Uh, have you read it? I probably should ask first.
Norman Mailer was apparently a big defender of the book, but God knows who all has even really read it. It's not really some big infamous book that people whisper about in hushed tones. It probably didn't help that it was published about twenty five years after it was written (imagining people reading it in 1969 is pretty damn funny.)
I guess the reason I read Dhalgren instead of his 60s SF is because back then I was trying to read all those big postmodern behemoth novels after taking an entire summer to read Gravity's Rainbow and that's what's on lists of stuff like that. I keep forgetting he even wrote 60s sci-fi.
At any rate, Dhalgren is all atmosphere and bleak deadness and not much happening and people wandering around this city called Bellona that's supposed to be in the dead center of the USA (certainly doesn't resemble any city *I've* been to in Kansas) and something terrible has happened there and we're never told what and nothing in it makes any sense at all. I found it to be stultifyingly dull and forgettable; if a novel's going to be a crazy trip of nonsense it needs to be glorious nonsense. And hey, I liked The Sun Also Rises, so I know I can take a novel where nothing happens! I have no idea what you'll get out of it.
I know that one defense of Dhalgren revolves around the idea that it's a terrific metaphor for where America was mentally in the mid 1970s after Watergate and Vietnam and the counterculture and...well, gee, you've heard this argument for about ten thousand things that are probably better to sit through than Dhalgren.
But look, I'm not sure what all of those big postmodern behemoths, besides Pynchon, that I even liked. Robert Coover was sort of fun to read, but William Gaddis, not so much. Of all the books I've slogged through the hardest time I probably had was slogging through J R. Which is from the same year as Dhalgren!
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