The novel is constructed under the amazed and fascinated gaze of the reader, who sees the narrator gradually deconstructing his life as well as his own identity: from New York to the Navajo desert, the desert of origins, from his daily life punctuated by downtime, multiple liaisons and "ego-moments" to an existence increasingly outside of normalized, conventional, collective time; from the quest for success, power, and seduction to the inner narrative of one's own story and to the creative act.
On the road to self-knowledge (the road movie he is filming is part of it), David Bell thus metamorphoses in America, merges with the most primitive fantasies of American society, and becomes himself the continent there unexplored.
Americana never ceases to remind us of the eternal struggle of man against the passage of time, the fear and fascination that the idea of death and destruction exert on individuals, and the hypocrisy of a society that promises happiness in 20-second commercials and at the same time, drops napalm on Vietnamese civilians (the action takes place in the early 1970s, amid the Vietnam War).
The poetic power that emanates from each sentence of this book, its incessant digressions, but which nevertheless always remain at the border of realism as cerebral and controlled as sometimes "dreamlike" and almost unreal, inscribe, in my opinion, Americana in the lineage of the great novels of Julio Cortazar or Roberto Bolaño (the latter moreover having one of his characters in "The Savage Detectives" say that Don Delillo was "the greatest living writer of our time").

Me aburrí mucho con este libro y odié a David Bell, el protagonista. Tuvo unos momentos de iluminación que me interesaron, pero no duraron muchas páginas.

"[The television commercial] moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled."

I have reached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness.

“Interesting,” I said.
“What do you think it means?”
“Very interesting.”
“Thanks a lot.”

Began really well but then descended into utter tedium. Absolute shite….

DeLillo had his shit down to a science right from the beginning.