Americana

By Don DeLillo

I'm a big fan of DeLillo's. I loved Mao II and White Noise, which I read in that order. However, although Americana started out well, it dragged on and on and I had to skim the last 20 pages in order to finish. There is no doubt that the writing is strong (gems like, "The women were his wife and sister, Flora and Veejean, and they appeared to be in their mid-sixties, beautiful, smiling and silent, a pair of lace curtains fixed in sunlight", continued to delight), but strong writing with no plot can only keep the reader satisfied so long.
Aside from the prose, I was initially intrigued by the strong resemblance between DeLillo's protagonist, David Bell, and Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis' protagonist in American Psycho. As Americana came out a decade before American Psycho, it is pretty clear that Ellis borrowed incredibly heavily from this book; I would go so far as to say Ellis ripped DeLillo off. Bateman is just a more psychotic version of Bell, and the book's stories are also very similar: young, beautiful yuppie tries to understand himself by indulging himself and becomes more deranged in the process, and eventually starts to bore the reader because of his unoriginality.
However, another strong point of the book is the "hip" dialogue between the "artists", which in a way reminded me of some of the Plan II banter that occurred late at night after too much drinking: Smart kids who thought they were much smarter would delve into discourses, which were really just a series of nonsequiters that no one was willing to question. However, in both cases, although fun and amusing at first, if they go on too long (as they inevitably do) they become grating.