A puzzle without a solution, but still a detailed investigation of character and writing. No positive or...

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	• Dhalgren Samuel R. Delany Vintage, 2001 - 816 pages average customer review:based on 100 reviews view larger image
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So many ways to see it...

Here is a multiple-choice test; pick as many as you like. "Dhalgren" is:

1) An embalmed relic of the mindset of the 1960s.

2) A demonstration of how to populate a satisfying novel with "marginal people" normally excluded from popular culture -- blacks and latinos; females; the uneducated and mentally ill.

3) A puerile fantasy of sex and asocial escapism.

4) An important work by a masterful writer.

5) A dangerous, morally defective inducement to the spread of AIDS.

6) An absorbing read.

7) Science Fiction.

I would write "true" after all but #7. Dhalgren can't be science fiction because its fundamental situation, the strange condition of the city of Bellona, is not justified by any coherent mechanism. It isn't credible that a whole city could be emptied by disaster (where did the refugees go?); that it would now be in a state in which TV, radio and the telephone don't work; that its skies are filled with strange astronomy and stranger meteorology; that there are no guards or barriers at its limits yet few enter or leave; and so forth.

If Bellona doesn't work as a science-fictional milieu, it does work very well as symbol. It stands for the condition of life in all the wrecked neighborhoods of the world: in the first instance the Bronx and Harlem (Delany has always been a New York writer first); but beyond them, it stands for any hopeless ghetto full of empty buildings with broken windows. Such ghettos _are_ ignored by the surrounding nation -- as Bellona is. Burning up and falling down _is_ their natural condition, and nobody cares or notices -- as in Bellona. Vast incomprehensible events take place outside them (wars, recessions, elections...) and pass on changing nothing -- as in Bellona. Marginal people can, in such places, live pretty much as they please, without reference to law or concensus morality -- as in Bellona.

So Bellona is not acceptable as a setting for SF, but it works as symbol. And a book set in a symbol is a fantasy, by definition.

As for charge #1, in those passages that approximate normal narrative, the book describes the lives of people very much like the people in Delany's memoir, "Heavenly Breakfast" (in which, by the way, there is a vivid paragraph about his sighting of a nameless person who is probably the visual model for The Kid). The people living out in the park are parodies of the Diggers of San Francisco. The "straight" (as in un-hip) Mom who features in one brilliantly tragi-comic chapter is patterned on 60s TV characters. And so on: anyone who was young in the 1960s shares a vocabulary of images and attitudes with Delany -- and anyone who wasn't, won't recognize many features of life in Bellona.

As for #3 and #5 -- I suppose we can't blame Delany for liking to write about sex, nor for writing, in the 1970s, about the carefree sex of the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1990s that AIDS was well-understood. But it was exactly the breezy exchange of bodily fluids so poetically depicted in Dhalgren that gave AIDS its big start in the world. And reading Dhalgren now... well, it would be nice if the author would add a sincere forward about Safe Sex. About the writing itself, he has nothing to apologize for.

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Sublime. Superlative. But not for everyone.

I just finished "Dhalgren" for the second time. Listen: It's not for everyone. I mean, if you're looking for a tight, linear story in which every loose end is resolved, this isn't the novel for you.

Fortunately, there are literally thousands of other novels like that out there. There's only one "Dhalgren," though, and you need to approach it that way: It's not like other stories, and it wasn't meant to be. It *is* quote-unquote literary science fiction. In fact, it's more like an 800-page poem than a novel in the conventional sense. And as a result, it takes some work to read. Hey, so do Proust and Joyce, but people keep saying you should read *them*.

The beauty of "Dhalgren" is that instead of being about extraordinary events taking place in the ordinary world, it's about ordinary events taking place in an extraordinary world -- and it works. Some people might pick nits with that description, because some extraordinary things do happen in the book -- mostly astronomical things -- but they're more or less accepted as part of the bargain of being in Bellona. For the most part, the narrative drifts from scene to scene very organically, very unaffectedly, evoking the bizarre sense of everyday life in a postapocalyptic wasteland. (It's no surprise that the Kid, the book's protagonist, is trying so hard to write a poem in the rhythm of natural speech.)

The whole enterprise is so audacious that it would fall apart if, again, it didn't *work*. In Delany's hands, it does. Resonances fade in and out; when the Kid has a moment of déjà vu, so do you. The philosophizing on art is purely delightful. (Ernest Newboy's comments on poetry and poets ought to be required reading in any lit-crit course.) There's a great bit in there about a comma, of all things. And the final passages are haunting, heartbreaking.

Some people will tell you it's a book about being inside a novel. And no, it's not a spoiler if I mention that, because while you can make a strong case for that reading, "Dhalgren" does not permit itself to be pinned down so easily. Go into it for the first time with whatever preconceptions you want, and it will defy them and leave you with plenty to mull over, or just plenty to feel.

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A puzzle without a solution, but still a detailed investigation of character and writing. No positive or negative recommedation

Bellona is a city in Midwestern America that has been completely isolated by some unspecified catastrophe. Kid is a man with a history of mental illnesses and no memory of his own name who looks significantly younger than his age. In the novel, he comes to Bellona and slowly adapts to life there, exploring, in detail, the various social castes occupied and coping mechanisms used by the inhabitants of the isolated, post-apocalyptic city where time passes differently for different people and two moons appear through the perpetual cloudcover. He discovers a half-filled notebook that mimics the novel itself in many ways, and begins to fill its pages first with poetry, and then with a journal of his life in Bellona. Intensely detailed and with a slow-moving plot, Dhalgren is largely impenetrable novel with almost no scientific aspects (despite being in the science-fiction genre), but is an interesting investigation into the roles of story, narrator, protagonist, and writer within fictional works. I found this novel disappointing and I don't recommend it, but I also wouldn't steer away an interested reader, because the text does have something to offer.

I believe that my major disappointment with Dhalgren was the lack of science. The novel is billed as sci-fi and is written by a sci-fi author, but the text is primarily an unsolved mystery: Kid becomes increasingly immersed in the irregular events that make Bellona so strange, including the unusual, non-linear passage of time, the hugely oversized sun, and the complete lack of radio signals throughout the town, but he never discovers what causes them. The novel is a puzzle without a solution, and so there is no room for the science-fiction explanations that I would expect in a novel from the genre. The lack of science makes the novel feel more fantastical or surreal than sci-fi, which wasn't what I was expecting and continued to be a disappointment throughout the novel. The unsolved nature of the novel may also make it unsatisfying of even frustrating for some readers: the text comes to no definite conclusion. Indeed, the last sentence is a fragment that loops back the sentence fragment that begins the novel.

The combination of the non-linear, confused timeline and the incredibly detailed writing make the book both lengthy and dense. The plot is loosely-constructed and slow moving--not much happens in the course of the novel, but what does happen is described on a daily basis, action for action, the detail. Reading about what Kid wears and eats, when he washes, who he makes love to, how he moves about town... can get repetitive and frustratingly dull.

Those caveats aside, the novel does provide a detailed, in-world investigation of the roles of text, protagonist/narrator, and writer. The exploration of these themes is not theoretical so much as it is a practical part of Kid's life in Bellona. His discovery of the notebook and the poems and journal entries that he writes, as well as the text of the novel itself and the identities of Kid as author and Delany as author, all interweave, work independently, borrow from each other, and question the underlying identity and nature of all of these roles. Like the mystery of Bellona, the nature of text and authorship is never fully resolved, but the question is given detailed, thorough investigation and provides a wealth of food for through for the reader. It is the saving grace of this difficult and frustrating novel, and I recommend Dhalgren for that purpose only: it is a interesting investigation of the nature of authorship, but not a sci-fi novel nor an enjoyable or satisfying read. I think this book is best for serious, dedicated readers, and don't strongly recommend it either way.

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3.5 Stars

This is one of those books that should be read for the experience but I have to admit it's far from my favorite science fiction narrative. It starts out quite encouragingly but then gets bogged down in repetition. Violence, sexuality of all kinds, depravity, dirt, grime, and gore are all part of life, particularly when living in chaotic circumstances, but Delany seems transfixed by these aspects of life and replays the same basic scenes too many times within the covers of one book. While he does delve successfully into the human psyche and provides a very realistic picture of human reactions to extraordinary circumstances overall I think he could have cut quite a few pages out and had a better book for it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there?. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man?poet, lover, and adventurer?known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

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