I have to surrender. Recent visits to the Strand (plus that outlet mall from the Hugo Boss entry) has added way too many titles to my “to read” pile under the hall table. New titles:
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius – Scott Berg
Delirious New York – Rem Koolhaas
Essays of EB White
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – James Agee and Walker Evans
7 Types of Ambiguity – Wiliam Empson
Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don”t Care” – Lee Server
The only things I’ve read, which will hardly help shrink the stack, are Daniel Czuchlewski’s terrible novel, The Muse Asylum, and Tom Stoppard’s recent Coast of Utopia trilogy of plays, Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage. I’m reserving judgment on the latter till I see it staged. My initial response was of such absolute bewilderment that I have to assume that I’m just missing something that’ll make more sense on stage.
So, in an effort to clear out a little space under the hall table, I am going to admit defeat: I’ve read 90 pages of Underworld, and I’m flummoxed. It’s just a terrible book. The baseball section that gets such praise is so poorly written, filled with such ridiculous pronunciamentos about the nature of the game, that I had to struggle to keep going. But that only led to some sort of idiotic performance art exhibition in the desert. The writing is just lifeless, and filled with inanities passed off as profundities. A buddy of mine once commented, “People like DeLillo for the same reason that kids liked Youngblood back in the 1990s: they feel like it’s not far beyond their own capabilities. It also explains the popularity of Tom Wolfe (the one in the white suit).”
Or, as my senior thesis advisor once put it, when I asked him if he’d read White Noise: “No. Well, I read a few pages of it, but it felt like it was the novel that a lot of professors want to write. That’s not a book I’m very interested in reading.”
So Don DeLillo can kiss my ass.