It's a pity that the first part of the book is so excrutiatingly uninteresting and unpleasant to read, because the second part actually becomes a pleasure by the end. I enjoy the picaresque as much as the next person, but here I found that it lacked any flow or rhythm. It just bored me. Plus, there were just too many attempts by DeLillo to be zany, reminding me of some Woody Allen-like practice of throwing a non sequitur curveball at the reader when he realizes that he just wrote a completely pointless paragraph. I don't say that the second part became more interesting because of the core plot advancements, the main one being clear from a mile away. Rather, in the second part, DeLillo stops messing around and wasting our time and instead actually starts stopping and thinking about the themes that were loosely and pointlessly scattered through the first ~70% of the book.

And don't get me started on the dialogue, which DeLillo seems to specialize in making as inhuman as possible.

I was all set to give this book two stars, but the last hundred or so pages were good enough to bump it back up to a three. But I think I'm just about done with DeLillo...he gets maybe one more chance with me....

The first half was super-fun. I particularly love Delillo's style of dialogue, and the first half of this novel is just a succession of conversations with increasingly bizarre characters. The middle, however, when he stopped introducing characters, got a bit slow and dark for me. I think the more science you know, the more fun this would be to read, as well.

Mysterious message from the stars! Mysterious message from the stars? Some really odd characters melded into relationships with a 14-year-old genius trying to solve the code from the stars. Perhaps it ends up being more about these relationships with the odd characters than about the message from the stars. Or is it a message from the stars? Interesting read however you interpret the roll of the dice.

A strange, hypnotic read about the beauty of mathematics and the thin line between genius and insanity. What it lacked in pace and plot was made up for with a wonderful cast of eccentric characters and plenty of scientific and pseudoscientific theories. This was my first DeLillo novel; I like his quirky sense of humour and look forward to reading more of him.

Delillo's first novel in which he goes whole-hog postmodernism, but it ends up feeling (respectfully) like Pynchon taking a crack at a young adult novel. There's plenty here to sink your teeth into, and I suspect some hardcore experimental literature heads dig this more than some of Delillo's more well-known novels, but for me it feels like it spirals out of control a bit, making the last forty percent of the book a bit of a slog.

Well written, but doesn’t adhere to the thin plot thread as well as White Noise or Gravity’s Rainbow...

I didn't get it. Manneristic.