Don DeLillo’s first novel was quite extraordinary. That’s partly because it reads like four or five novels in one (it runs close to five hundred pages). All of them revolve around David Bell, a television executive who leaves his job to become an avant-garde filmmaker. It feels like Bell is a cipher for DeLillo himself and the bedrock of the cinematic elements of his future prose style. There are long disquisitions on cinema as well as long passages in which DeLillo is clearly trying to embed a filmic style in his own writing. Bell’s film and DeLillo’s style both feel especially continuous with the experimental documentaries of the counterculture, such as David Holzman’s Diary, Medium Cool and Woodstock.

The novel starts as a study of middle-class ennui and corporate technocracy. Bell is jaded with his life in New York, moving from one empty relationship to the next without any clear sense of purpose or structure. His work at a television company is just as devoid of meaning. He seems to spend his days ensconced with his secretary, a bottle of whiskey, or both. Very little work gets done. The depictions of the internal operation of the company are laugh-out loud funny. At times the style reminded me of the world of Mad Men – corporate life as a study in capitalist surrealism, a space where the distinction between images and reality start to break down: “There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape.”

In some ways the novel is Bell’s efforts to regain the sense of purpose that is trickling away at the television network. He does so in two ways. First, he reminisces at length on his life growing up in Maine. These recollections form an entire impressionist chunk of the book and read as if they are drawn from DeLillo’s own experiences. They are exquisitely beautiful, moving between the textures of youth, the peculiar atmosphere of small town America, and the visceral apprehension of the future that can overtake you so suddenly in early adulthood – the future as both romantic possibility and looming void. Much of this section is about conceiving of and grappling with emptiness in an era when images are starting to become omnipresent.

Bell’s other effort to get in touch with the “real” is his film project itself. This is an emergent entity, born out of a television assignment on the Navajo paired with a road trip that he takes with a few of his New York friends. Gradually life starts to blend into art and Bell becomes sidetracked and dispersed by his need to film the people he meets in the heartland. At times the novel, like his film, becomes almost discontinuous – a tissue of encounters with people Bell never sees again and in some cases barely remembers beyond what he captures of them on his film. Sometimes he shoots verite, sometimes he stages scenes, much as DeLillo’s own prose hovers between stream of consciousness and self-conscious artifice.

For stream of consciousness itself never quite works in Americana. Time and again, DeLillo reaches for it as a modernist tool for making sense of a postmodern world but it always ends up short. DeLillo himself acknowledges this in the later stages of the novel with an endless paragraph that interpolates images from Molly’s final monologue in Ulysses. As fluid and fractured as it might have been, the stream of consciousness still presupposed a singular subjectivity. By contrast, in DeLillo’s world, consciousness seems to have been fragmented and dispersed across the American collective, present everywhere but irreducible to any one individual. Subjectivities have been replaced by nodes in an emergent network.

Rather than immerse us in Bell’s consciousness, or in the consciousness of his subjects, DeLillo presents us with a series of radio signals, missives from what Jarrett Kobek has described as the “motor spirit” of the 70s. In that sense DeLillo’s style often reminded me of the Beat poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular) in its evocation of a stream of consciousness that has been deformed and dispersed by the emergence of a new American order. Yet where Ginsberg often reaches for the language of classical cinema in his panoramic sweeps, DeLillo’s vision is more attuned to the hand-held camera and ultimately to television in its flickering glimpses of staticky selves.

Finally, DeLillo’s obsession with death is fully-formed here. Death, for him, seems to be the last bastion of the real against the onslaught of images – or perhaps the last horizon that images are in the process of colonising. For that reason, the mundanities of Bell’s work at the television network often give way to sudden visions of mass death and destruction: “We had said and done all these things before and they had been frozen for a time, rolled up in little laboratory trays to await broadcast and rebroadcast when the proper time-slots became available. And there was the feeling that somebody’s deadly pinky might nudge a button and we would all be erased forever.” This passage is fairly characteristic – spectres of death loom but become indistinguishable from, say, the erasure of videotape. When Bell’s mistress asks him to come over and reminisce about old times he simply responds: “There are no old times, Wendy. The tapes have been accidentally destroyed.”

That all creates a crisis of the future in Americana. In the first act, in New York, the future doesn’t seem to exist as a category anymore – it has already been absorbed by the images of the present. Bell observes of his girlfriend’s apartment that “It’s so conventional it transcends convention. It’s like a premature artform. A room in a museum a hundred years from now. The American Wing.” At the same time, a pixelated apocalypse seems imminent, one in which humans finally become indistinguishable from the images they create, or that create them: “I could not tell what was happening on the screen and it didn’t seem to matter. Sitting that close all I could perceived was that meshed effect…it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the set, my molecules mating with those millions of dots.”

Bell’s road trip and film project is an attempt to escape this imminent and immanent regime of the image and to restore the future as a meaningful category but so is the sheer variety and apparent inexhaustibility of DeLillo’s prose style. The novel continually tries to work its way out of the image, of its own representations, and of the way it might be canonized and cordoned off in the future. It’s a debut that is keen to shed its skin at every moment, making for a disorienting and exhilarating experience – full of passages that presage DeLillo’s later “classic” style but equally full of passages unlike anything else that he’s written.