Will I love Dhalgren?

Each time I have read this book over the years, new images are revealed of the post-apocalyptic dream city, Bellona. Now, as a published author, I am even more drawn to Kid, the poetic drifter.

I particularly relate to the mysterious notebook found by the fire late at night at the Hippie commune. Whoever lost it, has written on only one side of each page. The first thing Kid finds written inside is, “to wound the autumnal city...”, which is exactly how the mythic and symbolic novel Dhalgren begins.

How much of what happens is the direct result of what… show more.

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time,… show more.

I’ll admit that the opening sex scene with the naked woman in the moonlight caught my attention fifty years ago, but I’ve visited the city of Bellona several times since then. It means something different to me each time. Now I notice its poetic and mythological symbolism as part of Delaney’s construction of the city and reconstruction of the main character’s lost memory. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic place, like a confused mind. The poetic drifter starts like a character scribbled in the margin of a writer’s notebook. I’m sure that if you dare enter Bellona with him, your experiences will… show more.

I’ve always liked fat paperbacks, and this is maybe the best fat book ever. I picked up a copy randomly at a used bookstore, when I was a teenager, and Dhalgren ended up changing the direction of my life. Even then I had wanted to write a book but had no real idea what a novel could do, and how good they could be. Dhalgren changed that. It’s evocative and haunting, like a dream. The ultimate unreliable narrator enters and is lost in a shifting, urban setting. Familiar characters, dialogue that rings true, and an off-kilter, detailed, yet almost plotless… show more.