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A review by jesssalexander
Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo
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.