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thejoshl's review against another edition
4.0
"Did you get to California this trip?"
"Did Canada this trip. It was an all-Canada operation. Laying some groundwork. Feeling things out. New territory more or less. No, missed California this trip. Good friends out there. Out there's different. I liked California. Not the same kind of edgy pace."
"They drink human blood," I said.
"But the weather," he said. "Fantastic streak of weather last time."
"They tear the entrails out of dogs and cats and offer them up as devotions to dead movie stars."
"The weather's the thing out there. I remember the weather."
"Did Canada this trip. It was an all-Canada operation. Laying some groundwork. Feeling things out. New territory more or less. No, missed California this trip. Good friends out there. Out there's different. I liked California. Not the same kind of edgy pace."
"They drink human blood," I said.
"But the weather," he said. "Fantastic streak of weather last time."
"They tear the entrails out of dogs and cats and offer them up as devotions to dead movie stars."
"The weather's the thing out there. I remember the weather."
jesssalexander's review against another edition
4.0
Very wordy, very surreal, absurd and poetic. Occassionally I think Delillo gets too caught up in theories and word choice and forgets his narrative, but overall (and excluding the bizarre and confusing ending) I enjoyed this. In basic terms, this is the thoroughly postmodern story of a rock icon, man-turned-myth, who becomes extremely depressed and maybe unhinged. He unfruitfilly seeks asylum in his girlfriend's New York apartment, where she dies and a mysterious commune involves him in drug trade.
Some of my favorite things about this novel:
Bucky's unreliability. From the very first chapter I questioned what he said. He kept repeating that he put on Opel's coat and I kept thinking to myself, "what is the deal with this coat?! is he taking it off over and over or does he forget it is already on??" He is a really endearing protagonist with a lot of snarky one-liners.
Everything Bucky says about Opel. It is beautiful! She is his center of gravity, his comfort and his muse, she is unattainable and fragile and mysterious and Bucky adored her. The part where he speaks to the phone operator and demands that a true nun, probably of German descent, come see to Opel's body (or no deal) is heartbreaking.
I am not really a rock and roll girl but the opening descriptions of his music make you truly feel what the genre is all about:
"We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a good night of above-average fury." I think this book did such a good job at portraying rock and roll that I became embarrassed for how I rated Daisy Jones and the Six and went back and lowered my rating!
Sound as a theme. It is so fitting that anytime Bucky talks to someone and becomes disinterested in what they are saying, he zones out and listens to sounds, like the musicality of a hammer one street over or the rhythm of Fenig upstairs, or the lyrics to the radio song in the background. So like a musical artist.
Delillo handles depression in a really interesting way. Suicide is a central theme. Throughout the novel Bucky craves isolation and feels disassociated from humanity. The passage at the end of the party Opel throws for him is my absolute favorite description in the book:
"I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a mystical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fire. This was a madman's truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing."
This description of modern culture. And similar places in the book that made me pause and think oh, this is true and important:
"in a millennium or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovingly away at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pidgeon lofts and chimneys...back in their universities in the earth, the counter-archeologoists will sort their reasons for our demise, citing as prominent the fact that we stored our beauty in the air, for birds of prey to see, while placing at eye level nothing more edifying than hardware, machinery, and the implements of torture"
Not only is this passage gorgeous, it hits something real: a warning against the dangers of inclining toward the abstract and dematerialization. Perhaps this is why Bucky eventually rejects words and reverts to sound, finding peace in the unfamiliarness of objects without title.
Some of my favorite things about this novel:
Bucky's unreliability. From the very first chapter I questioned what he said. He kept repeating that he put on Opel's coat and I kept thinking to myself, "what is the deal with this coat?! is he taking it off over and over or does he forget it is already on??" He is a really endearing protagonist with a lot of snarky one-liners.
Everything Bucky says about Opel. It is beautiful! She is his center of gravity, his comfort and his muse, she is unattainable and fragile and mysterious and Bucky adored her. The part where he speaks to the phone operator and demands that a true nun, probably of German descent, come see to Opel's body (or no deal) is heartbreaking.
I am not really a rock and roll girl but the opening descriptions of his music make you truly feel what the genre is all about:
"We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a good night of above-average fury." I think this book did such a good job at portraying rock and roll that I became embarrassed for how I rated Daisy Jones and the Six and went back and lowered my rating!
Sound as a theme. It is so fitting that anytime Bucky talks to someone and becomes disinterested in what they are saying, he zones out and listens to sounds, like the musicality of a hammer one street over or the rhythm of Fenig upstairs, or the lyrics to the radio song in the background. So like a musical artist.
Delillo handles depression in a really interesting way. Suicide is a central theme. Throughout the novel Bucky craves isolation and feels disassociated from humanity. The passage at the end of the party Opel throws for him is my absolute favorite description in the book:
"I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a mystical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fire. This was a madman's truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing."
This description of modern culture. And similar places in the book that made me pause and think oh, this is true and important:
"in a millennium or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovingly away at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pidgeon lofts and chimneys...back in their universities in the earth, the counter-archeologoists will sort their reasons for our demise, citing as prominent the fact that we stored our beauty in the air, for birds of prey to see, while placing at eye level nothing more edifying than hardware, machinery, and the implements of torture"
Not only is this passage gorgeous, it hits something real: a warning against the dangers of inclining toward the abstract and dematerialization. Perhaps this is why Bucky eventually rejects words and reverts to sound, finding peace in the unfamiliarness of objects without title.
wmbogart's review
"It's really a studio-equipped mountain," I said. "There is no house as such. There's the facsimile of a house. There's the pictorial mode of a house. Exactly what my house in the mountains would look like if I had a house and there were mountains. My present state of mind doesn't accommodate the existence of mountains. I am in a plains mood."
Though smaller in scope than his more canonized novels, Great Jones Street is an early demonstration of Delillo's unique tone and approach. It's a little more imprecise than most of his later writing, and there are regrettable passages and asides that he'd likely have excised if he'd had more experience, but his ability to diagnose and distill the absurdity of capitalist "rationality" in its own approximated language is very much in place here.
Bucky Wunderlick, a loose stand-in for Bob Dylan, tries to drop out of public life but finds himself implicated in schemes and conspiracies far beyond his control. When he records The Mountain Tapes (a stand-in for Dylan's own Basement Tapes), a lo-fi mess of mumbled nonsense, warring factions conspire to get their hands on the recordings (and an experimental drug entrusted to his care) for their own commercial or political ends.
The message here, that there's no removing yourself from these systems, and that the "underground" or "counterculture" plays an illusory role in an empty political theater, is deeply cynical. Managers want you to honor contracts and distribute product (either recordings or yourself as "star") to various markets, the media wants "just a little of your time," the commune sees you as a figurehead for a sinister non-ideology, and audiences want you to articulate their own half-understood anger or despair before flaming out. The logical conclusion to all this is The Mountain/Basement Tapes, the articulation of the death of affect, the total rejection of public and commercial demands. But even this, we learn, can be taken by any and all parties as fodder for the machine.
The book is also very, very funny. The passages around coffee in particular got a lotta laughs. And his dialogue always works for me. Love the guy's writing! Wouldn't recommend it to readers as an introduction to DeLillo. Could totally understand why someone would hate this. But for the initiated, or for the ever-growing Dylan-DeLillo contingent, there's a lot to like here.
hollasan's review
3.0
How important is plot to you on a scale of 1 to 5?
If you answered anything other than 1, don't read this book.
If you answered anything other than 1, don't read this book.
njw13's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
grgrhnt's review
4.0
Conclusions can be diminishing. A sprawling epic comes down to a single point at the end. While this age-old way of storytelling does have its merits, it often undermines the experience that the story has to offer. Great Jones Street is about the experience, all the way. The conclusion is itself a part of the experience. A meditation on fame and its aftereffects on the celebrity once they become numb to all the extravaganza and the idol-worship. Some say that the book is a musical satire. That could only be the case if a slight exaggeration of modern music's shallowness can be called a called a satire.
We meet Bucky Wunderlick, a music god, at a time when the shallowness of his life dawns on him. He retreats to his girlfriend's apartment in Great Jones Street and whiles away the day looking out the window and sleeping the chairs and waiting on something he doesn't even understand he is waiting on. He comes to believe that all the things he had done had no meaning to them. He's trying to get out such a reality where meaningless things are being done all the while the world is trying hard to retain its superstar musician. He doesn't budge. Strange people walk into his life and he gets embroiled in a major drug deal. Nothing matters to him. He isn't interested. And at the end, he's back to what he was at the beginning.
Bucky's crisis is too big to overcome. Anybody who feels like they have exhausted all the meaning they can get from one thing, immediately look to other things. Bucky doesn't to that. For somebody so out of it, central involvement in a major drug deal should excite them back to life. That does not happen to Bucky. He's still looking for meaningfulness in things and he seems to be operating on the notion that nothing really is meaningless. But there is a momentary glimmer of hope. He unconsciously gets to the conclusion that there really is no need for meaning. If you keep doing things, meaning will be found. With this hope, he tries to venture back into the music scene with some early works of spontaneous nonsense. But nothing changes, he still feels the same way as the time of his reinduction into the world approaches. So, he gives in, goes back to the life at Great Jones Street and waits for all the plots to unravel. He wants to be free of all burdens, all people. In the end, after suffering or just going through an impairment of his greatest asset, he recovers back to full health. But the world doesn't know that. He chooses to keep on being an impaired person of no use all the while letting the world obsess over him.
Great Jones Street is the beginning of DeLillo's exploration of paranoia. He delivers its epitome in his big book Underworld. With dream-like prose and dialogue that doesn't really sound like real dialogue all the while retaining all the mannerisms and intonations of real speech of real people, Great Jones Street offers a lyrical story which might seem inconclusive in the beginning, but once the story is finished and seen in all of its entirety, no other end seems appropriate.
We meet Bucky Wunderlick, a music god, at a time when the shallowness of his life dawns on him. He retreats to his girlfriend's apartment in Great Jones Street and whiles away the day looking out the window and sleeping the chairs and waiting on something he doesn't even understand he is waiting on. He comes to believe that all the things he had done had no meaning to them. He's trying to get out such a reality where meaningless things are being done all the while the world is trying hard to retain its superstar musician. He doesn't budge. Strange people walk into his life and he gets embroiled in a major drug deal. Nothing matters to him. He isn't interested. And at the end, he's back to what he was at the beginning.
Bucky's crisis is too big to overcome. Anybody who feels like they have exhausted all the meaning they can get from one thing, immediately look to other things. Bucky doesn't to that. For somebody so out of it, central involvement in a major drug deal should excite them back to life. That does not happen to Bucky. He's still looking for meaningfulness in things and he seems to be operating on the notion that nothing really is meaningless. But there is a momentary glimmer of hope. He unconsciously gets to the conclusion that there really is no need for meaning. If you keep doing things, meaning will be found. With this hope, he tries to venture back into the music scene with some early works of spontaneous nonsense. But nothing changes, he still feels the same way as the time of his reinduction into the world approaches. So, he gives in, goes back to the life at Great Jones Street and waits for all the plots to unravel. He wants to be free of all burdens, all people. In the end, after suffering or just going through an impairment of his greatest asset, he recovers back to full health. But the world doesn't know that. He chooses to keep on being an impaired person of no use all the while letting the world obsess over him.
Great Jones Street is the beginning of DeLillo's exploration of paranoia. He delivers its epitome in his big book Underworld. With dream-like prose and dialogue that doesn't really sound like real dialogue all the while retaining all the mannerisms and intonations of real speech of real people, Great Jones Street offers a lyrical story which might seem inconclusive in the beginning, but once the story is finished and seen in all of its entirety, no other end seems appropriate.
katepowellshine's review
3.0
So often DeLillo just leaves me cold. Our protagonist is not only physically cut off, he's emotionally absent, and it might be good literature but I don't care for it.