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The worst part about reading the satire of the 1980's is waking up, turning on the TV, going to work or school, and realizing that what was once an absurd warning is now a normal fact of life. For example, I read White Noise in the late 1990's as a teenager. The book drove home points about useless academic pretension, the lack of interconnectedness in modern families, the overwhelming ennui that advertising makes of our existence, the complete state of panic and endless distraction we succumb to by being over-saturated by media, the existential void left by man being thoroughly disconnected from anything important in his own life. But now everything is worse than the forewarned lifestyle depicted in White Noise. I look around at crowds of people walking while staring into their phones, talking to a virtual stranger in their Cyberpunk Literature class, someone they talk to on a daily basis (when they talk to their parents once a month) on their way to purchase food they can take a picture of, so they can send virtual strangers an image of their food as a status symbol... I see daily life in America and realize we've sank so far down this solipsistic rabit-hole that a book like White Noise is an obsolescent relic of a more innocent time. That's the problem with what was once satire.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:27
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It's been a long time since I read it, but I am pretty sure I took the "forewarned lifestyle" as melodramatic rather than any kind of prophecy, in the same way that any kind of existential crisis related to media/consumerism pales in comparison to the famine reports from Ethiopia we started getting in the 80s (which then feeds into existential-crisis-guilt).God Of Paradise posted:That's the problem with what was once satire. Looking at it like that makes this sentence really tasty.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:11
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nooneofconsequence posted:Darn, I've only read Ratner's Star. That's a hell of an introduction. It's Delillo's craziest book by far.
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Jul 14, 2014 14:14
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Time to read Zinn posted:If you don't hate DeLillo most of all for Mao II, you don't yet hate DeLillo. Mao II bums me out. The first scene and the last scene are awesome, and everything in between is precisely what you said. Delillo has an obnoxious inability to write in different voices for different characters; everyone ends up saying and thinking the same things, but for whatever reason it's the worst for me in this book.
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Jul 14, 2014 14:20
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