Next up on the essays shelf:
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age.
I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.
Here’s my thing with Don DeLillo. I like him, and sometimes he is not just a good writer, but a great one. The opening 52 pages (or thereabouts) of Underworld are phenomenal, and up there with John Updike’s essay about Ted Williams’ last game at Fenway as the greatest baseball writing in existence. If only the rest of Underworld had lived up to that opening section. And even with my boredom and frustration with the length of that book (he could easily have cut, no lie, 300 pages – that’s how too-long I think it was), there were moments in the book where he still took my breath away. There are scenes I won’t forget, the airplane graveyard, for example. I like White Noise, that was the first DeLillo I read – didn’t love it, but liked it. And I liked his short September 11 novel.
But I always can feel Don DeLillo reaching. Reaching for importance, for profundity, for the ultimate Message. He wants to “say” something. He wants to make an “important” statement about How We Live and What the 20th Century Was Like, and I certainly don’t fault him for wanting to do such a thing, it’s just that … I feel the stretch. I feel him reaching. He is an Important Novelist who has Stuff to Say. Now. Of course he has “stuff to say”, he’s a writer. I like him best when he pares his stuff down, I like him best when he keeps it simple. In short, Underworld was too damn long.
Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale is also long. But it doesn’t feel long. It feels brilliant is what it feels like. It also provides images I will never forget – the underground reservoir, the ice wall across the Hudson, the consumptives lying in glass boxes on top of their NY mansions … the white horse galloping through the Bowery. It is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and never once do you feel Helprin reaching for profundity, meaning, or importance. It’s a BIG book and when you talk with others who have read it, you can’t help but start in on philosophy, and the meaning of Time, and what it means to Love, and etc. It happens naturally because the book opens up that space for you.
Ambition to be “important” is not a bad thing, ambition like that can often drive an artist to be better, to strive harder. Underworld is flawed, and way too long, but I don’t blame him for reaching for the brass ring. I just wish I didn’t feel that strain. It makes the book feel artificial. Except for those first 52 pages: those 52 pages represent the best writing DeLillo has done to date. It took me a while to find this post, but I did – Michael and I talked about Don DeLillo and Underworld. Michael is the reason I read White Noise in the first place because it is one of his favorite novels.
This short story, published in The New Yorker in 1997, has a lot of the DeLillo-isms that bug me. Clearly, the title places us in space and time – we know where we are.
Russia launched Sputnik in October of 1957 and the news went round the world.
DeLillo’s story is about an American family, getting ready for dinner one night, post-Sputnik launch. The wife is making Jell-O chicken mousse for an upcoming dinner party. The story opens with a description of the wife’s obsession with Jell-O molds, and how she would make layered Jell-O concoctions by tilting the glasses in the fridge. It’s a creepy image, funny, too: opening up the fridge to see it filled with glasses tilted on their side. The father stands out in the breezeway polishing the car. And the teenage son hides in his room, masturbating to a picture of Jayne Mansfield. Meanwhile, far overhead, Sputnik rotates.
The entire story is a REACH, in other words. And there are certain sections that come off as condescending, which I think is a result of DeLillo trying to make a Statement. He’s making fun of the Jell-O moulds, he’s making fun of things like “breezeways”, and the conventional American life. It’s a bit ARCH, what he’s doing here. And the fact that the names of the family members, Eric, Rick, Erica, all contain bits and pieces of one another, it’s like it’s all the same name. I get it, ha ha, it’s not supposed to be realistic, and he’s “commenting” on the generic and homogenized cultural norm of American life, laid bare in the wake of Sputnik launching. But when Don DeLillo starts to want to “comment” on something, I start to get bored. (That, by the way, is what is so extraordinary about the opening of Underworld. It DOES become an important snapshot of a moment in American history, it encapsulates the American dream, the American experience, and it does so through focusing on the details, sensory and otherwise, of that particular day at the ballpark. It’s amazing. He should have stopped right there!)
What I do like in this story is the over-riding sense of unease in this story. It’s hard to put your finger on what might be wrong, at least in the text, but the title says it all. A loss of confidence … a feeling of being Second in the grand world-wide race, and also a feeling that “they” might be watching from up there.
Here’s an excerpt.
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, just to see what was going on in there. The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and even renewable. But there was something else as well, faintly unnerving. The throb, perhaps. Maybe it was the informational flow contained in that endless motorized throb. Open the great white vaultlike door and feel the cool breezelet of systems at work, converting current into power, talking to each other day and night across superhuman spaces, a thing he felt outside of, not yet attuned to, and it confused him just a bit.
Except their Kelvinator wasn’t white, of course. Not on the outside, anyway. It was Bermuda pink and dawn gray.
He looked inside. He saw the nine tilted parfait glasses and felt a little dizzy. He got disoriented sometimes by the tilted Jell-O desserts. It was as if a science-fiction force had entered the house and made some things askew while sparing others.
They sat down to dinner and Rick carved the mousse and doled out portions. They drank iced tea with a slice of lemon wedged to the rim of each glass, one of Erica’s effortless extra touches.
Rick said to Eric, “Whatcha been up to all afternoon? Big homework day?”
“Hey, Dad. Saw you simonizing the car.”
“Got an idea. After dinner we’ll take the binoculars and drive out on the Old Farm Road and see if we can spot it.”
“Spot what?” Erica said.
“The baby moon. What else? The satellite they put up there. Supposed to be visible on clear nights.”
It wasn’t until this moment that Erica understood why her day had felt shadowed and ominous from the time she opened her eyes and stared at the mikado-yellow walls with patina-green fleecing. Yes, that satellite they put into orbit a few days ago. Rick took a scientific interest and wanted Eric to do the same. Sure, Rick was surprised and upset, just as she was, but he was willing to stand in a meadow somewhere and try to spot the object as it floated over. Erica felt a twisted sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours. It flew at an amazing rate of speed over the North Pole, beep, beep, beep, passing just above us, evidently, at certain times. She could not understand how this could happen. Were there other surprises coming, things we haven’t been told about them? Did they have crispers and breezeways? It was not a simple matter, adjusting to the news.
Rick said, “What about it, Eric? Want to drive on out?”
“Hey, Dad. G-g-g-great.”
A pall fell over the table, displacing Erica’s Sputnik funk. She thought Eric’s occasional stuttering had something to do with the time he spent alone in his room. Hitting the books too hard, Rick thought. He was hitting something too hard, but Erica tried not to form detailed images.
Do not punctuate or incinerate.
The boy could sit in the family room and watch their super-console TV, which was compatible with the knotty-pine paneling, and he could anticipate the dialogue on every show. Newscasters, ball games, comedy hours. He did whatever voice the announcer or actor used, matching the words nearly seamlessly, and he never stuttered.
All the other kids ate Oreo cookies. Eric ate Hydrox cookies, because the name sounded like rocket fuel.
One of her kitchen gloves was missing – she had many pairs – and she wanted to believe Eric had borrowed it for one of his chemistry assignments. But she was afraid to ask. And she didn’t think she looked forward to getting it back.
Yesterday he’d dunked a Hydrox cookie in milk, held it dripping over the glass, and said thickly, “Is verry good we poot Roosian moon in U.S. sky.”
Then he took a bite and swallowed.
I’m with you completely on Underworld. I was so sucked in by that first section. I wanted to love the rest of the book the same way but it wasn’t to be. The other part I remember best is the older couple taking a train ride into Eastern Europe and the husband saying that the further east they went the worse his shit smelled. But you are right in that is was over long, over baked, and over paranoid.
Falling Man was that thin little 9/11 novel and it was pretty good.
Dg – Yes, Falling Man – very good.
I also felt like the press Underworld was receiving was somewhat overblown – like people were ignoring its obvious flaws because it SEEMED “important”. Because it was long? I didn’t get it. You know, Don DeLillo writes “important” books, therefore this one, because it is long and “about stuff” is clearing a Masterpiece. For real?
And I say this as someone who likes Don DeLillo.
But Don DeLillo hasn’t written anything that even comes CLOSE to the level of Hilary Mantel, for example – in not just one but three books – A Place of Greater Safety, Wolf Hall, and Bring Up the Bodies – two Booker Prizes in a row – books about power and politics and how humanity operates – Those are important books, but don’t wear their importance self-consciously or archly, like DeLillo does.
He just doesn’t “have it”, in my opinion. I think he maybe knows that – and therefore when he REACHES, you really can feel it.
But I still go back, on occasion, and read that opening section of Underworld, for the sheer pleasure of it.
I have the Library of America baseball-writing anthology and if I’m not mistaken that section is in there – I’ll have to double-check.
You just might have a knack for this whole writing thing yerself Sheila.
haha One would hope, I spend so much time on it …
But thank you, Sean. :)