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Comment by flenserboy | Hacker News Reader

The Names is probably DD's best novel — what's not in these particular volumes, however, is his collection of extraordinary short novels that filled the 70s (Ratner's Star is the major exception; this is a monster-sized book, and it is a strange precursor to Stephenson's middle work). End Zone, Great Jones Street, Players, and Running Dog are all amazing portraits of the paranoias of the age — terrorism, bomb fear, rock & roll, long-running conspiracies. Reading DeLillo alongside JG Ballard's novels of the same era is an education in the social and political undercurrents running through the 70s and early 80s.

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The Recognitions by Gaddis gets you the 1950s in similar fashion (and it's clear he was a major influence on those postmodern tome style writers who came later). Pynchon has pretty good coverage of the 1960s. Then DeLillo and Ballard get you through the 1970s. It's fascinating how much history and culture you can pick up through some of these fiction writers.

Agreed on all counts. Pynchon and DeLillo are often linked together, but Pynchon and DD seem to be at least a generational half-step removed from each other. And Gaddis nails the 80s in JR back in the mid-70s.

> Gaddis nails the 80s in JR back in the mid-70s.

That's the thing with Gaddis. He's always a decade or two early. Only in retrospect can you really appreciate what he was doing.

Having been reading The Names recently, DeLillo is certainly brilliant. For an author often grouped in with the American “maximalist” authors mentioned by sibling commenters like Pynchon and Gaddis, I have appreciated DD perhaps even more for his subtle and sensitive dialogue and exploration of interpersonal interaction. The lead and his ex-partner in The Names have that sense of tired accustomedness to their relationship which is hard to neatly encapsulate.

Throw in Joan Didion (e.g. Play it as it lays, Slouching towards..) to flesh this out even further.

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