So this is the first DeLilo I've read.  

It is beautifully written, and it was strange to read this in the mid of lockdown.  The book details a family dealing with a toxic spill in their city.  The father is a professor of Hitler studies, the mother has multiple jobs.  The kids are all different and strange.

It is beautifully written.  It is quite strange, but makes excellent comments on culture.

And it is 50 pages longer than it should be.

I don't know why but I just can't get this book finished. I've tried several times, and even buckled down and tried the audiobook (which went better), but I get 20-25% of the way through and just lose interest in the characters. The MC/Narrator in particular is just so ridiculously smug about everything.

I think I'll try again, but I need to give it a break. Perhaps a winter book, not a spring/summer one. So consider this non-review a reminder to myself why I actually want to retry this one.

Some of the writing though, is just terrific and I can see why this is well liked. A little hard to grab quotes out of an audiobook but this one grabbed me enough to relisten and write it down, a perfect description of a dog day afternoon near the end of summer:

"The air was a reverie of wistful summer things, the last languorous day, a chance to go bare-limbed once more, smell the mown clover"

While the younger kids come off a little too "Dawson's Creek dialogue", the older teenage son reminds me strongly of trying to have an argument with my own teenagers with their inexorable ability to twist logic (and reality) to their own whims. Unfortunately, he's fairly rarely seen or heard from, certainly not enough to keep me reading, and he's still a couple of years too young at 14 to really be having most of these conversations. 

Even so, as a parent, finding yourself asking increasingly precise questions trying to get a straight answer out of an obstreperous teenager while they proceed to bend semantics in order to avoid giving one is all too familiar.

“Rain is a noun. Is there rain here, in this precise locality, at whatever time within the next two minutes that you choose to respond to the question?”

“If you want to talk about this precise locality while you’re in a vehicle that’s obviously moving, then I think that’s the trouble with this discussion.”

I thought that I will not like this novel. I thought that all the fuss about it was exaggerated.

I was wrong.

I enjoyed this novel a lot. I laughed a lot while reading it. I liked the irony, the sarcasm, the tragic-attractive moods. I liked the contradictions and the writing style. In short I liked it whole.

There is one reoccurring theme: death. How can we get rid of death? What if there is a pill for avoiding the fear of death? There is a pill for everything so why not death?

If a cure from the fear of death is found, what could be the consequences? It is interesting that the major side effect from which the patient who takes the pill of release suffers from is forgetting. Forgetting is a sort of death as the patient starts to forget everything that makes her alive, except the fear of death. This of course shows that such pill is bound to fail.