Americana by Don DeLillo

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial ins, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we would build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres."

David Bell is a young junior executive at a television company. His workplace is something of a circus, perhaps in the sense of a gladiatorial circus maximus: people are always getting the axe, and others rising in their place. Someone is sending out cryptic quotations that Bell thinks of as "schizograms," messages that may contain a deep meaning or none at all, or whose deepest meaning might perhaps be the fact that they mean nothing at all. And of course, everyone is sleeping around. So far, David has been the beneficiary of this cutthroat atmosphere, rising to a level of power and prestige. But when he's sent out a road trip to Arizona to film a group of "Navahos"--Native Americans standing for, throughout the novel, the opposite of the American impulse to capitalism and celebrity, though as always with DeLillo, that initial position is constantly undercut--David goes "off the grid," pursuing instead a private project in which he travels around the anonymous and suburban fabric of America filming a kind of quasi-version of his own embattled childhood in the Hudson Valley.

Americana was DeLillo's first novel, published all the way back in 1971. His novels have always had a quality of being ahead of their time, and Americana is no different; it strikes me as being as much about the television-addled "Me Decade" of the 1980s as White Noise, a book from the 80s, is really secretly about the advent of the internet era that followed it twenty years later. DeLillo's characters are always obsessed with the image, and Bell is the prototype, a lover of Burt Lancaster and Ozu movies who thinks, in some cryptic way that's never fully explained for the reader, that putting a version of his childhood on film might--what? Resolve it? Redeem it? Transform it? Bell's big project at the network is a program called "Soliloquy," in which people sit in front of the camera and tell their life story. (More foreshadowing: the front-facing video.) Is this Bell's "Soliloquy?" If so, is DeLillo exposing how the versions of our lives we distribute are always in a sense performative, that they never really capture the truth? Bell's version of his childhood is avant garde, elliptic; it took me a long time to even realize that was an important element of his "film."

For a first novel, Americana launches with incredible confidence. DeLillo's style is already hard-baked here, and the sentences are as epigrammatic and incredible as anything in Libra or White Noise. Americana is, if nothing else, a real pleasure to read, from one sentence to the next. But I left unsure of what all those sentences add up to. I think perhaps this is really a problem with the third section, the actual "road trip" the title promises. The first section is a terrific parody of the modern workplace, and the second section is a relatively straightforward realist depiction of Bell's coming of age: his mother's sickness and death, her confession that she was raped by the town doctor, David's outrageous Don Draper-like father, the disappearance of his sister. I loved this section; it's a more familiar kind of writing than we usually get from DeLillo, but in exceptional form. I actually didn't know he had it in him, this kind of realism. But the third section is too stuffed, too peripatetic, even as Bell ends up not traveling the country but rooted in one anonymous Midwestern town among football captains and insurance adjusters. I thought it suffered, perhaps, from first novel disease, packing in so many ideas that nothing comes out clearly.