Recent Obsessions

In the last few months, I have been reading books by two novelists in particular: Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse 5, Cat's Cradle) and Don Delillo (Great Jones Street, Falling Man). I don't know why these two have become paired in my mind, but I have been alternating on reading books of theirs, sometimes for the first or second times. I have also gone back into reading other classic books from my literary past, such as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

Sometimes I want to reinvestigate a specific author because I was lazy in regard to his work years before. Most of the novels I read in college, for instance, I never finished, and when I did revisit them, I was much surprised to find how very good they were. Some of these books I will be covering here, though I may not mention this one salient fact at the time.

Great Jones Street by Don Delillo was a book that evaded me. I think that I read it very slowly the first time, and the second time around was no different. Parts of it were very hard to take, as they diverged from the idea of narrative. This was not the first book by Delillo that I read, but it was definitely his most psychotic.

The protagonist of the novel is a musician named Bucky Wunderlick, who drops out of his life. He leaves his current concert tour midstream, just walking off stage and leaving the building, chartering a plane, and finding a good place to hide. At least he thinks he can hide. He is a much more famous person than he thinks. It’s from this fact that all the details of the story originate. Great Jones Street is merely the anonymous physical location of the action, but the novel is about who we think we are and how we function in the world, alternately for ourselves, and for others.