The Names

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." --John Milton One star for each of Pages 226, 227, 228, 229 and 230. Especially page 230, Mr. DeLillo. You took us there, sir. The place where embodied love can start; up against that wall, crushing all denial.

Though it seems to go against popular opinion, this is my favorite of all of Delillo's books. The language (and the meta-obsession with language) rings most true here. All choices seem precise, and well combined: from place choices, language choices, historical evidences. Maybe I'm most taken by this novel because of its self-location among mythologies, but it definitely works. Delillo has a tendency to wax poetic/philosophical, which can seem heavy-handed in other works (The Players, The Body Artist), but flow perfectly here with the landscape of the novel. This is one novel I read repetedly, and I always find it lyrical and profound. On par with the best of his works -- White Noise & Underworld -- and reminiscent of John Fowles The Magus. Really, a tremendous novel.

Delillo would get better, but those later novels prove that these early novels weren't some kind of weird writing fluke, while the novels from this period prove that he didn't exactly come out of nowhere. All of the classic elements of Delillo are already in place, the razor sharp prose that forms intricate and effortless rhythms where you think the words were always supposed to fall together that way, while the dialogue snaps back and forth like a live wire, even when the characters are talking languidly, and the characters themselves, both sharply defined and vaguely drawn, studies in contrasts. The plot here has something to do with language and a cult that is killing people for reasons that might have to do with language, while "risk analyist" James Axton ponders being separated from his wife and what all this travelling really means. What does it mean? It means the reader get a very meditative novel, carried along mostly by shifting from character study to character study, from observation to observation. For the most part it's a joy just watching everyone interact, the cult plot for the most part never becomes more than secondary and in fact most of the plot is secondary, you get more of a sense that you're peeking in on the lives of real (and very flawed) people. If Delillo wasn't such a master at crafting prose then all of this would come across as highly boring but he can make the descriptions of even the most static scenes and the most mundane thoughts crackle with a strange kind of energy, where behind the flat events sparks a vital sort of life. Probably more experienced than actually read, and not something for people who are expecting an exotic suspense thriller along the lines of what's currently in the movies (though it is exotic and you do get a good feel for the countries that are visited) it's for those who admire charactization and insightful prose over deft plotting . . . Delillo would sharpen all of these traits even further later on but if you want to see where it all came from and how it all started, this novel is one of the places to begin to look.

Thinking back over all the DeLillo I have read since the 1970s, I think THE NAMES is his best. I don't recall a meditation on language being enacted so deeply and compactly anywhere else. The book is one of those rare works which bears reading over and over and over again. It becomes incantatory after a while, which I think might please DeLillo.

The best of DeLillo, perhaps, if you find the later novels (White Noise through Mao II) to be a little too writ large, a bit lacking in humor. The Names includes side-splitting humor in its dialogue and in it depiction of character. This reader became lost and feeling at sea in the bookŒs ob- session with language and with middle-eastern cultures, but always the sheer poetry and musical beauty of the prose kept me afloat. What a voice. What expanses of knowledge are touched on and explored; what a senuous and ingenious work!