Americana

I admired this book more than I liked it. It started off really promisingly but seemed to descend into a lot of references to a period of American culture I didn't quite ‘get' and I found some of the road stuff quite obscure and difficult to read at times. It didn't help that I was completely confused about the motivation and character of the protagonist.

Nevertheless, I can see how DeLillo influenced American fiction, there were some great quotes which still prove as relevant today as when the book was first published and whilst I can't completely appreciate this book at the moment I do want to try to read more of his work.

Today, the day after I finished Americana, it being my first novel by postmodern legend Don DeLillo, I walked past a cardboard box of books left out on my street. Sitting on the top of the pile, free for the taking, was another of his works, a novella called The Body Artist. I snatched it up without a second thought, feeling an incredible sense of luck and synchronicity. Really, that's all you need to know about what I thought of Americana. Unfortunately, that hardly constitutes a review.

The difficulty in writing about this book is in finding how to begin. The plot? Yes, I can assure you, in Americana you will find a beginning, middle, and end, and they are even presented in that order (mostly). However, despite the potent-sounding mix of American Psycho and Easy Rider, it is not from the plot where Americana derives its central momentum. The characters, then? Well, yes, they're there too. Although, in actuality, I would be so bold as to suggest this book really has one character, one who finds himself surrounded by a cast of fables and punchlines. Even him, David Bell, the novel's protagonist, is more a philosophical concept than an entirely fleshed-out person. He's a symptom of the mass existential malaise, or the flickering spirit of the American soul. The only times David feels tangible are the brief insights we get into his life before the novel begins.

What Americana really is, is a series of impressions. There are books that you can read somewhat passively, and books where you get what you put in, where a little bit of elbow grease and close reading is necessary to truly enjoy the experience. With Americana, you get what it takes out of you. From the desiccated husk where the heart of Corporate America should be, to the suffocating silence of small town life, this novel will pull pieces of you into its environments. And as it hurtles forward, increasingly fractured and listless, the sense that this is less of a book and more of a mirror grows stronger. Not a mirror to society, or to a moment in time, but to you.

Americana is a reflection of its reader, the desperate artist, the office drone, the mind shackled by freedoms. The entire book is an exercise in decay, in stripping away everything in the desperate bid to find a soul somewhere deep down. That hole that exists in David, the gap he is so desperately trying to fill with his cross country escapades, lives in you too. After all, it is that void the book reaches into, filling its pages with the emptiness inside every reader.

(Minus half a star because the first third of the book is quite dull and cynical, a necessary evil for the rest of it to pack a punch, but one that makes the experience a lot less enjoyable)