I was sufficiently impressed by Joshua Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End, to check out the book that inspired that somewhat sales-unfriendly title, Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (opening line: “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year”. DeLillo, whatever his limitations, has an undeniable knack for the arresting curtain-opener–check out the site Don DeLillo’s America for evidence.) That same site’s page on Americana references a less-than-stellar review by Martin Levin, which appeared in The New York Times exactly 36 years ago (May 30, 1971):

“I’m trying to outrun myself,” says ex-network executive David Bell (pausing for breath on an Indian reservation) and one must count his effort a success. There is no real identity to be found in this heaping mass of tossed word-salad.

Faced with such a chill reception, many tyro authors would curl into a fetal ball after hurling the typewriter into a skip. But Americana turned out to be only the opening salvo in a venerable 14-novel (so far) career devoted to meditating on the modern condition, specifically as it’s experienced in the United States. And sure, there is a lot of foliage in Americana that has to be chewed over. But the book features coruscating passages that reveal DeLillo as not just the contemporary of such gnarly icons of postmodernism as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Jean-Luc Godard, but also as heir to the legacy left by a line of alcoholic suburban romantics stretching back through Richard Yates, John Cheever, John O’Hara, all the way back to F. Scott Fitzgerald (arguably Gatsby, with its Long Island setting, is the Ur-suburban novel). Characters in this genre are delirious from the belief that the nation’s soul and, in turn, personal salvation, might be salvaged if only they could plough through all the consumerist dreck to find the vanished Republic of their dreams. The conveyance of choice for this odyssey is the automobile–preferably something from Detroit’s pre-OPEC glory days.

From chapter 5 of Americana:

“The radio was announcing a sale on ground round steak and then some old-time radio came on, lush and mystical, cockney voices wailing through a prayer wheel of electric sitars, and we roared past Boston in a low cloud of crematory smoke. The windows were closed and the heater on and I moaned and chanted in the wrap-around fallopian cosiness of my red Mustang, an infinitely more religious vehicle than the T-Bird I had owned in college. All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards. There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country.”