One reason I'm enjoying this book is that I feel more of a connection to my life than I did with Gravity's Rainbow. Although these books have some similar themes they have different settings. They both deal with the Cold War and paranoia, but Pynchon did it in a roundabout way.
It's also amazing that this book was written before 9/11. I don't think I would appreciate it the same way if I read it before 9/11. The parts that take place in the 50's portray Americans living in a very similar time: scared, haunted, and at the mercy of the government.
Then, in the parts about the 90's, DeLillo taps in to the world of 24 hour news. I'm from the DC area and a few years back we had a sniper shooting down random people in the area. So when the character's are watching the news, the same tapes over and over, I could relate. And it's a gunman shooting from a car, so that also felt real.
They talk about Encyclopedic novels being prophetic...but only because they are set in the recent past. Many things about DeLillo's book go beyond that...and I get that same creepy feeling that we all got by looking at the cover. It was written in the 90's but it just seems so relevant to our post-9/11 world. Was DeLillo onto something? Or are we really living in a New Cold War?
I think in some ways this book is showing some amazing parallels between the post Cold War era and the widespread paranoia of the earlier period. I am inclined to agree with this book's supposition. Society attempts to be jaded, but truly is completely paranoid nowadays. People watch the obscene, attention-grabbing news nightly, some people are still scared to board airplanes, and, just like what recently happened in Boston, many will immediately report a suspicious looking box (does it contain a bomb?). One of the defining characteristics of the Cold War was the overwhelming mass hysteria, and I don't think we have completely done away with that. However, how can we? Everyday technology is being made more and more destructive, and now with disease scares, it is impossible to feel completely safe. I think the technology poses a double-edged sword. While making it to feel safe, we end up making ourselves even more scared. What do you think?
There are so many references to the World Trade Center that really do seem eery. Page 184, when Nick is looking at the Fresh Kills landfill: "The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one..."
Again on 372: "The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went... 'I think of it as one, not two,' she said. 'Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single enitity, isn't it?' "Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.' 'Yes, you have to look.'"
This passage in particular struck me. Why does the man call the towers a terrible thing? It takes on a whole new meaning when reading from our point of view-- the idea that the demolished towers, and horrible acts of violence in general, are terrible things, but you have to look. You can't ignore it, and it's hard to not want to look at horrific events-- the highway killer video, "rubberneckers" during car crashes, etc. There's this perverse fascination with the horrible, which was first introduced in the Prologue, with J. Edgar Hoover and The Tragedy of Death.