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Motherless
Brooklyn
JONATHAN LETHEM
Take your hardboiled detective, then give him a disability
that forces him to warp and bend language according to his own obsessive
impulses. Then take that detective and throw him in the middle of the
polyglot, pop culture mecca of New York, and watch the pages fly right
on by.
Lethem has already composed some of the most interesting narratives this side of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, but this novel happens to be the most potent one written in the last decade, signalling the vapor trail of that dying breed, the visionary author. If you pull this out of your stocking this holiday season, drop to your knees and build a shrine to Santa. Immediately.
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White
Noise
DON DELILLO
Every day, the things you eat, the shows you watch, and the drugs you
take are all gathering in the darkened rooms of your suburban dwellings
and hatching a plot to take you out once and for all. And what can you
do about it, sitting there watching endless loops of buildings crashing
in upon themselves and burying a small fraction of humanity beneath their
weight? Nothing.
Funny, isn't it? You're a professor of Hitler Studies and you don't know German, you've got a wonderful nuclear family -- built from the strands of several previous marriages, of course -- and when you're short on spiritual sustenance, there's always the immanent transcendent supermarket or the consumerist makeover of the mall to prop you back up from a descent into murder and madness. If this doesn't make you want to red White Noise, well, read it anyway.
