Don't really have that much input on the footnotes this time, not having seen either of those films. As far as late work goes, I'd be very interested at some point to know your thoughts on late Morrison (for that matter where does it even begin? My money would be on after Paradise) or Delillo (the ones you haven't reviewed of course.) Maybe this is my belated suggestion for those courses- do an entire major author's oeuvre from beginning to end (If in fact this wasn't in the cards, although it may be impractical.) Anyway, another thought provoking newsletter!
Thanks! I don't recommend Beau Is Afraid, by the way; the above is "critique" not "review," so I didn't say it there, but I will say it here.
I think DeLillo can be divided pretty easily: early (Americana through Players: diffident satire with hints of a more serious political critique and spiritual intuition) - middle (The Names through Underworld: maximalism with a relatively earnest social canvas plus a this-worldly spiritual quest) - late (The Body Artist and after: minimalism with less and less text and less and less world given over to more and more spiritual concerns). (I don't know if it matters, but I neglected to read an early DeLillo novel or two in there somewhere.)
Morrison is more difficult, the divisions more thematic than formal. Provisionally I'd say: early (The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby: the period of "metaphysical blackness," magical realism in service of cultural essentialism albeit with countervailing hints of anarchism) - middle (Beloved through Paradise: the synthesis of all previously marginalized social identities in a flexible literary language of body-consciousness now metaphysicalized in a figure of black maternity) - late (Love through God Help the Child: a series of experiments in finding social determinants beneath and beyond race, from gender in Love to class in A Mercy to age in GHTC, with Home as partial exception).
In DeLillo's case, I think the middle period is clearly best, but Lorentzen once made an argument for early and late DeLillo, intimating that Underworld and Libra might be not just middle-period but a bit middlebrow. In the same piece, he gives four periods where I give three, dividing the pre-White Noise era into comedies and thrillers:
With Morrison, because the division is thematic, the preference is much less clear and may just depend on one's politics, though I do think after Love she runs out of steam in the same way DeLillo does around the same time.
I like the idea of single-author courses, personally, and will have to see what others think.
You know it’s interesting that you bring that up about DeLillo, because the friend who read white noise before I did said that he found DeLillo’s prose middlebrow, although he liked the books. I’m not sure if I would describe it quite that way, but there’s something in the prose that’s always kept me at a slightly greater remove with him vs his contemporaries, a sense of the greatness building up incrementally page by page, as opposed to something like a Morrison or a Roth, where almost every sentence has something that can stun you. (Underworld is an exception for me so far, one of the greatest opening pages in American literature and it just keeps going.)
I suspect DD in the '70s through the '90s was both stylistically weird enough and ideologically edgy enough (by the standards of the time) to seem highbrow; it's just that his influence has been so absorbed by lesser figures and by pop culture that he seems middlebrow to us in retrospect—enough to be Baumbach-ified, though I did like that movie. Lorentzen seems irritated by the historical novel qua genre getting in the way of his otherwise diffuse approach to characterization. I see what you mean about his prose, though; I've seen it praised as light and uncluttered vis-a-vis Pynchon, but, as I've said before, sometimes less is less.
Ever read DeLillo’s short story “Human Moments in World War III?” Not really a fan of it as a whole, or his short stories generally (“Baader Meinhof” is all right). But re: spiritual intuition, it includes one of the most beautiful, rousing long paragraphs I’ve ever read (right at the end, if I recall).
I read it when the collection came out but had no recollection so I just reread it. You're right: so-so story, amazing epiphany. That sentence deserves a better context, or just to be published as a poem or prose-poem. DD can't do stories because his novels are themselves best when they are fragments gathering to wholes; the parts themselves are fine but from Don we've come to expect the grander context, the all-encompassing globe eulogized at the end of the story.
Quite so. And incidentally this holds true (for me) with Bolaño: the epic novel and the short novel, outstanding; his short stories I forget the day after I’ve read them.
Don't really have that much input on the footnotes this time, not having seen either of those films. As far as late work goes, I'd be very interested at some point to know your thoughts on late Morrison (for that matter where does it even begin? My money would be on after Paradise) or Delillo (the ones you haven't reviewed of course.) Maybe this is my belated suggestion for those courses- do an entire major author's oeuvre from beginning to end (If in fact this wasn't in the cards, although it may be impractical.) Anyway, another thought provoking newsletter!
Thanks! I don't recommend Beau Is Afraid, by the way; the above is "critique" not "review," so I didn't say it there, but I will say it here.
I think DeLillo can be divided pretty easily: early (Americana through Players: diffident satire with hints of a more serious political critique and spiritual intuition) - middle (The Names through Underworld: maximalism with a relatively earnest social canvas plus a this-worldly spiritual quest) - late (The Body Artist and after: minimalism with less and less text and less and less world given over to more and more spiritual concerns). (I don't know if it matters, but I neglected to read an early DeLillo novel or two in there somewhere.)
Morrison is more difficult, the divisions more thematic than formal. Provisionally I'd say: early (The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby: the period of "metaphysical blackness," magical realism in service of cultural essentialism albeit with countervailing hints of anarchism) - middle (Beloved through Paradise: the synthesis of all previously marginalized social identities in a flexible literary language of body-consciousness now metaphysicalized in a figure of black maternity) - late (Love through God Help the Child: a series of experiments in finding social determinants beneath and beyond race, from gender in Love to class in A Mercy to age in GHTC, with Home as partial exception).
In DeLillo's case, I think the middle period is clearly best, but Lorentzen once made an argument for early and late DeLillo, intimating that Underworld and Libra might be not just middle-period but a bit middlebrow. In the same piece, he gives four periods where I give three, dividing the pre-White Noise era into comedies and thrillers:
https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/genius-of-don-delillos-post-underworld-work.html
With Morrison, because the division is thematic, the preference is much less clear and may just depend on one's politics, though I do think after Love she runs out of steam in the same way DeLillo does around the same time.
I like the idea of single-author courses, personally, and will have to see what others think.
You know it’s interesting that you bring that up about DeLillo, because the friend who read white noise before I did said that he found DeLillo’s prose middlebrow, although he liked the books. I’m not sure if I would describe it quite that way, but there’s something in the prose that’s always kept me at a slightly greater remove with him vs his contemporaries, a sense of the greatness building up incrementally page by page, as opposed to something like a Morrison or a Roth, where almost every sentence has something that can stun you. (Underworld is an exception for me so far, one of the greatest opening pages in American literature and it just keeps going.)
I suspect DD in the '70s through the '90s was both stylistically weird enough and ideologically edgy enough (by the standards of the time) to seem highbrow; it's just that his influence has been so absorbed by lesser figures and by pop culture that he seems middlebrow to us in retrospect—enough to be Baumbach-ified, though I did like that movie. Lorentzen seems irritated by the historical novel qua genre getting in the way of his otherwise diffuse approach to characterization. I see what you mean about his prose, though; I've seen it praised as light and uncluttered vis-a-vis Pynchon, but, as I've said before, sometimes less is less.
Ever read DeLillo’s short story “Human Moments in World War III?” Not really a fan of it as a whole, or his short stories generally (“Baader Meinhof” is all right). But re: spiritual intuition, it includes one of the most beautiful, rousing long paragraphs I’ve ever read (right at the end, if I recall).
I read it when the collection came out but had no recollection so I just reread it. You're right: so-so story, amazing epiphany. That sentence deserves a better context, or just to be published as a poem or prose-poem. DD can't do stories because his novels are themselves best when they are fragments gathering to wholes; the parts themselves are fine but from Don we've come to expect the grander context, the all-encompassing globe eulogized at the end of the story.
Quite so. And incidentally this holds true (for me) with Bolaño: the epic novel and the short novel, outstanding; his short stories I forget the day after I’ve read them.