It feels weird to say this, but I read this Don DeLillo book so that I could get a handle on the upcoming movie-- I like DeLillo, though everything since Underworld that I've read isn't quite what I want with him-- the satire, such as it is, has somehow moved inside the forcefield of the consciousness we experience the book from, and the result is a much more slippery beast. That is definitely the case here-- obviously, Eric is a huge dick, master of the universe type, but we spend a lot of time with him and it makes you wonder what DeLillo sees in him that is so interesting-- it's true that he's kind of a trends wizard, on a collision course with the end of history and all that. In anyone else, that'd be wild shit, but in DeLillo, it's kind of old hat, and this version lacks the honest striving to understand that earlier books had (at least when I read them I found that; maybe I'm a romantic dope).

Still, it's a good, quick read. There's a lot of sex, some of it quite funny in a way that echoes Pynchon, a bit. There are some shocking twists. And there's DeLillo's very old but still very impressive trick of writing about wherever you are when you are reading the book, even though the book is so many years old. In this case, that means the book is, in essence, about Occupy Wall St and the banking collapse, only it purports to be about the year before 9/11. In other words, history has maybe done DeLillo a favor, granting his book a relevance it might not have had otherwise. Or else DeLillo is just that good. It's hard to say.

Not DeLillo's best work, really, but it's an appealingly brainy afternoon's worth of reading. And seeing how Cronenberg gets any of of it screen will definitely add to my ongoing love-hate with the director.