Lucking Out - James Wolcott [129]
Same with Don DeLillo. In recent years DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, “Why go on?,” his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he’s done before, beating him up with his own achievements (Libra, Underworld) instead. His Great Jones Street of 1973 doesn’t have the cybernetic density and conspiratorial mesh of his corporate-gnostic-algorithmic probes into power, chance, and paranoia, but its hungover mood evokes the exhaustion and pissed-away promises of the post-sixties, a psychological dehydration requiring a sequestering with none of the skin tingle of A Sport and a Pastime’s incognito air. I know, sounds like fun, and the novel’s charcoal prose can read like a coroner’s report: “I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” And yet its sense of time and place (I love that the novel is named for and set in an actual street with no mythic overtones until DeLillo endowed them) hooks me each time out: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge.” How such passages recall rooms and views from my own past, as if my Horatio Street and St. Marks apartments had merged into one. I sometimes wonder if Great Jones Street might not be more highly esteemed if DeLillo hadn’t dubbed his rock-star narrator Bucky Wunderlick, a Pynchonesque moniker that’s hard to take seriously for a mystique-ridden Jim Morrison–like lizard king in self-exile. I can’t see the name Bucky without thinking of Captain America’s kid sidekick, one of the residua of having grown up religiously consuming Marvel Comics.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I found true fruition in book reviewing and taken up literary criticism as my sole vocation, setting aside childish things. I bet I’d be real bitter now. Staring out the screen door like Tommy Lee Jones in a bad mood, having long been farmed out by whatever magazine employed me and wishing I had drunk more so that I could write a sobriety memoir. Writing as deskbound craft, profession, and calling already comes pre-outfitted with so many diaphanous veils of solitariness that word-delight alone—the pleasure of all the billiard balls clicking and emptying into the pockets—doesn’t compensate for an audience that doesn’t answer no matter how nicely you call. I never felt this way writing about television for the Voice, even though television watching was considered then (less so now) a sedentary, light-bleached act of inanition that The New Yorker’s former TV critic Michael Arlen once compared to masturbation, which would presumably make writing about television like masturbating with both hands, no one’s idea of heroism. There was always a sense of a larger audience out there, a fandom of fellow anchorites who watched The Rockford Files (James Garner as the perfect low-overhead, corner-cutting L.A. investigator for a recessionary time—a Lew Archer who can’t step out of his trailer home without some cheap hood harassing his sideburns); Kojak (with the lollipop-sucking baldie detective who looked like a Ban Roll-on deodorant whose show even Lionel Trilling confessed to watching); Tom Snyder’s late-night Tomorrow show, where the host’s cigarette smoke ribboned the moody tension on the set, so different from the decompression chambers of studios today; the local Stanley Siegel talk show on WABC, where the Me Decade host bared his neuroses and had a regular segment on Friday mornings when he discussed the week in review with his actual psychotherapist (Siegel’s national moment landing when a discombobulated Truman Capote appeared as guest and slurred, “We all know a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” and a “Southern fag” is “meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met,” as a prelude to venomizing Princess Lee Radziwill, with whom