Americana (novel)
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Americana, Don DeLillo's first book, is a novel in two and half parts. Beginning with an exploration of the malaise of the modern (at least, for 1971) corporate man, the novel devolves into internal monologue and ultimately, into an interrogation of film's power to (mis)represent reality. It attempts to address the roots of American pathology and introduces themes that DeLillo would go on to address more eloquently in books like The Names, White Noise, and Libra.
An early nod to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni sets the tone for the rest of the book: serious, searching, and slow. Like Antonioni's treatment of alternative youth cultures, Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point, DeLillo chooses to address contemporary social issues in a round-about manner rather than facing them head-on; Vietnam is mentioned only in epithet, the Hippies never, and Nixon and his disastrous policies are completely ignored. Instead, DeLillo makes his self-aware narrator the only interlocutor between the narrative and the audience.
The protagonist, David Bell, is split into two different characters, the competitive young corporate executive who grew up in privilege, and the 'personal' (read: avant-garde) filmmaker who spends the entire second half of the novel creating an autobiographical film in Nowhere, USA. DeLillo sets up the first half as an indictment of the corporate world and, through Bell's monologue, its effects on its practitioners; in the second half, however, Bell becomes a truly sensitive artiste whose formerly untrustworthy voice articulates the great fears and dilemmas surrounding contemporary American life. Both Joseph Heller's Something Happened and Norman Mailer's An American Dream address corporate malaise more skilfully than Americana, and the films of Jonas Mekas, Hollis Frampton, Chantal Ackerman and Bruce Conner put the self-indulgent piece Bell assembles into its proper cinematic context.
On the whole, the book adds much for those already engaged with DeLillo's thematics (as well as for film studies grad students), but its much promised revelation about America after the 1960s never fully arrives.
