Americana by Don DeLillo

Even before the sad news on Tuesday, I'd been thinking about John Updike lately. And Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and all the other Angsty Young Man writers of years past. I recently finished reading Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, and it's very much in the vein of those others. Glib dude seeks self, seeks tail, seeks less glibness.

Americana follows David Bell, a successful New York TV executive in 1970. Only 28, he's slightly obsessed with being the wunderkind around the office (making his secretary research the ages of any successful peers who might possibly be younger than he is). The first part of the book is a Mad Men-meets-Then We Came to the End scenario, with sharp, entertaining observations about life, love, and quirks in corporate Manhattan.

David is unhappy, although he feels like he shouldn't be: he has girls aplenty; he has an easy job; and he's good-looking, as he tells us repeatedly. David is also obsessed with framing his life as a movie. He describes his outfits in detail. He and his (now ex) wife move through their life together as though Fellini were following them with a camera. Even in divorce, they try for Neil Simon-style hijinks, by living in the same building.

When David's pet TV project is canceled and executives start dropping like flies at the network, he leaves the city, ostensibly to work on a Navajo-themed documentary for the network. He never quite gets there, though, and parts two and three are an On the Road-style attempt at finding meaning in American minutiae. David tags an artist friend whom he really just wants to sleep with, a washed-up journalist, and a failed novelist to go with him in a camper. They travel through the heartland, getting hung up in places like Chicago while he reminisces about his past and makes locals participate in an a weird, obtuse movie, restaging events from David's life. He rearranges all of his inner chaos, but with better blocking and pretentious exterior shots of sweeping American landscapes.

Although David isn't quite likeable (every time you want to cut him some slack for being glib and shallow, he tells an anecdote involving blunt, casual cruelty), it's hard to dislike him for long stretches of time, either. And he's kind of a perfect container for DeLillo's anti-consumerism spiel. It feels more authentic coming from a young, conflicted narrator standing in for a young, conflicted writer. It flows more easily, too--there's just not as much self-conscious social commentary as there is in White Noise, and so I liked Americana better.

I also liked the writing better. It's bumpy sometimes--it's pretty clearly a first novel--but in an endearing way. And the early descriptions of office life are just so dead-on, even 38 years later.

It looks like I'll have to do another DeLillo book soon, to see where the best-of-three lands.

Parts I liked especially:

"One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to lay low."

"Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and self-doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women."

"There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands....Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex."