15 Comments

1. October 7th, 2012 / 2:01 am Gordon Lish—

   This utterance brings three things to mind: its reprehensibility, its ridiculousness, and its rutabagas.

2. October 7th, 2012 / 2:26 am Brooks Sterritt—

   Sorry Gordon!

3. October 7th, 2012 / 8:51 am Brian Carr—

   Cormac McCarthy isn’t Faulkner. DeLillo isn’t Vonnegut. I don’t really find them very similar at all.

4. October 7th, 2012 / 12:54 pm postitbreakup—

   What DeLillo should I read first?

5. October 7th, 2012 / 1:28 pm J. Y. Hopkins—

   McCarthy’s next book is rumored to feature 80+ pages on high school football before introducing the reader to each and every one of the 927 residents of Blooming Grove, Texas as characters (most of whom will bleed at some point in the book.)

6. October 7th, 2012 / 2:36 pm Brooks Sterritt—

   I’ll take it! (at first I misread that his next book would be 80 pages long)

7. October 7th, 2012 / 2:45 pm Brooks Sterritt—

   Yeah, I wouldn’t even put Don D and Vonnegut on the same plane.

8. October 7th, 2012 / 2:55 pm Brooks Sterritt—

   I’d probably say Mao II at this point, though my (and likely most people’s) first was White Noise. Libra is a fucking killer too.

9. October 7th, 2012 / 3:36 pm Brian Carr—

   Have you read End Zone?

10. October 7th, 2012 / 3:38 pm Brian Carr—

    And, actually, just read End Zone. It’s DeLillo writing about El Paso, Texas, which is the geographic setting for much of McCarthy’s writing, and you’ll see that they’re absolutely non-comparable. Not to say one is superior to the other, but . . . . . .

11. October 7th, 2012 / 4:35 pm Brooks Sterritt—

    Haven’t read End Zone, but it is sitting on my shelf. I’m really looking forward to it, especially in light of what you just said.

12. October 7th, 2012 / 6:41 pm Bobby Dixon—

    I really enjoyed End Zone, especially the “long” section about what nuclear weapons. Have not read it in a few years, but kind of remember how it described deadly texas summers in a way that made me remember being hot in texas.

13. October 7th, 2012 / 8:15 pm deadgod—

    Cormac DeLillo is the chiastic Don McCarthy.

14. October 7th, 2012 / 8:30 pm deadgod—

    What kinds of novels do you generally enjoy? DeLillo began his writing life by writing his suddenness, his humor, and his particular mellifluity in a handful of genre novels. If you’re partial to spy books, Running Dog is DeLillo’s version of one–(roughly) more Len Deighton than George Smiley–which I greatly enjoyed – I found it a quick, funny, weirdly dread-filled joke, which I think would make it an introduction fair both to a reader and to DeLillo.

    (That’s the DeLillo line: filling with dread, sympathetically, by virtue of the events and filigree of the stories. That’s my estimate of his ambition and achievement, anyway.)

15. October 7th, 2012 / 8:42 pm Scott Riley Irvine—

    Anyone else but me read Ratner’s Star? You should really read Ratner’s Star.