Don DeLillo Critical Essay | Anthony DeCurtis

Anthony DeCurtis

SOURCE: "The Product: Bucky Wunderlick, Rock 'n Roll, and Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 369-79.

In the following excerpt from an essay on Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street, DeCurtis explores how the novel's main character—the rock star Bucky Wunderlick—his music, and the people with whom he associates reflect the dominant culture and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps the best-known passage in Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, not one of his more highly regarded novels, occurs at the beginning of the book. As the novel kicks off, rock star Bucky Wunderlick is holed up in an apartment in a desolate industrial section of Manhattan—this is the early seventies; Manhattan had industrial sections then—having abandoned his band midtour in Houston. Bucky's reflections on his celebrity, which he is seeking to escape and examine, start the novel:

Fame...
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