From the author of the National Book Award–winning White Noise comes a novel that “reflects our era’s nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) A thought-provoking exploration of the alluring yet hollow world of rock and roll stardom.
Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. Unfulfilled by the excess of fame and fortune his revolutionary image has wrought, he bolds from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment, where he breaks away from his manufactured persona and separates himself from the toxic and superficial culture he has helped create.
As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll’s merger of art, commerce, and urban decay through a vivid portrait of a troubled rock star’s search for meaning beyond the glitz and glamor.
Praise for Great Jones Street:
"Brilliant . . . deeply shocking . . . [DeLillo] looks at rock music, nihilism and urban decay." —Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books
"Luminous . . . finally, a novel that understands rock and roll!" —Jon Pareles, The Village Voice
"DeLillo has the force and imagination of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, with a sense of proportion and style which these would-be giants often lack." —Irish Times
"[A] wild comic [vision] of a post-’60s America as medieval hellscape." —Vulture
From the author of the National Book Award–winning White Noise comes a novel that “reflects our era’s nightmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) A thought-provoking exploration of the alluring yet hollow world of rock and roll stardom.
Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. Unfulfilled by the excess of fame and fortune his revolutionary image has wrought, he bolds from his band mid-tour to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment, where he breaks away from his manufactured persona and separates himself from the toxic and superficial culture he has helped create.
As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street is a penetrating look at rock and roll’s merger of art, commerce, and urban decay through a vivid portrait of a troubled rock star’s search for meaning beyond the glitz and glamor.
Praise
Praise for Great Jones Street:
"Brilliant . . . deeply shocking . . . [DeLillo] looks at rock music, nihilism and urban decay." —Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books
"Luminous . . . finally, a novel that understands rock and roll!" —Jon Pareles, The Village Voice
"DeLillo has the force and imagination of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, with a sense of proportion and style which these would-be giants often lack." —Irish Times
"[A] wild comic [vision] of a post-’60s America as medieval hellscape." —Vulture
