I'm not sure what to think of Don DeLillo. White Noise, like Mao II, like Underworld, like End Zone, is a book bursting with ideas and observations about people, the world and modern life. And some of these observations will make you see things in a new way, or at least crystallize your thoughts so perfectly that you nod your head and say, "Yes, that's exactly what I think. Now why didn't I say it like that?" Well, because you're not Don DeLillo. So give the man credit, because that's something few people can do. At the same time White Noise shows up one of DeLillo's bigger flaws: he doesn't really create characters you care about, even a little bit. Indeed, in White Noise I'm sure he didn't want to. They're not real characters at all, only a group of signifiers and commenators who all speak with the same voice and even use the same expressions, whether they are ex-sportswriters, housewives, sulking teens, or nine-year-old girls. By page 300 this gets tiresome. Intellectual insights are more memorable when they are hung on interesting and engaging characters. So while I enjoyed White Noise and am impressed with the mind behind it, I found it ultimately unsatisfying.

To say this book lacks a narrative structure, as another reviewer has, is to state the obvious truth, but it is also to miss the point of how this book works in the grossest sense. Also, to pretend that any work's validity comes from a complex narrative is to be stuck in the George Eliot school of literary criticism. "The novel" has thankfully moved beyond being simply a plot-vehicle; DeLillo has helped urge us down this path. The inheritor of similarly "unploted" authors as Proust and Nabokov, DeLillo's works read something like sprays of words; it is up to the reader to pick up the pieces. Here our narrator makes that task extraordinarily familiar. Set amidst American suburbia at its most mediocre, White Noise draws ironies and truth that a more traditional narrative would force into existence. In this book they emerge naturally from delicious verb-less sentences that string together such non-entities as brand names and un-happenings. If it strikes us as pedestrian, it is only because it hits points remarkably close to us as readers; products of post-war Americana, we _should_ know all that it contains. To have done this, and have done it with as much comic gusto as DeLillo has, is something of a feat. It is not an outright funny book--but Jack Gladney's demi-struggle is staged with such perfect wit that it recalls that other great, comic suburban exploration, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. Yet even Pynchon uses mystery to drive us along--DeLillo employs no such artifice. Funny for a book which points out so much artifice in the everyday.

The world encapsulated in DeLillo's White Noise is a gas powered consumerist wasteland bordered on the fringes by intellectual pondering and postmodernist parallels. It is in a constant vortex, shaping and reshpaing itself against a backdrop of supermarket commoditites, media misinformations, and the filtering of the human condition through radio and television samplings. However, behind this curtain of shrink-wrapped satisfaction and pre-packaged purpose, there lies a furtive cloud of danger, always growing in malevolent proportions. A consumerist death spreads it's ameobic presence throughout the text. It is our own refuse, overt consumption, and brand name ideology that manifests itself into DeLillo's 'airborne tovic event'. From an obsession with disaster, and disaster footage, bordering on fetishism, to a toxic mass embodying our transgessions, to a drug designed specifically with the intent of eliminating the fear of death, the results of overindulgence are visible, both literally and figuratively. One of the most relevant works to date, this book defies all categorization!

Read the first page of Great Jones Street and you might think you've stumbled across a new DeLillo novel about Kurt Cobain. "Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide," DeLillo writes, with eerie foresight.

Unfortunately for contemporary readers, that Cobain imagery is likely to stick with you throughout this 1973 novel and become a distraction. Bucky Wunderlick, DeLillo's rock idol, is neither as tortured or talented as Cobain. As other critics have noted, his lyrics are awful. DeLillo doesn't have an ear for rock lyrics (or at least didn't in the early 70s.)

Like Running Dog, Great Jones Street is a great premise and an awkward delivery. DeLillo had yet to develop his signature style of putting subtext before story. He also hadn't developed his micro-detail style of painting an environment, which he used to such brilliant effect in describing the supermarket in "White Noise" and the Bronx of his youth in "Underworld." What we're left with is conventional dialogue-and-plot story telling -- which is what DeLillo has always done worst.

If you've read the masterworks of the DeLillo canon -- Ratner's Star, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld -- Great Jones Street is a worthwhile diversion. If you haven't read DeLillo's best, come back when you're done.

GREAT JONES STREET is a novel set in the 70's that is as relevant now as when it was first published. The main character - an AWOL rock musician - with shades of Dylan or Lennon attempts to escape the life of celebrity only to find his disappearing act, in mid tour, has made him that much more an enigma, raising the torch of his celebrity. With the much publicized saga of the late Kurt Cobain, an artist drained by commerce and ultimately destroyed by it, GREAT JONES STREET forshadows the struggle of artists within the system of commerce and capitalism of the United States. It is a novel about fame, and commerce, and the rights of the individual in society whether they be famous or not. It doesn't have the taught language of UNDERWORLD or the magnificent LIBRA but it is worth the time. A definite precursor to the grand themes of LIBRA, Delillo's finest novel.

This is the surreal odyssey of one who declares himself no longer a commodity. Bucky Wunderlick has become that contemptible thing,a Rock Star. Even though he finds it ridiculous and can't quite believe that people buy it, they do, so f*** 'em. But his desire to disconnect from the consumer culture in which we live creates difficulties. This is, after all, Don DeLillo,and Bucky pays a price for stepping off the corporate bus.

Of course, there are many "GAN"s, for different historic periods, demographics, etc. But *Underworld* somehow manages to span so many of them, and over a 50-year post-War period that now spans into the post-9/11 future, that it's *more* than great, *more* than a "remarkable achievement"--it's just breathtaking, unbelievable.

In a sense, whatever you're looking for, you'll find it in *Underworld*. And don't be daunted by its length--it's actually a real page-turner, in the GOOD sense, though it begs for multiple re-reads. I'm familiar with the negative criticism of the book--that it's full of "sound bytes", it's a non-linear story, whatever...and sure, you bet! Though I wonder how many people who affect to dislike it have actually really *read* it--and don't worry, it's not (just) about the Cold War, New York, drugs, or baseball. It is a monumental masterpiece, a book that will be a classic for many, many years, and it will take that long for we as readers to fully come to terms with its genius, if indeed we ever fully do. All that, and it's STILL a...FUN READ! It really is. How DeLillo pulled all this off, I'll bet even HE doesn't know.

I wouldn't recommend *Underworld* as a reader's first Don DeLillo book--that would be *White Noise*, probably, which still holds up as a cultural mirror when I teach it in college freshman and sophomore classes, though it's now 18 years old--but then again, so does *Americana*, DeLillo's first novel, published in 1971!

But I consider it to be one of the finest American novels written in my lifetime, one of those books you've just gotta read before you die. Actually, death and the threat and fear of it (even, or *especially*, in "life") is DeLillo's Great Theme--in ALL his 13 books--and MY life, for one, has been enriched by having read them all, and in particular this one.

The majority of this book is about a time that I have never seen, events that I have only read about in history books, and prominent characters in American society who passed on before I was even aware of them. You would think this book really wouldn't get to me at all, but it did. The reason is its style. Don Delillo portrays the events concerning (and triggered by) the Cold War in a voice seldom seen in most American fiction. I was initially turned off by the dialogue --it seemed too fragmentary and spontaneous-- until I realized that PEOPLE ACTUALLY TALK THAT WAY! Nothing in this book was in the least bit dull, and that seems incredible, coming from a twenty-one year-old who grew up on television and the movies. This book made me change the way I thought about fiction, about art, about society, and about history. That is a great accomplishment. I used to be a fan of "popular" fiction, but Delillo has converted me to a whole new realm of literature that I wish everyone knew about. If you found this book boring, or you didn't understand much of it, or you were turned off by its rococo style --you need to 1) peel yourself from the couch and turn off your T.V., 2) avoid your local megaplex, and 3) throw away your Grishams, Crichtons, and Koontz's (you can keep your Kings, I guess). Oh, and put this book in your shopping cart.

I won't attempt any kind of meaningful literary criticism, you can find that in other reviews (beware, it is obvious many of the published reviewers have not read the whole book) and comments, and I'm not up to it. But I will try to explain what the book is. This is the story of America's past 50 years, told from a unique perspective (kind of like a hyperactive eye of God with a 5 minute attention span). This results in a series of interconnected short stories travelling back and forth in time, connected by ephemera (a baseball, garbage, TV shows, and the degrees of separation of all the characters). The story is discovered by tracing these connections, which are made by the actions of the characters (the story is not really about the characters, but about explaining the effects of different forces on their lives).

The book switches between styles frequently. The most disturbing thing many people may find are the switches between first and third person. However, people accept these changes in viewpoint in films... Next is the repetition. However this serves to illuminate the connections between the characters' experiences, and also help the jog the reader's memory to something that happened 300 pages ago. Don't be put off by the change in style after the relatively accessible and electric first chapter, either.

Making it to the end of this book is difficult, because there is barely a sentence that does not serve to illuminate the story in a way that makes you stop and think. But if you do, it should make you think differently about life, what more can you ask for?

Perhaps the most impressive feature of this book is that the author managed to keep it coherent despite its massive size and scope, finally resolving all of the interconnected sequences of events spawned in the first chapter. It is a demonstration of rare talent.

I like Delillo's work. It is strong and disturbing. This is no great addition to his ouevre. Even if written by someone else, you still run up against a book w/ uneven quality.

Delillo loves his language here as he does in other books. Languages, those of ideas, suburban life, espionage and other jargons still strike the ear just right. When he deploys these, the effect can be stimulating. We read/listen to dialogue that piques our interest w/out ever laying down in so many words that great silent center where we live our lives.

The first scene...Its relation to the rest of the book is uncertain. Delillo often chooses words with an eye/ear to overall effect. This idea next to that one. They don't cohere as well @ times. This is the problem I had w/ Mao II. (He is a novelist of ideas, but when he loses sight of the narrative for the sake of these juxtapositions, well-you just want to shake him & ask, "Where'd the story go, Don?".) While interesting in the abstract, unless a real connection can be made between events-despite Delillo's contention stated and unstated that disparate events are what make up our lives in contemporary times-sometimes it (the book) seems an amusing mental game he's devised. NOt a story. A game.

Reading him, you think of Orwell's famous language essay of words retaining meaning. As one of his characters might say, "This thing's got levels. Lots of 'em."

Phrase he/she "wondered if (he/she) was too complex" to do whatever is leitmotif that doesn't work. It's supposed to bind the work together thematically, especially one like this one which jumps from idea to idea-but what it does is tire the reader & remind them of the book's broken promises of delivering a cogent AND engaging tale.

Sex scenes read like a vcr repair manual. Language is dry & supposed to reflect the aridness of character's lives, but in the end, it's only white noise of an author of trying to say something & not really saying it. He goes @ length in these scenes as if by sheer effort he will make the reader see what he sees. He doesn't. Read these scenes & try picturing them & you try staying awake. Maybe I've become too complex to enjoy these overworked scenes.

Anyway, this book is definitely not the one to start w/ if you want to read Delillo. Start w/ Libra, White NOise, or End zone.

You can read the tea leaves of any DeLillo novel and see shadows of the WTC disaster, but they are more striking in this novel than any other. One of the main characters works for a grief counseling company in the WTC, her husband works on Wall Street and is casually drawn into a terrorist plot.

"Players" is heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and Dostoyevsky's "Demons", but its unmistakably DeLillo. The terrorists in this book are not drawn by religious or political zealotry, they are almost offhand about their deadly work. As he will do later in "White Noise", DeLillo places a disaster in the foreground but finds the real drama in domestic interaction, in characters so caught up in lifestyle that the world around them is dull, unimportant.

In my opinion, "Players" is the transitional book in DeLillo's body of work. It is his first book to touch on his obsessive themes in a serious, sustained manner. However, it does not match the virtuosity of his later works. Not until "The Names" did DeLillo hit his stride, so don't expect as polished a book as those written in the 80s and 90s. But for DeLillo fans who have overlooked this work through the years, "Players" is a gruesome treat.

Basically, this is the story of a couple that takes separate vacations. She goes to Maine with her friends, a gay couple, and we read about their interaction. Meanwhile, he is drawn into the political underground, where he becomes fascinated with some vague group's shadowy and violent tactics. DeLillo fans that have read "Mao II" will recognize this "two-path" structure. But this time, the juxtapositions of different family-member experiences didn't really resonate (at least with me) or seem to add up to much. Is this what he's communicating? "It occurred to her that this was the secret life of their involvement. It had always been there, needing only this period of their extended proximity to reveal itself. Disloyalty, spitefulness, petulance."

Mao II is the first book of Don Delillo's I have ever read. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, getting into the minds of 63 year old writer Bill Gray and his live-in assistants, with all their human complexities, flaws, and obsessions. And along comes Brita, who photographs writers, to capture reclusive Bill's face on film and shake things up. Then, in the second half of the book, Bill agrees to go off at his publisher's request in aide of an unknown poet taken hostage. The book gets political from there, away from a world I relate to to scenes in London and Beirut with Bill, plus the here and there of his abandoned assistants, and Brita, without any sense of closure or the tightness of style and dialogue so beautifully painted in the first half of this book. In the final run, after a beginning so well rooted in American soil, I found it ultimately unbelievable that Bill Gray would face potential danger and run off like he does. I guess I feel shortchanged because I really loved these characters and would have like to see the narrative go deeper into their lives, and deal a lot less on the political level. Read it and make your own conclusions.

These reviews are for people who are not familiar with DeLillo, because anyone who is familiar with his work only reads these to affirm their own opinion.

Having said that, I will say that we are placed under great pressure to READ DeLillo, owing mainly to the fact that he wins awards and is worshipped by the literary establishment. Some people buy DeLillo in the same way they buy wine; too bad bookstores don't have bags that read, DELILLO INSIDE.

Mao II is full of beautiful aphorisms and phrases and literary terms that one might as well call hooks, or licks, or riffs. They're on every page, and they keep me reading, but it's understood that I'm reading them just to see the words on the page.

The fact is that DeLillo writes about situations and themes with considerable intellectual weight, and he uses his characters' dialogue as a vehicle (sidecar?) for his own narrative. Consequently, DeLillo will introduce you to characters who are totally indistinguishable from one another, and who speak dialogue that no human has ever spoken or will ever speak. This will annoy readers of other authors who are capable of conveying a sense of weight and consequence in their writing, while developing distinct characterizations.

Reviewers of writers like DeLillo love to insult people who do not like his books - they try to paint such people as unsophisticated rubes who are better off reading Grisham. I say, stick to your instincts. If you like books about characters who do things to cause the narrative adapt to them, do not buy DeLillo. If you don't mind characters whose verbosity would annoy even the guy waiting on the movie line with Woody Allen in Annie Hall, buy DeLillo.

I am always torn between recommending Mao II or White Noise to those who want to try some DeLillo. Perhaps one can consider Mao II to be a watered-down White Noise: its characters and events are fleshed out more, and it reads more like a novel than a collection of clever aphorisms.

Mao II lacks the "edginess" of White Noise, but at the same time, we should applaud DeLillo of not harping on the theme of "America is really consumerist" for ever and ever. A writer of his skill can take on more challenging themes than that.

So what's it about? It's about individuals and crowds, and the frightening equivalence between the lone-wolf individual and the composite of crowds. Think repeating Mao portrait. Think of the name of the reclusive, lone-wolf main character: Bill Gray. There's also stuff about art, and of course DeLillo's ubiquitous "novelists are terrorists" insinuations.

This is probably my second-favorite DeLillo, and the one I'd recommend to someone looking for something like a traditional novel. It was very enjoyable, although perhaps not as intellectually searing as something like White Noise or (Pynchon's) Lot 49.

The book is simultaneously a masterpiece and unfulfilling. DeLillo is a master in his use of language - the sentence can be jarring, incomplete, ambiguous, meandering as the plot line requires. An example: "She moved past the landing and turned into the hall, feeling whatever she felt, exposed, open, something you could call unlayered mayer, it that means anything, and she was aware of the world in every step." While I frequent enjoy movels specifically because of their use of language, I found DeLillo's writing jarring - there were sentences I had to reread in order to get the sense of them. I prefer to reread a sentence for the sensual pleasure of the words.

Similarly, I was both impressed and uneasy about his building of character. He does a splendid job of rooting the body artist in the physical, with an awareness of the physical that had, for me, an almost Zen-like quantity. This was used to advantage as her experiences after her husband's suicide lead to fluid boundaries of time, space, personhood, reality ... However, in the first chapter which sets up the story I found the discrepancy between her semi-awareness of thought and her physical rootedness created a character out of focus.

Nonetheless, while I've not been made a fan of DeLillo, anyone interested in the use of language in contemporary novels should read something by him - and this volume is an excellent choice.

It is no accident that DeLillo's first word in this book is "time." "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance a spider pressed to its web." And so you enter "The Body Artist," DeLillo's latest work that is apparently being written off in a number of quarters as being too slight. But as you can tell from just two sentences, he still has all the visionary skills of the writer he ever had, and he is addressing the "big" concepts, just as he has done in the previous works of his that I've read. Okay, so this is not "Underworld." Let that be understood. "The Body Artist" does not attempt to achieve the overarching historical and societal commentary of that opus, but that does not mean that it carries no weight. Here DeLillo is delving into the personal, even more so than in portions of "Mao II." How does a human being respond to the pressures of time, of memory, of grieving, of silence, of being alive?

Other reviewers have laid out the plot for you. Man dies. Wife grieves. A stranger shows up, then leaves. The wife, the body artist, performs a piece based on this. That's the bones on which the tale is built. But the fascination is not the plot but the personalities, the psychology of the heroine, the boundaries of what is real and what is not. And this is the stuff of "big" books, not lightweight ones. It's more like the thin volumes that Beckett was putting out in his later stages than the tomes released by Proust, but like both of those writers, DeLillo is not focused on minor concepts here even if he is delimiting his world by the circumstances surrounding one woman for a brief time.

And through it all runs the subtext of What is creation? How does it work? Where does the artist establish or violate the boundaries of real life and art? At what point do they blur? Why? Writers have been dealing with this in ways for centuries, and coming down on opposite sides of the fence. DeLillo puts his two cents in on these questions without being heavy-handed about it.

What are we to conclude about the body artist who projects herself into the newspaper stories she reads? Could she be projecting a strange unreal man into the realities of her life immediately after the death of her husband? Well, pick up this book and be the judge for yourself. DeLillo won't answer the question for you, but it's well worth the evening that you spend with it. You may find the urge to immediately reread, as I did.

This book kept me in a trance for the two hours it took me to read it. I, unlike previous reviewers came away Euphoric. The Author, Don DeLillo, takes you on a journey into the mind of a wife reliving what she thought was just another uneventful morning she had with her husband.

You have to pay attention, otherwise you miss the point that everyone goes about their daily lives in a kind of mindless way until something shocking happens. In this case it's the death of Lauren's husband and she replays over and over again their last conversation and all the mundane things that happen all around them like toasting bread and watching birds feeding outside the kitchen window.

To me, the Author's point was that you take for granted that someone you love will always be there until by some unfortunate event they are yanked away and you are left with recreating the short time you had together.

Just as suddenly as Rey, Lauren's husband is pulled out of the story, a strange man is discovered in the house. It's left up to the readers imagination to figure out whether the man is real, a ghost, an imaginery friend or even an alien. Without revealing too much, Lauren loses herself to the task of discovering why the man is there in the house with her and in doing so unknowingly examines her own life.

Much like Nietzsche's, Delillo's writing hits hard, blunt truths which may not resonate as you first read them, but seem to subltly speak to something beyond. This is not to say that Delillo is a flagrant cynicist or ironist. I find him way too dry for that. Not that that is a negative statement, in my opinion. Nevertheless, this book promises more than many reviewers gave it credit for. The territory may not be brand-spanking new, but the story is compelling, rather intriguing and has some nice twists in it. Minor characters don't get their due, but the main character provides enough reason to read on and the antagonist (in the looser sense of the word) also serves as a nice tangent from the main vein of the narrative. What continues to compell me about Delillo is his need to depict, as if by camera, what is happening in his novels, through his crisp sentences. His prose is almost geometric, the way it sets up angles and perspective. Almost every sentence is like a cross-section of the culture we live in. Because his novesl are embedded in history, I believe we may be looking back at Delillo in 40, 50, 75 years from now, trying to see "what it was really like" back then. Like a timecapsule in a book.

One of my very favorite quotations is from Don DeLillo: "Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom." It's a delicious quote, and until recently reading Cosmopolis, it's been the only thing I know about DeLillo, other than the fact that he's considered a sophisticated writer with a sophisticated following, and that the quotation is from White Noise. So after reading a couple of short reviews of Cosmopolis, I decided to give it a try (which is saying something, since I read science fiction and horror almost exclusively). Cosmopolis follows one day in the life of New York billionaire asset manager Eric Packer. What sort of guy is Eric? Well, if you were ever a fan of the TV series ThirtySomething, think of evil advertising executive Miles Drentell, only immensely more rich and powerful, and maybe not QUITE as nasty. Do people like this actually exist? I shudder to think. There obviously do exist people who live such lives of luxury, protected by swarms of security people, insulated from the grittiness of the real world; experiencing Eric's life vicariously was almost appalling for little old me. DeLillo has an obvious talent for dry, matter-of-fact prose that at times begs to be read aloud. But I have to subtract a star from my review, because the narrative tends to fall apart toward the end (as does Eric's life), and the story's climax is a bit of a letdown. BUT GETTING THERE WAS LOTS OF FUN.

I've read all Don DeLillo's novels, enjoyed some more than others, and turned friends and students on to them, for years--and after my second reading of *Cosmopolis* I'll say that, in my opinion, this is a masterpiece. He's never been better. The humor of *Americana*, the poignant profundity of *White Noise*, the treatment of relationships in *Mao II*, the grit of *Underworld*, the soaring lyricism of *The Body Artist*...the BEST of them are all present here, in just over 200 pages.

There was a time when I thought DeLillo had a "niche" and that the Zeitgeist had necessarily passed him by--ah, but he's WAY too good. I don't consider him an "Apocolyptic Postmodernist" anymore, if indeed he ever FIT that label which reviewers too commonly affix to his books--if one MUST put it in a phrase, he's a satirical Spiritual Humanist, concerned with personal identity in a frenetic world, with isolation and with loneliness, and with the absurdity of the world that serves as its own complex character in his work.

This is, at first reading, a difficult book--and it's worth it. Authors like, say, Chuck Palahnuik are doing what DeLillo *used* to do--but DeLillo is truly amazing in his ability to adapt to the "times" and continually out-write the younger writers who are so heavily influenced by him.

It occurs to me that if there's a book to compare this to, it's not DeLillo himself but, in sundry strange yet fitting ways, *Notes from the Underground*, by Dostoyevsky. I've read the other reviews here, and I understand, I believe, both the positives and the negatives of what these readers are saying. It took even *me* a second reading to really begin to "get" it--*Cosmopolis* is condensed, very complex, disquieting and challenging.

I'm glad I took the challenge. In the midst of the times in which we live, we're often left reeling--and this book just made me feel so vital, so validated to live in my own skin.

So...*alive*.

Don DeLillo is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors (even though I have only read Americana, Mao II, and Libra). But this book lacked something his other books did not - it just didn't feel like it was going anywhere or saying anything of importance. I suppose for a first stab at novel writing it is good (I would not know, not having published anything myself :) I reccomend you read this book - but NOT before reading some of his others. I reccomend checking out Mao II first, and i hear White Noise is very good as well.

In summary: Good for fans, bad for newcomers.

Though rambling and at times aimless, though missing the technical virtuosity of "Libra" and the sodden comic dread of "White Noise", Americana remains my favorite book by Don Delillo. The novel is a retelling of Huck Finn, in the persona of an all-around Golden Boy and very dead soul named David Bell. Bell, like Huck, lights out for the territory, but instead of a burlesque and edenic frontier, he finds a graveyard of flickering images, of a country at the end of its reel, spinning, flailing, disintegrating, full of phantoms. Twain's daguerotype of a giggling boy's swampy adventures is re-rendered by Delillo as a faithless young man's journey through an empty celluloid desert. Super-good.

Over the course of his career, Don DeLillo has grown into a force of literature. Several of his eleven novels, among them White Noise and Underworld, seem destined to become classics. I've read these books, as well as all of the others in his canon, and admire them greatly. But ultimately, Americana, his first book, is the one I keep coming back to. It is a brisk novel, brimming with tight, controlled prose, and on the surface, not a lot seems to happen -- some board meetings in the offices of an advertising agency, a road trip, several lengthy monologues read as dialogue from a movie script. Subsequent examinations, however, reveal its many complex layers. All of the classic DeLillo themes are present -- advertising, paranoia, American mythology versus reality -- and explode fully formed onto the page. The story chronicles the exploits of a young, self-involved advertising executive who retreats into the heart of America with his camera in an attempt to discover what, if anything, lies beneath the series of images that define who we are and the country we live in. DeLillo's command of the language is remarkable from the first page as he filters the chaos of Christmas in New York City through the ennui of the ironic narrator, David Bell. It has often been said that DeLillo writes "idea books," meaning that he is less concerned with characters (though the characters in his books are always memorable) than the large and complicated issues of modern life (fear of death, fear of life, the nature of terror). If this is true then Americana sets the gold standard for much of what has followed from him since its publication in 1971. Which leads me to my final point: Although this book is almost thirty years old, it reads as if it were written last month. DeLillo's perceptions about our image-obsessed American culture are perhaps more relevant now than ever before (despite the flood of recent fiction that has tackled this very subject). And this, it would seem, is one of the true tests of any novelist, to make the necessary connections to a time and place but also create a work that's timeless. Americana (unlike, say, DeLillo's End Zone or Great Jones Street) achieves this. If you have any interest at all in the work of Don DeLillo, you would do well to begin your study here.

First things first - this is a brilliantly-evoked account of the Giants/Dodgers playoff game that ended with the "Shot Heard Round the World". It is also the opening section of DeLillo's novel Underworld. Like most of the other reviewers of this book, my main beef is "Why should one bother to buy this extract?" In context, this is only the beginning of a long exploration of American history in the 50 years that separate us from that game - particularly the Cold War, which could be said to begin on that day with news of the Soviet Union's atomic test reaching the US. The historic baseball goes weaving from hand to hand binding the stories together. If you're a DeLillo fan, then, don't buy it for yourself. If you want a taster of his work, perhaps buy it as an entry-level sample but be prepared to fork out for it all over again if you decide you need to read the full novel. Best of all, buy it as a gift for someone who's unlikely to be a DeLillo reader, now or in future, but is a fan of baseball and/of 50s Americana. It's great stuff, but its appeal in this format is just pretty limited.

And I really believe that. This is the opening section of *Underworld* (1997), and it originally appeared in Harpers--so, when I saw it in stores, I thought "why re-release this as a BOOK?"

Then, I read it. It stands on its own as a novella--and it's not *just* about baseball, either, so don't let that mislead you or put you off. It's about *everything*. Maybe you don't wish to read the lengthy *Underworld* (though the themes and characters and plotlines here run through the entire novel)--but at LEAST read THIS.

And while I own the novel, I'm pleased to own this, too--and if you like DeLillo and wish to turn others on to his work, this is what you give them. I've given copies to several people, and use this brilliant work in my "Writing a Novella" Creative Writing class. I don't test the students, or ask them to try to emulate the work--I just ask them to read it.

Their jaws drop open every time, just as mine did--and does.

Yes, if you've read Underworld then there's no need to buy this book, and yes, it's a cynical ploy to release this already published and republished story as a new hardcover. I'd be irritated with Delillo if this weren't one of the most magnificent things I've ever read. I also enjoy the cover. I'd never seen that photograph before and hence never understood the story's odd original title. Why Pafko, mentioned in the text only once or twice? But there he is, forever, watching the ball sail over his head and into Cotter Martin's hand. Like Nick Shay said, the ball is about losing, not winning. Buy this book and give it to someone who'd never pick up an 800 page book. Give it to a baseball fan.

This is a helpful set of books if you need to know what the books are about or some insight on the story line. Don't expect too much deep literary criticism.