White Noise by Don DeLillo

How to start my several weeks overdue review of Don DeLillo's 1985 National Book Award Winner?  I found myself marking pages throughout the book to cycle back and re-read DeLillo's amazing prose.  His look at an educated and somewhat desperate middle class family was rich and scarily true to our own times. 

Even though it was written in the 1980s, DeLillo's characters operate in a world driven by catch phrases, hollow status and the warm glow of the television.  Even the "chemical event" which drives much of the novel would not be out of place on any current news channel.

Following a professor at a small liberal arts college and his almost cliched mixed family as their lives slowly but inevitably unravel, DeLillo digs away at the initial image of a well functioning existence.  Jack and Babette and their mixed brood of children assembled from various marriages are buffeted on all fronts by mass media culture, fear-mongering, and their own need for each other.  I feel like I can't even begin to describe the way DeLillo has encapsulated the bubble of middle class (we're trapped in our own education and need for security).

I'm sure that I could go on for many pages about the love I have for this book and how well crafted it is.  But I won't bore anyone.  :) I just recommend that you go read it.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, I enjoyed the breezy southern style Percy used throughout. The sense of place in the novel was amazing. Percy has (had? I don't know if he's dead or not) a great ability for description that really encompasses all the senses in a way that is almost hard to define.

This 1962 National Book Award Winner seems to have fallen into the theme of the award winning novel about ennui. While I have already read several award winners who depict young men battling with their own sense of ennui, their disconnect from their time and place, I felt like Percy achieves his own place in history with a particular flair. His character, the moviegoer of the title, Binx weaves in and out of the New Orleans with loads of style.

Overall it's a book I enjoyed, a quick read that was a good time, though, like with The Fixer I can't think of much more to say.

The Fixer - Bernard Malmud

Well, I have finally finished The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1966, Winner of the National Book Award in 1967. This book read like a cross between To Kill a Mockingbird and Crime and Punishment. The heavy philosophical musings of the main character, the "fixer" Yakov, were hard to wade through at times. This book, like All the Kings Men falls into the category in that I am happy I read it, but don't necessarily think I will read it again.

Yakov's morose pondering on life and spirituality from behind the bars of a Russian prison both provoke the reader and turn them off. Malamud's portrayal of the anti-Semitism Yakov faces brings the reader into close contact with the evil side of human nature which is hard to look at face on.

At this point I can't even think of what more to say about the book. The book is achingly well written, but its hard for me to go further than that....

Maybe I'll have more to say later...