Little bits

As you might have guessed from my reduced posting schedule here, I've been pretty busy as of late. Or maybe you read the last post, which kinda spelled it out. Either way, recent developments have considerably limited my leisure time. But it hasn't gone away completely. My girlfriend and I have been plowing through HBO's dramady (yes, I used that word) Six Feet Under. And I've been reading Don DeLillo's big book Underworld.

White Noise, DeLillo's most famous book, is probably the best novel I've read during the last couple of years. It quite literally changed the way that I look at the world. So I expected a lot from Underworld, which is fitting, because Underworld expects a lot from me. It's a long, dense book that features many characters, alludes frequently to 20th-century American history, and changes narrative focus and perspective at well. On top of that, it tells its fractured story mostly in reverse chronological order.

DeLillo is much beloved among American literary scholars, and Underworld is a case study of his academic appeal. It's the kind of book that's best read alone in a quiet room, with a pen in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (and a browser window open to Wikipedia, if you know what's good for you). It begs for interpretation, elucidation, illumination.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to engage in this kind of close reading right now, no matter how much the text deserves it. I barely have time to read Underworld at all. It's a giant hardback tome, which isn't exactly conducive to the subway-and-waiting-room reading opportunities I'm limping by on these days. Its dense subject matter has me frequently backtracking to make sure I didn't miss anything during my preceding five-minute block of reading time. After nearly a month, I'm only 550 pages in. If I'd started Underworld around the time I started writing this blog, I would've finished it in two weeks.

I'm probably missing a lot of the deep thematic elements of the book because of the incremental way in which I'm reading it. That's okay, because just about every page of Underworld is loaded with gorgeous prose flourishes. DeLillo isn't just a master of the novel—he's a master of the language. Most of the book's individual scenes would be quite lovely even when taken out of context. And the way that I'm reading Underworld effectively forces me to do just that.

You know you're reading a great book when even it shines under the worst possible circumstances. I'm going to read this one again somewhere down the line. That much is for sure.