Product Description

A factional reconstruction of the events leading up to John Kennedy's assassination. The antihero of the book is, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in this book as he was elusive in real life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56347 in Books
• Published on: 1989-07-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140119480
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
In search of his roots, a successful but unhappy TV executive takes off for the heartland of America. "This first novel is peopled with characters alienated not only from one another, but from themselves. It has the smell of staleness and despair. It is also, with its deadly accurate observations, its veracious dialogue, and its consistency of view, brilliantly written," maintained PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Fantastically Readable and Utterly Relevant
Over the course of his career, Don DeLillo has grown into a force of literature. Several of his eleven novels, among them White Noise and Underworld, seem destined to become classics. I've read these books, as well as all of the others in his canon, and admire them greatly. But ultimately, Americana, his first book, is the one I keep coming back to. It is a brisk novel, brimming with tight, controlled prose, and on the surface, not a lot seems to happen -- some board meetings in the offices of an advertising agency, a road trip, several lengthy monologues read as dialogue from a movie script. Subsequent examinations, however, reveal its many complex layers. All of the classic DeLillo themes are present -- advertising, paranoia, American mythology versus reality -- and explode fully formed onto the page. The story chronicles the exploits of a young, self-involved advertising executive who retreats into the heart of America with his camera in an attempt to discover what, if anything, lies beneath the series of images that define who we are and the country we live in. DeLillo's command of the language is remarkable from the first page as he filters the chaos of Christmas in New York City through the ennui of the ironic narrator, David Bell. It has often been said that DeLillo writes "idea books," meaning that he is less concerned with characters (though the characters in his books are always memorable) than the large and complicated issues of modern life (fear of death, fear of life, the nature of terror). If this is true then Americana sets the gold standard for much of what has followed from him since its publication in 1971. Which leads me to my final point: Although this book is almost thirty years old, it reads as if it were written last month. DeLillo's perceptions about our image-obsessed American culture are perhaps more relevant now than ever before (despite the flood of recent fiction that has tackled this very subject). And this, it would seem, is one of the true tests of any novelist, to make the necessary connections to a time and place but also create a work that's timeless. Americana (unlike, say, DeLillo's End Zone or Great Jones Street) achieves this. If you have any interest at all in the work of Don DeLillo, you would do well to begin your study here.

Meet Huck Finn's evil twin
Though rambling and at times aimless, though missing the technical virtuosity of "Libra" and the sodden comic dread of "White Noise", Americana remains my favorite book by Don Delillo. The novel is a retelling of Huck Finn, in the persona of an all-around Golden Boy and very dead soul named David Bell. Bell, like Huck, lights out for the territory, but instead of a burlesque and edenic frontier, he finds a graveyard of flickering images, of a country at the end of its reel, spinning, flailing, disintegrating, full of phantoms. Twain's daguerotype of a giggling boy's swampy adventures is re-rendered by Delillo as a faithless young man's journey through an empty celluloid desert. Super-good.

Delillo's first masterpiece
Don Delillo is an amazing writer. His prose, and the ideas contained in his novels, are so powerful they sometimes make me stop and catch my breath, and that's not hyperbole. I can't think of another contemporary author that moves me so much, with the possible exception of Saul Bellow. Reading his novels is pure joy, it's a wonder on every page, it's magic. I don't say that often.

I read somewhere that "The Names" was his first great novel, so I picked up "Americana" expecting to read the work of a budding author showing only flashes of brilliance. I found the writing and ideas expressed in "Americana" to be as fresh, brilliant, and moving as in any other book of his I've read. Delillo writes beautiful, highly intelligent novels that are also page-turners, and that's a rarity. He is, quite simply, a completely original American novelist, and "Americana" is a wonderful first novel.

Delillo should win the Nobel prize for literature some day, and I'd be very disappointed if he doesn't.