Representation: Black characters
Trigger warnings: Drug use
Score: Five out of ten.
Find this review on The StoryGraph.

Well that was a unique reading experience. I wanted to read Great Jones Street when they got it last year but I put it off for months before finally picking it up. I glanced at the blurb, making it seem intriguing, but I lowered my expectations after seeing the ratings, and when I closed the final page, I thought it was average.

It starts with Bucky Wunderlick leaving New York in the 1970s after forgoing fame and fortune when he left his rock and roll band to pursue peace by travelling across the world in the opening pages. I enjoyed the beginning but Great Jones Street got stale from there as its slow pacing didn't do wonders for it as it disengaged me from the narrative. For a piece of literary fiction, Great Jones Street's plot is surprisingly simple even though it tries focuses on the theme of escaping from fame and riches. Tries. Still, it's superficial since the story is mostly about Bucky going to places and talking to so many characters I couldn't keep track of, and they were hard to connect or relate with. At least I interpreted a message saying being a celebrity has unintended consequences (which is true,) but making the narrative more engaging would've cleared everything up. The conclusion has slightly more action as Bucky arrives at a place called Happy Valley, where he takes a drug that makes him forget to speak until the last pages. What a finish. ( )

DNF.
Awful, even by DeLillo standards ( )

This book was lent to me by my Gr. 11 English teacher and I read it back in 2004 and loved it; but I don't think I appreciated it to the extent I want to. Therefore, it's back on my to-read list to remind me to read it again soon. ( )

Mediados de los sesenta. Bucy Wunderlick, la joven estrella del rock, se encuentra insatisfecho con el tipo de vida que le ha dado riqueza y fama. En mitad de una gira, decide separarse de su banda para alojarse en un decrépito apartamento de la calla Great Jones, en Manhattan. A partir de ese momento, sus incondicionales fans especularán sobre esta desaparición creyéndolo incluso muerto. Su estancia en la calle Great Jones no será lo que esperaba: su privacidad ser verá continuamente entorpecida por variadas y enigmáticas visitas. La calle Great Jones refleja las pesadillas y alucinaciones de nuestra era con todas sus escabrosas sombras: una mirada penetrante a la mezcla de arte, negocio y decadencia urbana que conforma el rock and roll.

Great Jones Street – Don DeLillo’s novel published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series where a young rock-and-roll artist seals himself off in a Lower Manhattan down-and-out apartment. Well, there’s the occasional visit from his girlfriend and members of his rock group and hawkers connected with a Happy Valley Commune yammering about a future miracle drug, enough visits to keep his sharp edge very sharp and enough visits to possibly drive a crazy boy crazy.

And here's our man, the one and only Bucky Wunderlick, musing on the mystical nature of his girlfriend and soulmate, the incomparable Opel: "All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language." A batch of reasons why this novel by Don DeLillo is fab:

THE BOX MAN, AMERICAN-STYLE
Within months of publication of Great Jones Street another new novel hit the shelves addressing many of the same themes: The Box Man by Nobel winning Japanese novelist, Kōbō Abe, where the nameless protagonist surrenders his previous identity and conventional routine to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Great Jones Street and The Box Man – so into yourself, so “society get out of my face.” At one point in DeLillo’s novel, girlfriend Opel tells Bucky about a new underground counterculture group: “The return of the private man, according to them, is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man.” Oh, Opel. Oh, Bucky. Oh, Box Man. This is so 70s! Sidebar: I recall watching a 1970s newscast where a university student wore a black cloth over his head down to his shoes and walked around campus calling himself “the black bag.” Actually, I thought this guy really cool.

POETRY
At one point, Bucky reflects: “Alone I lived in the emergency of minutes, in phases of dim compliance with the mind’s turning hand.” And here’s another of his rock-and-roll reveries: “Euphoric with morphine we’d be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were.” It’s as if Bucky’s words could have been excerpts from Alan Ginsberg’s many page beatnik slam-poem “Howl.” And there are numerous other such Bucky rant-lines for fans of DeLillo’s poetic, philosophic prose.

THE WRITER IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE
“Some writers presume to be men of letters. I’m a man of numbers.” So says the novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer Fenig, who lives in the apartment on Great Jones Street right above Bucky and who is a writer obsessed with seeking fame and knowing the ups and downs of the writer’s market better than a seasoned stock broker knows Wall Street. Don DeLillo, you sly dog, putting a writer who might be the shadow side of yourself in the apartment above your protagonist.

ROCK-AND-ROLL, THE NEW MODERN ART
In an interview, Bucky pontificates how when people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there, but through his music, he makes people move. WOW! The one and only Bucky Wunderlick, shining star, prime mover, kinesthetic force, creator of a new political-erotic-mystical art form that, as sculptor Claes Oldenburg insisted, does more than just sit on its ass in a museum.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY
Again, Don DeLillo fans will not be disappointed since many are the zingers hurled at contemporary American society. For example, how TV programs are interrupted and announcers sound close to insanity, their voices soaring, as they report on the impending snowstorm: heavy snow, deep snow, drifting snow, big fluffy white flakes are falling and will continue to fall from the sky. (I myself am always both amused and amazed at the panic snow arouses in the media). And, again: Bucky has issues with his hard-earned money having to work . . . no, no, no, he did the work; he wants his money resting in nice big green stacks in some cool bank vault. He’s told in so many words: so sorry, Bucky, like it or not, your rich ass is tied into the American financial world!

BUCKY’S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
Inserted into the first-person narrative is the Superslick Mind-Contracting Media Kit featuring The Bucky Wunderlick Story told in various news clips, song lyrics and Zen-like enigmatic responses to interviewers. All very fitting since Bucky’s words have that ring of rock-and-roll truth, when he states further on in the story, “Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape.” Yea, baby! Hearing such wisdom I have to ask: What’s the sound of one Bucky turning at thirty-three and a third, second cut, side one, third album?

THE FIGURATIVE DEATH-IN-LIFE JOURNEY
Bucky wants us to know his solitary journey on Great Jones Street is only the literal way of looking at things. Figuratively, he tells us, he lived in a remote monastery with the lamas of Tibet, being guided through the mysteries of the highest levels, the most esoteric planes of death. That’s what he came to know. Death-in-life.

Oh, how cool is that! Thanks, Don D. You rock!

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