I am not afraid of books that challenge the reader. Infinite Jest and The Gold-Bug Variations are two of my favorite books from recent years, and I very much enjoyed reading Gravity's Rainbow. Dhalgren has a reputation as a particularly difficult but excellent book, and at Eric's urging, I dove into it.

Alas, Dhalgren isn't in the same class as the other books I mentioned. It starts out with great promise, plunging the reader into a startling post-apocalyptic mid-American city. The descriptions are richly textured, and there are a handful of intriguing elements (e.g., the optical chains, the appearance of a second moon, etc.). At the sentence level, the novel is very rich.

In my opinion, the mark of a great novel is that it lives by its own rules and that it contains most of the elements you need to understand it. Here is where Dhalgren falls flat. The only "rule" of the text is that there are no real rules. The pieces never come together; there is no reason for the novel to contain many of its elements.

Worse, the novel is filled with one semi-pornographic sexual encounter after another. Delany does this well, but after the umpteenth time, I failed to see the point. I'm not a prude, and I am interested in gaining insight into the mind of a bisexual black man in the early 70s, but I didn't really get that, nor did I get much else.

I'm giving Dhalgren three stars because there are some wonderful elements in it, and I was captivated for the first 200 pages as I began to understand what was going on. I'd give it four stars if Delany edited 200-300 pages out of the middle, and I'd give it five if he tied a few of the many loose ends together. Dhalgren is an important book, but it's not a great book.