A review by wmbogart
Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo

"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.