolutely brilliant. Simply by the biography of Lee Oswald it is gripping and intense, but combined with the infamous conspiracies in which he may (or may not) have been involved, the probing descriptions of the agents, Oswald's wife and his mother it is a masterful novel.
You're constantly wondering what is fact and fiction, a device that is as clever as it is easy to employ on such a subject; The entire enigma of JFK's assassination is tightly woven into American fabric thirty one years on.
Delillo has created something powerful and moving with 'Libra' and I can't recommend it enough. It is a daunting trip into an incomprehenisble time in American history.

short.sharp.dull.sentences., 10 Jun 2003
Want to get into Delillo,because heard so much about him,and an excerpt of `Cosmopolis` impressed. But I couldn`t get past the style of `Libra`; short,sharp,dull sentences; declarative,not inviting,as if it was stage directions; no real colour or `lift` in the prose. I will try and read other work of his,but I like my prose to smoothly flow,and not be so `self-important`. He`s letting the fact that it`s an IMPORTANT story do the work of him telling the story. In fact this story is so big,nobody can do it justice. We`ve all SEEN the killing,so how can anything be more dramatic than that? For example,there will NEVER be great literature about September 11 or Princess Diana`s death because we`ve SEEN them (or the mangled car in the case of the latter). `Novels` are supposed to be `new` or `news`...JFK`s death is OLD,but then I`m not American..

Imperfect pretentious peril., 19 Oct 2007
Smart Alec narrative, pretentious dialogue and wooden characters without description of feeling make it difficult for the reader to engage. An empty plot which tries I think to allude to something, but even that is flimsy. Notwithstanding the above there are some good ideas and some good writing. The former and the latter just do not mix - a very irritating combination. Uncommonly unsatisfactory, read it as I did (if you dare) at your own peril.


Much to talk about: a great choice for a book group, 09 Jul 2006
Although there is a strong story, Mao II is more an exploration of interconnected themes and images. It raises a lot of issues that stay with you, and insists that you think for yourself.

For me the main theme was around how people could be controlled by individuals. At the highest level, this was applied to groups, such as the Moonies and Maoist terrorists. This was set against a series of backdrops of crowd behaviours and mass tragedies, such as Hillsborough, Tiananmen Square, and an unnamed square in New York where the homeless congregate.

The same theme ran through the main characters. The central character is a dissolute writer, Bill Gray, who has stayed hidden for 20 years. His life is organised, and largely controlled, by a fan who has tracked him down and become his personal assistant. He is supported by an ex-Moonie girlfriend, who has not been completely de-programmed. They both become protective when the writer insists on being photographed by a photographer from New York who "only does writers". The new character destabilises the situation, and the writer re-enters the wider world.

It is here that the second theme of "writing and terrorism as a zero sum game" emerges. Bill is convinced that terrorists are taking the ground for commentary that was the preserve of serious novelists, and that news is the medium for them doing so. He becomes involved in the negotiation for the life of a poet held hostage in Beirut, and seems to become the target of the same group.

Some of the imagery is prescient: the twin towers of the World Trade Centre loom large through the window of the photographer's apartment, ten whole years before 9/11. Some of it is already out of date, either technically and socially. The inhabitants are so amazingly primitive that they still think a word processor is a pretty neat idea. Similarly, today's terrorists have moved away from Maoism, so that the idea of a woman photographer interviewing a Muslim extremist is simply unimaginable today.

Although a depressing book in many ways, there is hope lying in the rubble of this text. The story ends with a 4am wedding parade in Beirut that provides suitable "green shoots" of hope.

This is a book you'll either love or hate, and there's plenty to discuss. For these reasons, and because it's a genuine modern classic, it would make a great book for a book group. For example: "would you accept a baby from someone who walked up to you in the street?" Please discuss.

Pretentious and empty, 23 Sep 2003
While some of his imagery does work (hence the second star), it is obvious that he is just trying too hard. He mingles torturously constructed, wooden-sounding, sentences with clichéd phrases to make reading the book a chore rather than a pleasure. While reading the book, my face was in a grimace most of the time and I almost shouted with joy when I finished it. The idolised writer character just spouts highly contrived – but ultimately barren – pearls of wisdom, and one gets the lasting (but erroneous I’m sure) impression that he is just a vehicle for the author’s narcissism.

This is the only book of Delillo’s I have read, but if his others are similar, I would rate him as massively inferior to other modern writers such as J. G. Ballard.

Supremely written., 10 May 2002
DeLillo's intelligence is astounding; his observations seem to clarify many uncatergorised fears that makes us 'all to human'; the scope and depth of his imagination is frightening: and all in all this is definitely a fantastic read.

In a nutshell, the plot is secondary to the ideas and themes that run throughout this epic novel - the power of imagery (photgraphs, mainly) and words, global terrorism and movements. Of these themes, the most striking is the photograph, and, in a sense, how the definite image of an event has come to resemble more than the reality itself.
The central characters are a female photographer and a reclusive author, who come together for a once-in-a-lifetime photo shoot of the hermit novelist, and it is the build-up and culmination of this which makes up the rest of the novel. The exchange here is one of the most brilliantly written, thoughtful, most inspiring pieces fo literature I've ever read, and i recommend everyone to give it a go merely for this alone.

Can't say too much about the plot, since there isn't really one. But, if a storyline is essential to your enjoyment of a book, I suggest leaving this alone . . . On second thoughts - give it a go and it'll probably change your stance.
For this reason, though, it loses one star.

Sheer Brilliance, 08 Aug 2001
Having read Underworld, I though DeLillo would never have been able to prodece a book that would dazzle me more ... but Mao II is just that book. The sheer beauty of the prose is in places breathtaking, and the enormity of the ideas and themes, played out in the small details of characters lives and fragments of images viewed on television screens, held me engaged enough to finish the book in one sitting. There are sections I have returned to again and again - The photographing of Bill Gray, the depiction of Khomeni's funeral - and I have yet to not find the return worthwhile. Yes, Underworld is a huge and great novel - but for literary genius, this is the one to read.

One star is too much praise!, 11 Oct 2008
When one picks up a book from the "Cult Fiction" section in any bookshop, it's normally there for a reason. I expected from reading the blurb to White Noise that I would be in for, and I quote, "brilliant and often very funny dialogue" and an exposition of "our common obsession with mortality". So, a darkly funny book about death, something that immediately appealed to me. How mislead I was.

What I was, in fact, in for was a slow and torturous read. The characters of Jack and Babette were, for the most part, very boring, and the only instance in the story where they seemed to develop partially-formed identities of their own seemed like a last-ditch attempt, as if no real thought had been made as to who they were until the last minute. I had completely forgotten who Murray was supposed to be by the end of the book, his presence was so meaningless. As for the festival of children featured, they confused and frustrated me beyond belief.
The plot was the most disappointing part of the whole experience. I suppose I should have realised as soon as I read the less than specific blurb that it was going to be bad. One can't write a novel about all the instances of two people discussing Hitler and celebrity deaths. I can see what DeLillo was trying to do; write a series of short stories that introduced different chapters in the Gladney family's lives, but he missed the boat completely. Instead, what you are faced with is 3 chapters with no beginning, middle or end, just a series of analogies and non-events that try to convey a sense of philosophical meaning. As previous reviewers have no doubt mentioned, this book tries to make you think, but it fails by trying too hard. I have read children's books that have made me contemplate the human condition more than this book.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole thing is that you are given a lot of information that you really don't need, like on the first page, where you are given a list of items packed in station wagons. A LIST, I tell you! I was told in Year 5 that lists equal bad writing. DeLillo is almost projectile vomiting pieces of worthless information at the reader, like what colour a character's jumper is, while at the same time is neglecting elaborating on his characters personalities or even the town they live in. A really good story could have come from these people, but it is because of such dire writing that no such wonder appears.

I refuse to understand why this is so highly praised, or why it is a "must-read". DeLillo is the worst author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, and it has made me strongly question the meaning of the words "Cult Fiction".

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!, 10 Sep 2008
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated, 21 Feb 2008
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the