New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Bad Habits
There are many things you could call William S. Burroughs, who was born a hundred years ago this month, but Will Self prefers to call him “the original junkie,” a title which reflects the author’s hedonistic background and the strangeness of books like Naked Lunch. Self takes a close look at Burroughs’s novel-cum-memoir, Junky, in The Guardian.
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Snapchats of a Native Son
“That has always been the unsettling irony of the carefree aesthetic. Rhetorically, it denies the full unpredictability of black experiences in America. It is a stereotype, albeit one intended for benevolence and created, perhaps lovingly, by black people.” Doreen St. Félix writes about the roots and ramifications of the “Carefree Black Boy” phenomenon.
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Tana French on the Celtic Tiger
Tana French pegs the cause of Ireland’s financial crisis on “a total disconnect between action and consequence.” For many Irish citizens since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, she writes, “their whole sense of a world governed by coherent cause and effect, of their ability to have any agency in their own lives, came under attack.” Bonus: our own Edan Lepucki has previously written about French’s novels and plotting.
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More dispatches from what will undoubtedly go down in history as the Great Pulitizer Prize For Fiction Brouhaha of 2012:
The Tournament of Books team over at The Morning News have posted an in depth commentary on this year’s withheld Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Wall Street Journal asks a handful of book critics to name the books they thought should’ve won. And over at Moby Lives, Nick Davies has rounded up the statements made by the jury in response to the brouhaha. Lev Grossman, on the other hand, outlines why he’s totally okay with the board’s decision. And of course, we’ve got links and excerpts for all the finalists over here.
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Point Omega is a wonderful book as well. The literary establishment, and those prone to pick their books according to the latest hype and fashion, wrote off DeLillo after Underworld, acted as if he was an old man with nothing left to say, or, that what he had to say was of little importance and derivative of his earliest work. But The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Point Omega and three of his best novels. DeLillo is a brilliant diagnostician of American culture, and that ability hasn’t abated with time, it’s only gotten more acute. The problem is you have to work, really work, while reading his prose, and some people just don’t want to. They want their truth to go down easy. DeLillo is not easy, but he’s essential. Always has been, always will be. When Cosmopolis came out it was waved off with a sigh. In this way late DeLillo reminds me of late Kubrick (of The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut), in that he is only getting better with age, but no one will admit it, because in this country, to be old is tantamount to being invisible at worst, or being considered irrelevant at best.