Customer Reviews

The Names

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First, let me ask you...how many languages do you speak? That question will take on a whole new meaning once you've read this book. The story (and there *is* one) centers around a group of American and British expatriates living and working in Greece (where DeLillo lived for a while before writing this novel). It was the last of his early novels...meaning the next one was WHITE NOISE, at which point DeLillo started to become famous. Yet, THE NAMES still remains one of my favorites. Yes, it was followed by three truly *excellent* novels (WHITE NOISE, LIBRA, and MAO II), and (after several years) by an undisputedly GREAT novel (UNDERWORLD). But, here we have DeLillo still paying his dues...and paying them remarkably well, too. In this one, he finally brought together the various disparate themes of his earlier works, and he solidified his "outsider in society" motif. It was the first of DeLillo's novels I read, and it made me an instant devotee.

So...how many languages do you speak? These expatriates I mentioned come in contact with a bizarre language cult which is responsible for a series of ritual murders in the area. Our "hero" is James Axton, a "risk analyst" who isn't exactly sure himself just who he's working for (i.e., business insurance...or CIA?). In fact, he's pretty much detached from most things in his life...his ex-marriage, his friends, Greece itself, the cult (when he finally meets them)...you name it. The Outsider. Wishing he could be part of something...never able to get past the *analysis* of risk. His inaction leads to serious consequences.

As always, DeLillo's intense use of language ultimately leads to something nonverbal. It's interesting to me that he seems to have most successfully achieved this in THE NAMES, which so persistently circles around issues related to language. DeLillo has said that he writes his works one sentence at a time, paying as much attention to the nonverbal elements as to the verbal. He hears the rhythm of the words, the prosody of sound, and he studies the shapes of the words on the page. If something's not right, he says, he'll change a word...even if it means changing the meaning of the sentence. Thus, language becomes the driving force of the story. Thus, DeLillo says, writing becomes a religious experience. If you don't know what he means by this, maybe THE NAMES will give you a clue. It's contemporary American writing at its best!

And, by the way...how many languages do you speak? And where are you from? Are they killing Americans there?

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.

I had never read DeLillo before and a friend suggested that if I never read anyone else again, I should read something that Don DeLillo had written. Although The Names was not his first suggestion, the title intrigued me (yes, I judged the book by its cover) and off I went.

The Names is a book with little plot, but what it lacks in any consistant action it more than makes up in DeLillo's absolutely superb prose and insight. There are many books that I have read where the author offers a thought or an idea that rings quite familiar in my life. But this book continually presents perspectives that I had never before considered or pondered. DeLillo's ideas are fresh and his expression is invigorating. I eagerly await the experience of reading his other work.

Acquaint yourself with this author. You'll make no mistake in doing so.

There are, I suppose, two reasons we keep turning the pages: the plot and the prose. The most commercially popular authors tend to focus on the former, the critically acclaimed on the latter. It's a joy to find a book in which the two are successfully combined. In my view, The Names - my first Delillo book - comes close but never quite makes it. Certainly the prose is magnificent, and Delillo is a master of creating an atmosphere. And certainly the milieu is intriguing: here is the Middle East in one of its more tumultuous periods, Greece both old and new, a world of risk and uncertainty. The characters are less interesting, having that quality of being something off which ideas are bounced rather than living beings round whom the story twists. And the plot? Well, the plot, in as much as you can say there is a single plot, is intriguing too, but the reader is always at one remove. We are not involved in the deciphering of the cult of The Names; we are involved in James Axton's experience of that deciphering. The distinction is crucial and will dictate your enjoyment of the book: do you prefer the journey or the arrival? Those who read for love of language will be in heaven. But I ultimately found myself reading from curiosity rather than absorption. I couldn't help wondering what Umberto Eco, say, would have done with the same ideas.

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.

DeLillo surely kept a journal while living in Athens and visiting various other places in the Middle East and India. He noted scenes, described the climate and vegetation, philosophized on the locals then published his journal as a novel after he added a "plot" about a cult that murderers people for the completely uninteresting reason that their initials match the initials of the place name in which they are murdered. DeLillo also added the equally uninteresting denouement in which it is discovered that the narrator, who has been described as a risk analyst working for an insurance firm, is actually working for the CIA. The front cover tells us that Michael Wood found this book, "brilliant, powerful, haunting." It is none of these things. It is tedious and amateurish. The best that the reader could hope to encounter in this overlong ramble is illustrated in the opening paragraph:

"For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. They weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It's what we've rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit."

A promising beginning that does not pan out. Instead, a number of notebook entries similar in philosophical tone are trotted out and then abandoned for something else. Most of the novel involves boring reenactments of dinner conversations among businessmen and their wives who all share the narrator's tone, style, and tendency to philosophize. It's as if DeLillo was too embarrassed to give one character all the weighty thoughts and so distributed them around the table as in a card game. When he gives the weighty dialogue to his first-person narrator, this is typical of the way it's handled. This exchange occurs a few pages after the above quote about the Acropolis.

"Climb the hill, James. The thing is right there. It looms. It's close enough to knock you sideways."

"That's just it," I said. "That's the point."

"What do you mean?" Ann said.

"It looms. It's too powerfully there. It almost forces us to ignore it. Or at least to resist it. We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter."

"I didn't know you were so deep," she said.

DeLillo inserts the "I didn't know you were so deep" to beat would-be critics of the clumsy dialogue to the punch. No one says things like this. People think such things; they write such things in journals, but they don't say them (unless they're pretentious bores). The "What do you mean" is also unforgivable as a device to elicit a philosophical remark.

Sure, the book is probably better than commercial fiction. But that's not its genre and there is a higher standard against which it must be compared. DeLillo is usually regarded as a literary figure. In general, I did not find his technique artful, interesting, or well-considered. It is true that he has more than a few nice paragraphs and does a good job characterizing the narrator's son, but most of this novel is not worth the effort of turning the pages.

[...]

Favorite Delillo themes such as cultural dislocation and the thrill of
senseless violence are eerily embodied in a book about a divorced man
living the expatriate life who becomes obsessed with a series
of serial killings. Delillo's flair for intelligent, witty dialogue
is in full display, while he presses all the buttons the ideal
Delillo reader----himself, and I use the pronoun deliberately,
dislocated and disturbed/obsessed with senseless violence,
just like the author---to ritualistic effect. A haunting book,
especially for this expatriate

Though White Noise--the academic novel meets family sitcom meets apocalyptic event--is more directly humorous and linearly plotted and Mao II--the author and the terrorist--has more immediate relevance to September 11 and Underworld--individuals in the shadow of the Cold War--operates on a grander scale, The Names may be the most successful DeLillo novel. As with the other books I've listed, don't approach The Names with the hopes that it will reach a clean resolution. But, even if somewhat infuriating, the experience will nonetheless be rewarding. DeLillo's skill at crafting sentences that stay with you, that make you laugh, that strike you as impossibly true has never been greater than in The Names. The book's "failure" may be that the individual sentences, the exchanges between the various couples are more satisfying, certainly less flat than the larger plot--the cult with their patterns. But the latter provides an element of suspense, of genuine scariness that gives the former a great immediacy. This book will stay with you if you give it a chance.

Don De Lillo's work is characterized by its obsessive prose, beautiful to the point of brilliance...yet neurotic in detail and obsessive repitition of themes...The Names is a pinnacle of sorts in this neurotic obsessive dance.

Somewhere, it's called a 'thriller'. Wouldn't go that far. thriller, not in the usual sense at all, but yes, there is a mystery. Except that the mystery is less important than the fascinating characters that the narrator occurs, the bizarre conversations he has with him, his own wierd sense of observation of local colour and details--most of th ebook is set in Greece and thereaboutss..and the prose that proceeds at snail's pace but manages to tell you everything important, in emotional sense.

It's a great book, but not for everyone. Read it at random pages see if you can enjoy the brilliance of De Lillo's prose and writing...some passages are exquisite. If you want stronger plot and coherent story go for his underworld then, but if you want a beautifully written book you can't do much worse than Names.

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.