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Comment by dondawest | Hacker News Reader

I completely disagree. I think Don Delillo has an unbelievably cool writing style (especially how he only writes one paragraph per page and makes sure his words LOOK AESTHETIC in addition to conveying meaning). But DeLillo has essentially zero significance in American culture.

No millennials read or connect with his work, and only very few boomers do. I find Delillo’s work largely hostile to readers that don’t share his exact super-wide frame of references and age.

I like DeLillo but the idea of giving him a Nobel is an absolute joke, save the Nobel for artists who actually influence other artists and cultures. DeLillo just doesn’t have much influence and his highly verbose style is transparently hostile.

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I suppose you think Olga Tokarczuk or Svetlana Alexievich are more popular with millennials?

David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom both have called Delillo one of the greatest living authors. I and quite a few other people I know in my age range (mid-20s) have enjoyed him without sensing his work is irrelevant to our demographic. Even his denser works like Underworld read like a 'pageturner' relative to his contemporaries like Pynchon or even Wallace. Let alone other writers in the canon like Dostoyevsky.

My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic. Zero K specifically felt like a fan fiction version of William Gibson's non sci-fi stuff like Zero History. And most of what he is trying to convey he just says outright in a 3rd person omniscient voice.

I actually think he is very culturally relevant and influential but I sense that if you were to evaluate his writing through the lens of academic comparative literature like the Nobel Prize committee (not the standard literature should be held to imo) it would fall short of most other laureats, Bob Dylan notwithstanding

> My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic.

Could not agree more.

Bob Dylan and DFW deserve Nobels, IMO. Both of those guys have fans of all generations.

I feel like DeLillo is a “writer’s writer.” People like DFW applaud him, as you point out.

I just don’t agree that DeLillo has anywhere near the amount of influence as, say, DFW.

I’m frequently amazed how large and diverse DFW’s fan group is.

DeLillo seems to only appeal to writers. His work is very obscure, even within educated niches.

Nobel prizes, atleast in Literature, are given for a body of work and bodies of work take decades to create. Every decade, approximately, is different and every generation is very different. American literature has often been blamed for being insecular and very focused on the American way rather than having a universal appeal. I do not pass judgment on that but I will say that only writers that can appeal to fundamental societal truths, dig deeper into the superficial differences and unearth commonalities in the human condition will be considered great.

If the so-called millenials are not reading DeLillo, the onus is not on DeLillo to say things that appeal to them. Rather, the onus is on them to figure out what DeLillo is saying and see if they identify with him.

(Edit: I am not American and english is not my first language. I like American literature among others.)

I've never heard of DeLillo but I come across Pearl S. Buck references now and then. I'm not American, in case that matters.

A writer with a 'verbose' style. A terrible sin.

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