Is he the greatest writer of our times?
>>24999766No
>>24999766I initially was skeptical of him but Mao II looked like an interesting read, especially with its descriptions of faceless crowds
>>24999766100 pages into underworldReally good but idk if I should keep rapingShould I read something else?
>>24999814If you're interested in America or Cold War history then I'd say keep on since it'll be more of your thing, if not though I'd say don't get your expectations up
>>24999766I dare you to tell me The Body Artist is enjoyable or good to read
>>24999821The Body Artist was a breeze compared to Point Omega and the autistic focus on 24 Hour Psycho. He’s got a great command of language though, does a lot with rhythm, without becoming a Corncob like anachronism.
>>24999766The most pretentious hack I've ever read tbqh desu
>>24999766Frank Gardner blows this fool out of the water.
>>24999880Buy an ad Oh wait you already pay millions for ads and still get zero readers Sad!
>>24999766He's not really "of our times" unless you're geriatric, anon. He's a living relic of a past America like Pinecone (McCarthy would have fit in here as well but..)
>>24999986Stop bringing up McCarthy when you mention writers like Pynchon. He doesn't stack up.
>>24999986That said I've read White Noise and Mao II and I enjoyed both of them a lot. Someone on here was saying Libra is his best work a month ago so I bought that as well but I haven't started it yet.
>>24999766Yes he is, and though ultimately he remains a minor poet and is not exactly overrated he is the best this age has offered. I think its meaningful that DFW (who is important, though actually an awful writer) worshipped this guy above anyone
>>24999987I can't tell if you're saying Pynchon doesn't stack up to McCarthy or vice versa, but I think they're basically of the same caliber. Below the Modernist Masters who preceded them, but better than contemporary slop [dfw, franzen, zadie smith, saunders] by a large degree.
>>24999766I can’t tell if Delillo is a despairing man just toying with pulpy conspiracy themes in boomer goggles, or he’s really a postmodernist, government spook.
>>24999993>though actually an awful writer
joyjak.st winned/onions/ winned
>>25000001Basedcucks lost o algo
>>24999993*underrated>>24999990Libra's the only one I couldn't get into. I think its contrived as he tried to base it off historical events rather than the natural flow of his imagination (at least that's my explanation for why I found it lacking). And his take on the conspiracy is just another layer of obfuscation ultimately. But that could just be me, some way its his best>>24999986He's more relevant than Franzen or Wallace. Maybe the world hasn't changed that much, or there is the way an artist can predict the future by being the one to see the present
>>25000001Brimstone post
>>25000000
>>24999997Just be happy I acknowledged he was important, more so than anyone his generation (or after? -- at least in his medium). His sensibility is so juvenile that it sinks the whole endeavor. He wasn't a genius. Ironically he was too good at math to be a genius
>>25000007There is no world in which Delillo is more relevant than Wallace. You need to take your meds.
>>25000012
>>25000001>couldn't steal a GET on a glacially slow board like /lit/The sharty isn't sending their best.
>>25000015Why do you think Wallace is relevant? He's more influential in that his ideas permeated popular culture, but that is hardly the right criteria. And certainly Wallace ranks Delillo way above himself (read his letter to Delillo gushing about underworld, this by the way after he achieved infinite jest)
>>25000007Yeah I'd agree he's more relevant than DFW or Franzen, and a far better writer than either of them as well.>>25000015DeLillo obviously heavily influenced Wallace so I would disagree. DFW was a short-lived pop phenomenon whereas DeLillo is arguably one of the best American novelists of the Post War era
>>25000007>He's more relevant than [...] Wallace.If you're talking academia and serious literary circles (publishers, agents, reviewers, critics, etc.) then yes, but 4chan/reddit prefers DFW by a large margin.
>>25000012>His sensibility is so juvenileWdym
>>25000022Kek
>>25000025>>25000028>Yes DFW is more well-known, more highly regarded by the public, more highly regarded by critics, and more influential>but Delillo is more important b-because DFW mentioned him once or somethingDelillofags are consistently the most delusional /lit/ posters, but this is a new level.
>>25000015DFW did not influence a single writer of quality.
>>25000040TBQH writers of quality don't get published anymore.
>>25000040He influenced 99% of zoomer literary authors. Not his fault none of them are any good.
>>25000039>DFW>more highly regarded by criticsOh I forgot about DFWs National Book Award and his PEN/Faulkner Award and his Library of Congress Prize
>>25000029The critics and authors prefer DFW too. What have you been smoking to get the idea that they prefer Delillo?
>>25000029>If you're talking academia and serious literary circles (publishers, agents, reviewers, critics, etc.) then yes, but 4chan/reddit prefers DFW by a large margin.Don't even need to mention academia as Wallace is a complete non-entity there except as a litbro joke among students or as an example of a chauvinistic male narcissist among the faculty. It's honestly amazing how damaged his reputation became in the last ten or so years.
>>25000044>none of them are any goodIf he was good then he would have influenced good writers. DFW is a hack. The literary world lost nothing when he "eliminated his own map". God what a fag.
>>25000044>He influenced 99% of zoomer literary authors>Not his fault none of them are any good.Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Has anyone read Amazons? It's the only Delillo work I'm interested in.
>>25000049White Noise is more of a litbro joke in academia than Infinite Jest, tho. You will be laughed out of any serious literary discussion if you bring it up.
>>25000049Being considered bad by Academia is basically a seal of quality these days.
>>25000047DFW didn't win a single reputable award retard.
>>25000054shut the FUCK up. we are having a slap fight here. no one cares about the thread topic anymore
>>25000049How did Infinite Jest became the definition of the litbro book?
>>25000039Every word of this post is dishonest. "Delillofags" isn't even a real contingent on /lit/. It probably speaks well of him that he is ignored here.>>25000035Someone here who has read his work more recently could better explain. I've noticed he is the writer people are most embarrassed of being really into when they were young. His position on irony is interesting, especially in how much it resonates--the idea that human emotions and passions would be regarded as "cringe"; that seems so remote from the ancient world, except when Socrates tells his friends crying over his death "you're acting like girls!"I remember reading Joshua Cohen dismiss his concerns of "goyisch" but actually I think (sorry, I mean no offense) his emotional constitution is more Jewish in the way Jews can be super ironical and cynical and then have as their basis this extreme sentimentality, all this stuff with the Holocaust, Israel.
>>25000063Because /lit/bros are retarded pseuds who don't actually read and heard it was a HARD and LONG book for SMART people. Luckily it requires half the intelligence of the other two books they jerked off at the time (GR, Ulysses) so they could actually read a page or two of it to post memes about it on here.
White Noise is the most pathetic "good" book I've ever read. It's clear he thinks he's very clever while writing about '>le modern unreality and consumerism' that was already so overdone as to be cliche (even in genre fiction) twenty years before it was written. Not to mention how painfully unfunny his attempts at humor are.
>>25000049He was basically cancelled. It’s only because of his private life that he’s not relevant in academia anymore. Nothing to do with the quality of his writing.
>>25000065Lit bros like this don't exist. Just call them fops and call it a day. You're just projecting your self-hatred, or aping some article bu a litgirls complaining about her exboyfriend
>>25000035It's just pseuds trying to tear down a good writer because they are jealous bitter fags who will never write anything that anyone will ever care about.
>>25000070The way he killed himself is a testament to his essential immaturity.
>>25000066>It's clear he thinks he's very clever while writing about '>le modern unreality and consumerism' that was already so overdone as to be clicheIt really wasn't. It hadn't even been 5 years since Simulacra and Simulation was published (3 in English). You probably grew up in a post-Matrix world and largely have no idea what you're talking about.
>>25000069>Lit bros like this don't exist.It's incredibly clear how few people here actually read; I've been posting here since 2010 and I'm almost 30 years old.
>>25000074Brave New World was published in 1932.
>>25000077>I'm an emotionally stunted manchildThat was more than obvious lad.
>>25000073Should he have used a shotgun?
>>25000078Not even marginally similar in the themes they address. You have not read both of these books. >>25000077 This is what I'm talking about
>>25000067I think this is true, but if his writing was better he would have survived cancellation. His private life wasn't that bad, and with his experience of depression and suicide he attracted people's pity. One would never classify him as a great writer.
>>25000081Complete cope. Jailbird by Vonnegut also did the same thing, published 6 years before.
>ACKSHULLY he isn't a great writerHe wrote one book before he died. A great book. His half finished book is fucking quality too. 2/2 is better than 99.5% of writers in history. Bunch of slack jawed faggots on this board these days.
>>25000064>"Delillofags" isn't even a real contingent on /lit/. It probably speaks well of him that he is ignored here.Then who has been posting the delillo thread every other day for the past few years? Fucking idiot.
>>25000067>Nothing to do with the quality of his writing.Oh, it kind of did, let's be honest.
>>25000089He wrote more than half a dozen books and the non-fiction ones were far better than the fiction. You people don't read anything.
Infinite Jest I'll admit is contentious, and discussion is poisoned by its own reputation. But get the honest opinion out of "serious" literary people and you will find almost unanimous, if grudging, praise for DFWs as a short story writer and essayist.
>>25000094No one cares about non fiction here.
>>25000098Then they unforunately are missing out on the best of DFW by a wide margin.
>>25000101Pale King > Consider the Lobster
>>25000089You’re throwing out statistics like when people argue over who the greatest basketball player in history was. In this case, it’s DFW vs. Don Delillo… Why are you DFW knobslobbers so insufferable? It’s just like reading the Nietzsche apologists. You make these people into your Gods, you bunch of faggots.
>>25000060No. No! Talk to me about Cleo Birdwell or hit the bricks, pal!
>>25000104I don't agree but I'd put it above both A Supposedly Fun Thing (and IJ)
>>25000080>Adulatory public narratives of David, which take his suicide as proof that (as Don McLean sang of van Gogh) “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” require that there have been a unitary David, a beautiful and supremely gifted human being who, after quitting the antidepressant Nardil, which he’d been taking for twenty years, succumbed to major depression and was therefore not himself when he committed suicide. I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men. But bearing in mind his fondness for Screwtape and his demonstrable penchant for deceiving himself and others—a penchant that his years in recovery held in check but never eradicated—I can imagine a narrative of ambiguity and ambivalence truer to the spirit of his work. By his own account to me, he had never ceased to live in fear of returning to the psych ward where his early suicide attempt had landed him. The allure of suicide, the last big score, may go underground, but it never entirely disappears. Certainly, David had “good” reasons to go off Nardil—his fear that its long-term physical effects might shorten the good life he’d managed to make for himself; his suspicion that its psychological effects might be interfering with the best things in his life (his work and his relationships)—and he also had less “good” reasons of ego: a perfectionist wish to be less substance-dependent, a narcissistic aversion to seeing himself as permanently mentally ill. What I find hard to believe is that he didn’t have very bad reasons as well. Flickering beneath his beautiful moral intelligence and his lovable human weakness was the old addict’s consciousness, the secret self, which, after decades of suppression by the Nardil, finally glimpsed its chance to break free and have its suicidal way.>This duality played out in the year that followed his quitting Nardil. He made strange and seemingly self-defeating decisions about his care, engaged in a fair amount of bamboozlement of his shrinks (whom one can only pity for having drawn such a brilliantly complicated case), and in the end created an entire secret life devoted to suicide. Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.
>>25000105Nietzsche was a highly sophisticated critic of deep culture who for quite fascinating reasons was attracted a cult of bourgeois American strivers. Wallace was an American TV addict pothead who wrote clever but sloppy fiction about being a depressed yuppy.
>>25000117>Nietzsche was a highly sophisticated critic of deep cultureHe was also a pseud who didn't actually read half of what he referenced.
>the same fags who lose their shit over Nietzsche are also terminally offended about fucking David Foster Wallacekek
>>25000121If anything Nietzsche read too much. Only someone with no culture who's knowledge of Nietzsche is limited to internet culture would make a comment like yours.
>>25000117>highly sophisticated Yes
>>25000133You have shit taste kek
>>25000136He tried criticizing Kant and admitted in his journal he didn't even make it past the Refutation of Idealism. He had little to no reading in philosophy and most contemporary academics find his linguistic analysis laughable. He's the very definition of a pseud.
>>25000137You have no real taste for art or culture if you see Nietzsche as a pseud. I strongly object to many of his writings such as The Case of Wagner but he paid for them in madness and is greatly superior to every tradlarper who defines him by his online image. What would we think of Shakespeare if we were to judge him by his fans?
>>25000136>If anything Nietzsche read too muchLike many "intellectuals" of his time he sacrificed all depth in order to maximize width to try and appear like the polymath genius he never was.
>>25000145Schiller told Goethe not to bother reading Kant, and Goethe said Schillers reading of Kant hurt his poetry. Nietzsche was oriented towards aesthetics. As I said I disagree with many of his views but he remains superior to people like yourself.
>>25000153>poets are too stupid to comprehend philosophical geniusSounds about right
>>25000149He himself says in Ecco Homo he shouldn't have read so much. His sickness took him away from all of that and forced him into his self
>>25000155No point engaging with someone like this
>>25000148>paid for them in madnessFair deal. Eye for an eye.
Everyone in this thread should be sterilized, lobotomized, and pasteurized.
>>24999766We take him for granted. The quality he's put out over the years puts a lot of writers to shame. For my money him and Saunders are the best
>>25000169>SaundersJew Yorker slop
>>24999766Antipode of Updike. Sparseness, and a masque that slips too regularly and too often. The sheer volume of mid prose and story to match for someone this highly regarded by the critical establishment is an indictment of late 20th century American letters, and the publishing industry .
>>25000182You sound like a faggot.
Whenever I read him I get the sense that he thinks very highly of himself, to the detriment of his writing. I also don't understand the praise for his prose at all.
>>25000155Let’s not pretend Kant’s autistic, closed-system of subjective nonsense didn’t just set the stage for Nietzsche’s Dionysian LARP. Mask-off, the complete dissolution of Enlightenment “progress.”
>>25000191>Whenever I read him I get the sense that he thinks very highly of himselfI don't think so. And the thing is you would never get this impression from writers who definitely do think most highly of themselves (like Tolstoy, or Shakespeare). He said he saw Hemingway once and was in awe--and would never put himself in that league. Many of us view Hemingway as a minor writer.> I also don't understand the praise for his prose at all.Its hypnotic and precise. Much better starting point than any other American writer. He is a minor poet but a minor poet can be the beginning of something major
>>25000197Let's not pretend you understand or have even read Kant.
>>25000191>I also don't understand the praise for his prose at all.Same.
I reread some of White Noise and can confirm the style is perfect for what it is and could not be improved on. Here you can disagree about content--and indeed he has one character and your view of Delillo will depend on what you think of this character, himself, basically Italian American jazzophile Stephen Daedalus/Leopold Bloom. But that is the best this age had given us as far as I'm concerned. He is the best stylist of his generation of writers.
>>25000205What prose writers do you like or view as consummate?
Read Falling Man Wasn't impressed..Never felt the urge to try any of his other works.
>>25000201I do understand him. But he clearly mystifies you, which is why you take him so seriously, superstitious nigger.
>>25000201
>>25000222>niggerwe do not use that kind of language here, sir
>>24999994Pynchon is a minor writer compared to Corncob
>>25000169Jen Egan is better than Saunders. At least until her post-Goon Squad books.
>>25000211Can anyone who doesn't like Delillo answer this question? I feel that anyone who can appreciate the merits of Defoe or Joyce should be able to see how good Delillo is.
I really loved White Noise but Underworld just felt aimless and overwrought. Which should I read next?
>>25002756End Zone. Very funny to me. This also was Wallace’s favorite book of his. Delillo seemed to have lost his sense of humor after white noise.
>>25002756The thing with DeLillo is he developed very late and by his own account wasn't very motivated as a teenager and through his 20s, he kind of just eased himself into being a novelist, so his technical and artistic ability reaches its purity when his fire is no longer what it was -- not that an author cannot create great work into old age, but in this case there's an unevenness to his work and if he were to have the skill and tact of his late work with the incisiveness and humor of his early sensibility, he actually could have been an all time great writer. But God makes people as they are.
>>24999814You shouldn't rape regardless of what book you're reading, anon
