Here is how I ended up with a copy of Americana: I was 17 and it was lent to me by a neighbour, a professor at the university my father had worked at, who told me it was good but not Don DeLillo’s best. At the time I was like a lot of 17-year-olds who studied creative writing; likely too arrogant and too annoying to be around.

I’d borrowed the book with the idea that I wanted to read first novels. I wasn’t enjoying studying and had the thesis – again, most likely arrogantly – that all I had to do was read writer’s first books and then I’d really learn about writing. I still believe this is true, in a way. Sometimes it’s good to learn from author’s ‘lesser’ novels, to try and see the machinations of how they worked, or didn’t – it’s more interesting that way.

The problem was that Americana, as well as being DeLillo’s first book, is also a very good book. The slow decline of the narrator, David Bell – a 28-year-old TV executive who, bored out of his mind and obsessed with his young age, runs away by the book’s second half, isolating himself in a small town to shoot an experimental movie – was cut with such sharp insight that I finished the book both in awe and knowing that I’d never be able to even scrape close to it.

It’s been well over a decade since I’ve read Americana, but here are two things, possibly close to the start of the book, that I remember very clearly:

One, while at a party, someone points out to David that he has dandruff on his shoulders. Later David walks into the apartment’s empty kitchen, pulls out the tray and spits on the ice cubes, before replacing the tray back into the freezer.

Two, David explaining that his ex-wife, during their marriage, had been self-consciously theatrical, as if being filmed. One day, David returns to their apartment to find her sitting on the living room floor, wearing a sombrero and trying to write a haiku. He thinks: ‘It pained me to learn that she did these things even when alone.’

Most of everything I’ve read ends up fading away. Whole novels have been reduced to a few basic plot details and maybe one or two character’s names. It’s reassuring, in a way, that I’ll always have these two small moments with me; it’s writing I’ll never forget.

Chris Somerville