Aesop

Face it: you have to know Aesop. It doesn’t matter if the morals have all become clichés. It doesn’t matter if many of them seem a little more cynical than you’d want for a children’s book. It’s to culture what grains of wheat are to pastry. Or something like that.

Can’t say I enjoyed reading Aesop’s Fables, but they helped me understand a lot of other allusions.

O Henry

When I first started becoming interested in short stories, my brother gave me an old hardback complete set of O Henry’s works. It was a very thoughtful gift, and was much appreciated, even though I never made it through the set. They’re probably still in a box in America. The set’s well over 70 years old now, and I doubt anyone’s made it through all of them.

O Henry pretty much nailed down the genre of short story with a clever moral twist. Kind of a sophisticated Aesop.

I remember reading the volumes Roads of Destiny, Rolling Stones, Sixes and Sevens, and The Voice of the City.

I can’t say he’s one of my favorite writers, but some of his stories are among my favorites. “The Gift of the Magi” is so heavily anthologized that you’ll come across it somewhere even if you try not to. I enjoyed it, but I preferred the darker side of him that was revealed through stories like “Roads of Destiny”.

My all-time favorite of his stories is the under-anthologized, “The Green Door.” I’ve never seen it in another anthology, and don’t know which of those volumes it was in. But it’s worth the search.

Don Delillo

In some obscure liberal arts college this weekend, a small group of scruffy scholars with IQ’s far higher than mine are reading aloud and downing beverages to the following list:

masses in ritual

a small man with a large woman

a character spoken in self-consciously written dialog

a clash of economic status

an unexplained symbol

a vague, impending doom

an overly-bright child

an affectionate couple whose relationship has survived infidelity

an unusual name

a strange, reclusive super-artiste

paranoia

a journalistic observer

India

a misspelling or misunderstanding resulting in a deeper meaning

fog, clouds, or radiation

a character who suspects time may not be progressing sequentially

Nazis, communists, or fanatics

a message that may not really be a message

a 2^nd-rate character devoted to the reclusive super-artiste

a black-and-white film

a list of brand names

an explicit mention of lists

graffiti

a secret society

baseball

homes of mud

holes or caves

 

Suggesting his books would make good fodder for creative bingers does not imply disrespect for Mr. DeLillo, any more than mathematically describing a fugue would be disrespectful to Bach. However, if you don’t like overlapping musical phrases, you should avoid Bach, and if you find nothing of interest in the list above, you should probably avoid DeLillo.

I first heard of Don DeLillo from a favorable comparison on the back of a paperback copy of Fight Club. I liked Palahniuk enough to follow the recommendation. Underground was on all the bookstore display racks, but its size scared me off for a time. But then I saw that White Noise had won the National Book Award, so I decided to give it a try. I found that comparing Pahlaniuk to DeLillo is like comparing Aesop to Kafka.

Three days later, I had also read Ratner’s Star, and Libra. I left for the desert two weeks later with The Body Artist, and The Names.

White Noise introduces the same basic characters and themes you’ll find in many of DeLillo’s best work, but that’s OK because you don’t read his books for characters. You definitely don’t read them for plot. You read them for tone, maybe, and theme. You read them for sentences that could be typed in 12-point Times New Roman, framed, and stand alone as things of beauty. If you’re new to Don DeLillo, White Noise is a good place to start.

Ratner’s Star touched me so deeply personally that I probably will recommend it more highly than I should. I started college in a special program that was supposed to result in the equivalent of a major in physics and chemistry in slightly over 4 years and an advanced degree in less than 4 more. I switched majors within a year. I’ve tried for years to explain why I changed, but DeLillo did it better. Reading Ratner’s Star was like reading my own journals, in an alternate universe in which I was a literary genius.

The Body Artist is more poetic in many ways than his other work. For one thing, it’s shorter. Every page held some beauty in language and image, but the book as a whole didn’t leave me wanting to read it again. Still, since it was one of the only books I had for several years, I found myself going back to it often, opening almost at random, and reading with enjoyment. Like I said, you don’t read him for plot.

I’ve read The Names four times so far. It’s one of the only books in which all of the characters are foreigners, and I read it after just moving to space and language. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best book to read when living in a terrorism-plagued police state, but I have no regrets about the time I spent with it.

Libra, End Zone, and Mao II won’t waste your time, but I think I was born too late to enjoy them enough. Maybe paranoia, like comedy, is something that really only affects the generation it was written for. The Kennedy assassination, nuclear war, and spiritual mass cults are things I remember learning about, not things I remember experiencing. The Players falls in the same group in that, if it were the only book he wrote, it would be great, but it just doesn’t meet the standard of his great ones. It’s not dated by its fears, but by its attempts at iconoclasm: by the time I read it, a homosexual couple was no longer a shocking character (They aren’t really separate characters in the novel). If you start with them, and you’re too young, you may not read more. However, that sentence I just wrote can’t be totally true. A friend brought End Zone to me, by special request, and he ended up reading it on the plane and getting hooked.

You can probably think of Cosmopolis as the abridged version of Underground. I loved them both, but wish I’d read Cosmopolis first; as it was, I approached its take on 21^st-century America already spoiled by the brilliance of Underground. As for Undergound…What is there to say other than, “How can a human being produce something like this?” In a good way. The size alone…and every page, every sentence better than so much else…

And yet, as Underground so clearly shows, don’t expect it to lead somewhere. For DeLillo, the plots end in death, and the characters end when their words run out, which leaves the readers just wondering what do to with all of the beauty that now has become clutter and soon will become rubbish.

Waste.

Maybe that’s the greatest single theme of his corpus. I read Americana, his first novel, last. If I’d written a first novel like that, I would have cried at having set the bar too high for any more writing. All the themes are there. Beautiful, beautiful sentences. All about the waste that we, Americans, authors, white, privileged, modern, whatever the readers of his book have in common, are. You weep for what could have been and was thrown away for reasons that are deeper than the heart of man. Such a beautiful mess.