books:

	Ratner's Star Don DeLillo Vintage, 1989 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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now as a fun-type book, if you enjoyed the "calvinball" in the "calvin and hobbes," you'll love half-ball, and for fans of "deep thought," delillo's "space brain" provides nearly un-endurable humour (oh, wait, space brain's changed it's mind again. . .). the only way in which i'd fault delillo is that he (as many others have done/continue to do) is under the impression that mathematicians desire to win a nobel prize, but the truth is, not-just-a-few mathematicians see the nobel as a cute prize that pales in comparison to the fields medal. other than this (annoying) hindrence, ratner's star is a truly exceptional book. if you want lighter reading, go with "white noise," but ratner's star is most definitely its equal, and in some ways (that are directly related to how much the book demands of the reader and how much work the reader is willing to put into the book-as-art aspects (i.e. going after meanings not plainly displayed on the surface)) i think it exceeds all of the delillo i've read excepting underworld. basically, read this book, it'll make you're life better.

oh, that "typewriters?" things? that's because the book has a remarkable futuristic feel and does an exceptional job of transporting the reader to a pi-in-the-sky/ivory tower research facility, but there are constant mentions of typewriters that do a pretty good job of breaking the flow, but they have the effect of endearing the work rather than trivializing it.

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It's science! But not really, or at least not how you think

Early Delillo novels aren't exactly honed affairs. I mean, all the elements are there but the sharpness of his vision wasn't quite in place at the beginning, so you get good ideas and great prose and it doesn't really come together into anything awe-inspiring, even if it reads well and it still way smarter than most other books. Ratner's Star is probably the first one to really feel complete, even if it's not all the way there just yet. Its vastly more esoteric than his other novels, while it deals with the same themes of alienation and loneliness that normally characterizes his work, here he always throw in a bunch of high theory science just to make things more interesting. The plot of the book involves a bunch of scientists working on trying to decipher a message from a distant star. To help, they bring in a child genius, Billy, who has won the Nobel Prize in mathematics. From there he spends the rest of his time bouncing the various eccentric characters off each other and letting them interact over the course of the book. A lot of time people are throwing extremely complex sounding theories back and forth, which may or may not be actual theories (they sound good but I'm not a mathematician, and I have no idea how much research he did for this), some of which are actually useful and some just reflect the personalities of the people coming up with them. As it goes along Billy eventually winds up working on some other project deep in isolation with an even odder group of scientists. If you were reading them chronologically (which I'm not but bear with me) this is the first book that really "feels" like Delillo, it's exploring themes but also trying to puzzle through what all the chatting means, so it feels a bit more focused, instead of vamping on a topic until it reaches the end. The characters don't ever feel totally three dimensional, because they are wacky scientists but he imbues them with enough so that they aren't total stereotypes. The point of it seems to be that the more you know the less you understand, as if you have a whole bunch of people who can't at all relate to each other or the real world. The science project itself is just an excuse to get everything together and bounce them off each other, and the ending basically reflects that. His prose is sharper here, without showing off, keeping what could be an utterly boring story moving along nicely, never getting bogged down in all the science, but not skimping on it either. There are a few passages that are downright brilliant in composition. And when he gets a little experimental toward the end, it feels right, in the sense its a culmination of what's gone before and not "well I feel like doing this now." That said, the book didn't blow me away, but it was surprisingly readable and entertaining given the subject matter. In a way it also pointed toward what was to come in later novels. Probably the first sign that he might be able to hit a stride, and stick with it.

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Zorgal Theory

Ratner's star is a spectacular novel about a genius kid, Billy, who enjoys phenomenal gifts in Mathematics and a suspicious relationship to elderly persons whom he continuously accuse of all sorts grossness. In short it's Don Dellilo's literary skills applied to the bizar world of mathematical geniuses and a fictional demonstration of why mathematics is only as correct as logic allows it to be.

The story revolves around Billy's participation in a top secret research project where he encounters a fascinating array of persons; including the brilliant mathematician Endor, who have chosen to live in a hole after his attempt on cracking a extraterrestial code and the enigmatic Mohole, with his flimsy theory on Moholean relativity and garage sale of "vintage art films" such as "Aunt Polly's Banana Surprise" and "What the Butler Did".

As a mathematician myself I find it a laudable achievement to write a book full of wit and slapstick that centers around the development of a logical system of discourse for use in celestial communication (Logicon). The book is however not without its flaws as it contains to many wasted side stories that does nothing for the plot.

Ultimately a story about ignorance at the frontiers of knowledge, this book will properly bore the casual reader and if you are looking for a introduction to Don Delillo I suggest you look elsewhere (like Libra or White Noise).

The avid Delillo fan will however find this book to be a fascinating and enormously ambitious achievement. A splendid read for math lovers and layman alike. Packed with brilliant prose and a insane character gallery it's sure to keep you turning the pages.

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not DeLillo's best undertaking

I must admit that this book, even after two stabs at it, didn't thrill me the way other DeLillo novels can, and I did feel as though I were reading something more by Thomas Pynchon. Many of DeLillo's finest work seems to work on the exploration and twisting of its own metaphor, but filtered through extraordinary but still accessible characters, people who feel both rooted in and confused by the complexities of the world behind them. _Ratner's Star_ seems to want to delve in such a way, but through a situation far more absurdist.

Billy Twilling is a young math Nobel laureate who is pulled into a think tank that bombards him on all sides with eccentrics, from fellow mathematicians to the custodians. Yet many of these characters become redundant through their lack of introduction and propensity for monologue. Many moments of the book read like Kafka and Michio Kaku co-writing an episode of _Dragnet_. Twilling's main job is to decipher a coded message received from outer space, but of course his progress is hindered and his job outright disregarded by many in Field Experiment One. Eventually, the book breaks down in plotline and form itself when Twilling is pulled underground into a new project that is off the charts.

There are many delights in this book--Twilling himself is a wonderfully concise and hilariously unhumorous boy. DeLillo shows his skill at even comic timing on the page. The scenes with a mathematic precurser who has banished himself to a hole in the ground and the meeting of the esteemed Ratner himself during a torch ceremony are wonderful, yet I didn't find the book as a whole challenging with its exploration of metaphor as DeLillo does in later books. There is a wide expanse of characters, but the ecentricities become the focus of the book, not the crucial ideas, and the eccentricities become a little formulaic at times, even in their seeming randomness.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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