Americana

This is the first novel by Don DeLillo. DeLillo is a well-known American writer whose novels often make top 100 lists. Because of his reputation, I was curious as to what his books were like. I read this one for a class this semester and it is the first of his I've read. It centers around a young, successful man named David Bell who works unhappily in advertising. Toward the beginning of the novel, Bell realizes the shallowness of his life and wants to change it. His desire is to escape the world he lives in and create a great work of art. He wants to capture the essence of America in a documentary film. Fair enough, but the reader sees through the course of the novel that David, who represents America in general, cannot really do anything unique. Everything he does is merely a reproduction of images he has already seen. All his attempts to be artistic are plastic reproductions of works by real artists.
Las Vegas is a great example of what DeLillo is getting at. Vegas is filled with buildings that are commercial reproductions of real works of art. Because they are nothing more than copies, they give the buildings a cheap, inauthentic feel. DeLillo argues that this tendency affects Americans on many levels. For example, what Americans see on TV is what they try to emulate and copy in their own lives. For people like Bell, life becomes nothing more than a reproduction of images seen on the screen.
I liked the theme of this book but I don't know that I cared much for the delivery. At the start of the book, I dug the writing style, but by the end I had grown a little tired of it. Interesting, considering this is one of DeLillo's shorter novels. I know that most of his more well-known books came after this one so I'm curious if I would like some of those better. I just felt that this story, though good at times, wandered a bit and went on too long.