DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.

I've been embarrassed for Don DeLillo since 1999, when a friend handed me White Noise to read. He said I'd like it, and by all accounts I should have. A novel (which I liked) from the 80s (which I liked) about popular culture (about which I was obsessed).

I hated it. I couldn't finish. From the tone of the sentences I sensed that here was a book that spent hours mystifying the everyday in such a too-serious-and-cloying-for-its-own-good manner that I was made completely sick of the time I'd been spending with its narrator. I rushed quickly to True Stories and my one Talking Heads compilation as a kind of balm.

I disregard Don DeLillo with the same vehemence and weak rationale with which I disregard the Boomer generation as a whole. His allure for others I think lies in his ability to put into words* that peculiar mix of wonder and anxiety and estrangement that Boomers seem to feel for "the present" (by which term I mean the world after the Sixties (i.e., the world as it has existed each time DeLillo has put another novel out), which is of course the world that Boomers themselves created, the world to which the rest of us (by which term I mean those people of the "letter generations" to which the Boomers have given themselves the privilege of putting names) are unwitting heirs).

David Byrne might technically be a Boomer himself, but it's clear to me that he's not of the same generation as DeLillo and the critics that have allowed him to get away with murder for so long. I bring him up because, in ways I can't quite put into words right now, the two men seem to have similar aims in their work, and David Byrne has made much more thought-provoking, envelope-pushing, and idea-driven art that dissects and interrogates the culture(s) of the present(s) than DeLillo ever has. The latter can learn a lot, I think, from the former, and it's the former I will always return when I need to get what both seem to be offering.

What's frustrating, though, is that the former is undoubtedly a fan of the latter (though I'd be willing to put money on DeLillo's total disinterest in Byrne), because everyone I admire, and every writer I seem to admire, adores and loves and is a total fan of DeLillo. I, clearly, am missing out. But setting aside his incredibly crafted sentences, it seems DeLillo's great theme is nothing more than Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. No, Don, we're not, and most of us have never been to this "Kansas" you speak of.

I think the reason I hate Don DeLillo so much is that I want so much of what he has: the extended career, the ability to publish novels driven solely by "interesting" ideas, the ear for rhythm, and, yes, the fame, the money, the critical adoration. And yet, despite wanting what Don DeLillo has, I never ever want to write the way he does.
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* If there's one thing I will always give Don DeLillo, it's his words, his sentences, the way he can drop the phrase "toothpaste suburbs" at the exact moment in a sentence such that the image is perfectly formed in your head despite all lack of regular logic needed to form it; DeLillo is a man hugely gifted in metaphor and rhythm.