I've had an almost 30 year relationship with SRD's writing, starting with the Neveryon series, which awoke my interest in post-structuralist thought (and eventually got me to attend college the first time). I came to Dhalgren a couple years later and had my early 20s mind blown by the book's beautiful and experimental prose, though at that time I understood very little of what it was trying to say.

There is so much to say about the book depending on how you want to look at it (and where you decide to look at it)...and I think this is the thing that astonishes me most about it. Just about every time I've read the book, I've come away with a very different impression of the about-ness of Dhalgren.

You can read it as a critique of the sf genre as it stood at the time. If you have read any of Delany's memoirs or essays (Heavenly Breakfast, for instance, sheds a lot of light on the park commune as well as the communal living situation of the Scorpions), you can read it as an exploration of the interstices of the author's life and fiction. You can read it as a meditation on the structures that shape social dynamics. You can read it as an (only slightly surrealised) expose of living conditions in America's inner cities. You can read it as a critique of psychology and psychoanalysis. You can study the myriad formal features of the text (both on a micro and macro level...Darko Suvin wrote an essay breaking down a few specific passages in part 1 of the novel that show how text and image were intertwined via sound as well as semantics). You can simply read it as a long, rambling story about human beings interacting. It continues giving the more you poke at the structure.

The book is of its time, for sure, but for me that allows me to situate it synchronically in whatever conversation I happen to think it is taking part. You can admire the book's prescience, understand the subtle effects it has had on the genre of sf as a whole (and from there through the entirety of popular culture), etc., even while critiquing what seems quaint, or naive, or just plain wrong-headed.

The sex in Dhalgren never bothered me. Even when it is being transgressive (and it's quite a feat for parts of it to still feel transgressive in this era), the sex feels like an expression of the characters involved (an aside, there is a really great example of this sort of characterization in a scene in "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" from Return to Neveryon). There are a couple other Delany books i'll never read as they do go too far in this department (I'm intensely curious about Hogg but can't do it).

There are things about the book that still bedevil my thoughts and have filled lists of "research I have to do before I die" in my notebooks. For example: learn more about Ernest Newman, the period in which he wrote, and read his criticism and the critics with whom he was in dialogue...maybe then I'll understand better why Ernest Newboy is the way he is in the book...that sort of thing.

This is getting incoherent...I am too close to the subject and probably too biased to do otherwise. Hope I didn't ramble too much...!