I am far away from my library but that can’t stop me from thinking Don Delillo as I walk throuhg New York City. I was on my way to the subway when I stumbled across the short spurt of West 3d also known as Great Jones Street.
Great Jones Street was Delillo’s third novel, published in 1973. In it, rock star Bucky Wunderlick fakes his own death to live on, in a surreal, post-rock-star, post-dead world. it begins thusly:
Fame requires every
kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or
chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the
circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.
Not to get all weepy here, but doesn’t Delillo just fucking nail rock stardom, the edge of the void, when it was still all mushy and fresh and new? Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had been dead barely 3 years when the book hit shelves. "Imparting an eroitc terror to the dreams of the republic" — shiiiiiiiit, Kurt Cobain was a snotty-nosed Kindergartener, but boom! — there’s his future in one damn sentence.
Delillo’s NY of the early seventies probably didn’t include a Quizno’s on the corner, but a little bit of it remains in SoHo. Whew.
