RATNER’S STAR - DON DELILLO

A victim of the Kindle. I think this book took me 2 months to read. Not that it was too long, it’s about 500 pages, but because I kept interlacing it with other books and then, while on vacation in the United States, I switched over to physical books since I had access to a library and prefer to read that way. I’ve always been a DeLillo fan, I’ve read more than a half dozen of his books and he’s an author I’m always checking for and trying to keep up with. However, this is the first book of his I’ve read from the first half, pre-White Noise, of his career. All of the DeLillo-ism are already present. The most striking of which is his signature dialogue style. DeLillo characters don’t speak like the vast majority of folks in real life. In fact, when you encounter a DeLillo character in real life, as I have a few times, it’s always a strange and wondrous event. His characters speak past one another, they speak gnomically and cryptically, their syntax is strange and jarring, they make pronouncements and float theories instead of simply conveying information. This manner of speaking actually makes more sense in this book than his others since Ratner’s Star’s characters are all genius scientists. The book follows a 14 year old math prodigy, named Billy, who is selected to work on a government project in a top-secret lab that involves deciphering a message from space. Billy spends most of the book interacting with different scientists and thinkers who work in this complex and listens to them ramble and rant about math, truth, theology, science, kabbalah, technology, language and all the other things that occupy DeLillo’s mind. The book is very episodic and is basically a parade of these absurd and erudite characters lecturing and interacting with Billy, who is sardonic and precocious. I’ve long known David Foster Wallace was a big DeLillo fan, and you can tell in his writing, but this book is really the blueprint. Billy is very similar to IJ’s Hal and a sort of smarty-pants zaniness pervades both works. In the zany vein, this book also recalls Pynchon, especially when DeLillo decides to add some Pynchon names like Calliope Shrub and Elux Troxl. Also, like Pynchon and that recent McCarthy novel, this book plumbs the philosophy of mathematics and pontificates on the relationship between math and language, which is a very common theme for a certain type of YT male author. I’m not sure that overall this is my favorite DeLillo, it might have the highest highs though. Some of the speeches about math and truth and language really hit and resonate but some are tedious and boring. Reading it over such a long period also made it all run together a bit, which might have done the book a disservice. All that being said, this is the DeLillo-ist book of DeLillo I’ve read, all of his obsessions and quirks as a writer on their most naked display. If it was a bit shorter, I’d recommend it for first time DeLillo folks to really get a taste of what’s up with him. There are some parts of this book that I’m sure I’ll think about for the rest of my life while most of it has already slipped into a sort of undifferentiated haze. Excellent overall, but I need to pick up my reading pace.