I absolutely love this weird thing-would enjoy talking with some one else who is interested in my theory that it is a pretty straight up premonition of life in post-Katrina New Orleans.Some of the stuff in here is just chilling to read after the fact.I think he didn't realize it at the time,but he was having an extended vision of life after the storm.A small example: the book BEGINS'...to wound the autumnal city.' and then the main character begins to walk OVER THE BRIDGE into the destroyed city...nifty! ( )

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, like the city where the novel is set, is a great, shambling mess of a novel, a true baggy-pants monster of a book. As the novel opens, the unnamed hero finds himself on the road to the deserted city of Bellona. He has lost most of his memory; he does not know where he comes from nor why he is going to Bellona. Bellona itself is equally mysterious. The city has been deserted by almost all of its inhabitants. The few people who remain roam the empty streets living like parasites on what remains. Some have banded together to try to build a new community in the city's main park. Others formed gangs that extort whomever they can. A small handful hang on to civilization by walling themselves up in a large mansion or shutting themselves up in apartments, refusing to accept the changes Bellona has been through.

Bellona has suffered a singularity. It's not clear why the city has become cut off from the rest of America; no television, no radio, no telephones. Strange things happen. A building catches fire and burns for days without being consumed. Two full moons appear on the rare day when the constant smoke clears. Landmarks appear to shift. A single bus route is still running, its driver going where and when he will.

The unnamed hero, who becomes known as Kidd, never helps the reader solve the riddle of Bellona. He knows little of his past but it seems he was once in a psychiatric hospital. He suffers blackouts that jar the novel's narration several times leaving more holes in the story rather than filling any. The third person narration is so closely tied to Kidd, that it becomes as unreliable as he is.

Though the bulk of Dhalgren takes place in a single location, it's essentially a road novel. Kidd moves from one set of characters to another as he moves through the city. He begins at the commune in the park where he meets Lanya, a girl he will form a close bond with as the novel progresses. He spends the night with Tak Lafour, an engineer who moved into the city after its fall and became a sort of wise old man, the guy others go to for advice. Tak knows the fallen city inside out. Kidd gets a job moving furniture for the Richards family who insist on maintaining appearances, pretending that everything is normal as everything around them slowly falls apart. Mr. Richard's leaves for work each morning, though no one knows where he spends his day. Mrs. Richard's runs the family's luxury apartment as she always did, serving empty soup bowls at dinner time in a strange charade of the family dinner.

Kidd has found a notebook, filled with someone's diary about the city. He uses the blank pages and margins to write poetry of his own which is published in a small edition halfway through the novel by the city's main celebrity Roger Calkins who keeps a large, walled mansion filled with celebrity guests from the outside world. One of them, a poet, takes an interest in Kidd and encourages his writing. By the end of the novel, Kidd has fallen in with a street gang, the Scorpions, who wear mirrored disks that create holographic disguises. Kidd forms a family, reuniting with Lanya after the commune in the park breaks up, who becomes his girlfriend. The two are joined by Denny, a teenager who shares their bed.

What to make of all this? Should on even try to make anything?

Science fiction author and fan of the novel, William Gibson, has said that Dhalgren is "a riddle never meant to be solved." But it's human nature to solve riddles, even when there is no solution.

Some possibilities:

In the midst of this massive, post apocalyptic science fiction novel, Kidd is writing poems. Here Dhalgren becomes an extended meditation on the creation of art, how art works, where it comes from, how it suffers when it becomes a commodity, how the artists must finally face the reaction of the public. Not something I expected to find in a science fiction novel.

Though published in 1975, Dhalgren is a product of the 1960's; the influence of the hippie movement on it is clear. It can be read as a critique of the changes American society during that decade. The commune in the park Kidd finds when he first arrives in Bellona is a hippie paradise. Golden Gate Park 1968. The Summer of Love. The commune runs as a collective, everyone helps with the food, the maintainence of their camp and the construction of new shelters. The members move from partnership to partnership, without moral constraints. They are as free as anyone could be. The Richards, whom Kidd works for, don't know what to make of the commune nor of the changes their city has gone through. They insist on going on exactly like they always have. When their eldest son begins to question their way of life, they force him out and pretend he has died. Their daughter sneaks off to join the commune and to sleep with a radical black leader whenever she can. The commune falls apart, just as the hippie movement did. It ends in crime and exploitation without leaving any mark on the landscape, having failed to build any of the permanent structures they had planned.

There is much more in Dhalgren--as many solutions to its riddle as their are readers. I will be keeping my copy. I'm not sure if I'll ever re-read it--at 800 pages I make no promises--but if I do, I'm sure I find a new set of answers to its riddles. Dhalgren is that kind of book. ( )

SF/F (nothing overtly magical, but no hard science explanations either and plenty of things that could be covertly magical) and full of "race stuff" without being a book about race.

I adore this book. Dystopia (?), utopia (?), surrealism (?), hyper-realism (?), magic realism (?) . . . I don't know what it is, but I love it. This is a novel for the lover of words and the imagery of dreams. Those who love it can re-read it over and over. Those who love it can read reviews and essays about it, and then run back to it and read it again. *Dhalgren* does not age. *Dhalgren* does not grow old. ( )

After writing Nova, Delany didn't publish any fiction for five years. After this hiatus, he produced Dhalgren, his most ambitious work, although, in my opinion, not his best. Dhalgren is a very distinctive work, and is probably one of the most polarizing in the science fiction genre, provoking reactions from love to hate and contempt.

The book's protagonist, unnamed in the beginning of the book, and known only as "The Kid" through the rest, seems to wander through the decayed remains of the fictional city of Bellona - supposedly situated in the middle of the United States, but cut off in some unexplained way from the rest of the country. In Bellona, the sun is huge and red, there are sometimes two moons, time seems to intermittently flow faster or slower than normal, and an array of odd people try to live in a city where nothing seems to work. Bellona appears to be cut off from outside contact by radio, telephone, or other methods, its only interaction with the outside world appears to be the handful of people who manage to find their way in or out of the city.

The Kid starts his journey outside the city, where he has sex with a random woman, tells her he has lost his name whereupon she bestows him an "optic chain" and promptly turns into a tree. He hitches a ride on a truck, finds the bridge to Bellona, meets a group of women leaving the city who give him an "orchid" (a bladed weapon worn on the wrist) and finds Tak, the unofficial gatekeeper to the city. He hesitantly engages in a homosexual liaison with Tak. And then the book gets surreal.

As one might guess, the book has a fair amount of sexual content, and much of it is pretty explicit. The Kid engages for much of the book in a three way sexual relationship with Lanya and Denny, but there are other sexual elements introduced, like an episode of group sex involving multiple members of the "Scorpions" gang (of which The Kid and Denny are members), and a single woman. While sexuality was touched upon in his previous works, Dhalgren marks Delany's push into the area of sex, gender, and sexuality as major themes in his books. Delany explores several sexual relationships- between the older Kid and young vulnerable Denny; between the older Tak and The Kid; between a young girl and her obsession with her own rapist; between the Scorpions and the women who surround them, and so on.

Dhalgren is a difficult books to understand. The Kid appears to be an unreliable narrator, and although his presence drives much of what story there is, he is mostly passive, drifting from situation to situation, getting lost, discovering new parts of the city, and interacting with a wildly disparate group of people. Everything that happens in Bellona has an odd, dreamlike qualify, and an air of unreality. There is the possibility that Bellona may not exist at all, and may only be a figment of The Kid's deranged mind.

Wandering through the city, The Kid comes across a commune that has taken up residence in a city park where he meets Lanya, who gives him a half-filled book: he writes in the unused pages of the book throughout the rest of the story, seemingly writing the story of the book he is in. He later stumbles into an apartment complex and befriends a family that seems to be in denial about the oddities of the city around them. Here, one finds a union of the normal and what would be unacceptable behavior - while the father of the family goes to a nonexistent job every day and the mother insists on maintaining a normal lifestyle with family dinners, their teenage daughter has been raped by George Harrison (not the Beatle, a character in the book who is a popular local figure, and known rapist), but has become fixated upon Harrison with a kind of puppy love. The Kid, while helping move the family from one apartment to another, witnesses the death of the family's son, an event that has its own unreality about it.

The Kid later interacts with a local poet who tries to get him published by a local newspaper editor (and leader of what passes for Bellonan high society) named Calkins, and eventually drifts into joining and leading the Scorpions (some of whom had beaten him earlier in the novel), a sort of street gang that is made distinctive by wearing light projectors that, when turned on, surround them with images of various predatory and mythical creatures. In keeping with a general theme that The Kid lacks a defined self-identity, his light projector is faulty, displaying only an amorphous, shifting array of light when activated.

The Kid takes his Scorpion buddies to a party thrown in his honor by Calkins, where in a very odd sequence, the street gang interacts with the intellectual elite who reside in the city: a poet, an astronaut, a psychotherapist. The Kid is interviewed by a writer as part of this party. The novel then gets very self-referential, much of the last chapter is taken up with excerpts from the non-poetry that The Kid has written (the novel talks a lot about The Kid writing poetry, but you never see any of the actual poetry), until eventually, the last unfinished sentence seems to bend back to the first partial sentence in the book, making the novel circular in a manner that is almost certainly intentionally similar to Finnegan's Wake.

In some ways, the circular nature means that it doesn't matter where you start Dhalgren. You could pick it up, begin in chapter three, read to the end, and go back and read up to where you started. Though The Kid's path is linear as he drifts from situation to situation, the story references backwards and forwards so often, that reading it in this way probably wouldn't change a reader's understanding of the story much. In some ways, the story seems to suggest that The Kid has gone to Bellona before, left it, and then forgotten his experience - when he begins reading the portion of the notebook that was already filled when Lanya gave it to him, and it looks suspiciously similar to what The Kid has written, and the story that he has lived through - making one think that maybe the half-finished notebook was possibly half-finished by The Kid in a previous tour of Bellona. The Kid seems to be something of a cipher, almost without his own identity other than that which he drifts into and which the reader imposes.

As with much of Delany's later work, Dhalgren seems to be concerned heavily with culture, and the preservation of culture in the face of stress - even though Bellona is clearly a dying city, with fires raging out of control in some areas (but oddly, rarely seeming to actually consume anything), the "elite" of the city are cultural figures: poets, writers, newspaper publishers, and of course, The Kid, who spends much of the book reading or writing in his notebook, and Lanya, who is described as an artist (though she produces no visible art during the book). Even the Scorpions, with their flamboyant light projectors, fill in for sculpture and a kind of performance art in the city.

In the end, the novel poses numerous questions, and steadfastly refuses to answer them. Is Bellona real? If it is, why is it cut off from the rest of the world? Is The Kid merely insane? Who is The Kid to begin with? Why does he go to Bellona, and why does he leave? Why does anyone go to Bellona? Are they seeking a sort of hippie freedom to live in a commune away from the workings of the world? Are they merely hedonists seeking pleasure unfettered by social mores? Are they criminals in an underworld where criminal behavior is acceptable? And so on and so forth. It is difficult to recommend Dhalgren as a book to be enjoyed, because some people will almost certainly not enjoy it. It is a significant book, and on that basis, a science fiction aficionado should definitely read it if for nothing else to explain why they dislike it. I enjoyed the book, but I can certainly see the elements that someone might not like, and as a result I give it a recommendation conditioned on the understanding that at least some people will absolutely hate the book. ( )