Customer Reviews

Players

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

During my rabid consumption of DeLillo's work two years ago, "Players" was the one bump on the road. It was the only one of his books that I could take or leave. It reads like a dry run for "Mao II," another book that lacks the soul and wit that drive DeLillo's best work, "White Noise," "Libra" and "Underworld" and his most underrated book, "End Zone." "Players" was perfectly fine, but leaves an empty feeling. My purpose isn't to condemn this book, only to urge new DeLillo readers not to start with it.

This is Delillo's first masterpiece.Pammy and Lyle Wynant are archetypal late twentieth century Americans. They are successful,good looking,bored,self-obsessed,and alienated from each other and nearly everyone else. So they play. Their games,which turn ominous and deadly, give both of them a look at the heart of darkness in the American dream.

As usual,Delillo's prose cuts like a knife:

"Pammy had to put down the bag of fruit before she could get the door opened. She remembered what had been bothering her,the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing,though,a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind,she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse. She pushed into the apartment."

This description is both mundane and horrifying; hatred of your life as something as common as that thing on your grocery list you forgot to pick up. The novel has many such passages.

Like WHITE NOISE,MAO II,and UNDERWORLD, PLAYERS portrays the devasted spiritual and emotional landscape we live in and helps us recognize ourselves before it's too late.

Either the print was really large in this book or I caught a second wind at some point over the weekend because I literally finished this book in a few hours. Generally Delillo books take me longer than that, since I have to slow down to make sure I absorb anything. In this case, it didn't seem as crucial. This time out, this early novel depicts a married couple (Pammy and Lyle) who are jaded by this crazy, post-modern world and just kind of float through it, doing whatever they want. Their narratives split off early on, with Lyle getting the more interesting plot of becoming tied up with a terrorist organization after seeing a man shot on the Stock Exchange floor . . . he seems to do it mostly out of boredom or vague interest and what strikes me as funny during it is how he seems to be playing triple agent, informing on the organization while telling the organization that he's talking to the authorities, and nobody seems to care either way. I don't know if it was meant to be funny but I found it hilarious. Meanwhile, Pammy gets relegated to the "B" plot, going up to Maine with a gay couple that she works with and basically exploring the nature of relationships, however Delillo seems to know that nobody really cares about this plot, as he devotes short chapters to it, while Lyle gets comparitively sprawling ones. Lyle seems to be the more compelling character, much like Updike's Rabbit, he gets a lot of mileage out of being a clueless jerk but a consistent and generally well-meaning one, even his dialogue where he sort of narrates himself ("What's going on, the guy said" is a paraphrased example) is used sparingly enough that's quirky, although when he and Pammy do it to each other it seems overtly cute. Otherwise, the scenes between the couple are well done, you get the sense that they do like each other, but it's all buried under the crushing ennui of the age. Delillo's ultimate point seems to be about how soul numbing modern life has become, that people like Pammy and Lyle can just do whatever they want and move through life without consequences because they just don't care (and while they seem oblivious to their own actions sometimes, they don't strike me as sociopaths) . . . Delillo gives us plenty of examples and his separation of the two of them is meant to juxtapose their situations and have us draw deeper meaning from said situations, but either he didn't give us reasons to connect them or I'm just dense. That goes for the whole book, I know there's a point in there somewhere but for the life of me, it's just out of my grasp. So can I recommend it? Sure, Delillo's writing is sharp as ever and generally most pages either have a scene or a line or two worth reading simply for the craft involved in putting the words together. To borrow a cliche, the man could novelize the phone book and at least make it interesting reading. And as I mentioned before, it's short. By the time you start to tire of it, it's over. Wouldn't it be better if everything was like that?

It's interesting to turn to early DeLillo and find that in more than a quarter of a century, the themes that drive his work are more contemporary than ever; as Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 1977, "This elegant, highly finished novel does not shrink from suggesting the complicity of Americans with the terrorists they deplore". The complicity is not direct, even though one of the main characters does become directly enmeshed in a terrorist conspiracy the extent of which he is (and we, the readers, are) not fully cognizant. Rather, the complicity is systemic, terrorism the shadow of the bright waves of electronic capitalism, the anti-thesis, lying only as far away as the reverse side of a thin paper page. In this, as in the sparkling quality of his prose, he resembles Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher-provocateur; both quip and incant their way towards revealing alleged secret truths about the real sources of terror and violence, secrets of systems and alienation. This sort of language I think becomes tiring once you've read more than a few of DeLillo's novels -- he is forever talking about inner meanings, hidden truths, darkly wound secrets, et cetera. It isn't the ideas that are misplaced (contemporary novels are rightfully full of conspiracy), but the language; these are the only passages where DeLillo becomes literal rather than figurative, the only places where it seems DeLillo himself comes out from beneath the narrative guise. And to say he doesn't need to is to credit the complete remainder of the text -- it races, clean and honed, from page to page, reading as quickly as ads flashing past on a subway. And as Players unwinds, it nails modern malaise and restlessness, diagnosing the moral disengagement that hasn't stemmed since it was written, and is caustically funny in a way which no-one else I have read can match. I found myself, on finishing, talking to people in the same obscure one-liners used by his characters (of course, he doesn't do character, really; that is part of the diagnosis). The whole thing is pitch-perfect and prescient; he should be compulsory.

You can read the tea leaves of any DeLillo novel and see shadows of the WTC disaster, but they are more striking in this novel than any other. One of the main characters works for a grief counseling company in the WTC, her husband works on Wall Street and is casually drawn into a terrorist plot.

"Players" is heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and Dostoyevsky's "Demons", but its unmistakably DeLillo. The terrorists in this book are not drawn by religious or political zealotry, they are almost offhand about their deadly work. As he will do later in "White Noise", DeLillo places a disaster in the foreground but finds the real drama in domestic interaction, in characters so caught up in lifestyle that the world around them is dull, unimportant.

In my opinion, "Players" is the transitional book in DeLillo's body of work. It is his first book to touch on his obsessive themes in a serious, sustained manner. However, it does not match the virtuosity of his later works. Not until "The Names" did DeLillo hit his stride, so don't expect as polished a book as those written in the 80s and 90s. But for DeLillo fans who have overlooked this work through the years, "Players" is a gruesome treat.

Of all his earlier novels, *Players* is the one that best anticipates the mature style of DeLillo's later masterworks. All the major themes and preoccupations are here, including foreshadowing of the topics that will become central to novels like *Libra,* *White Noise,* and *Mao II.* This makes *Players* an ideal place to start your discovery of this remarkable writer.

On the surface *Players* is a spare and simple story. Lyle and Pammy, an upwardly mobile New York City couple who've reached an interminable plateau in virtually every aspect of their lives, are bored. But this is no ordinary boredom. They are culturally, existentially, epically, mythologically, terminally bored. They're not sure how they got this way, they aren't even angry about it or with each other. There's no one or anything to really blame. They're still in love with each other, in fact. It's just that everything is so...well, empty somehow, so boring. What's even worse is that together, and separately, they don't know what to do about it. How do you go about *not* being bored in this day and age?

Pammy decides to take a vacation with a co-worker and his lover to Maine. Lyle, in the meantime, remains in Manhattan and becomes involved in a terrorist plot to plant a bomb in the New York Stock Exchange. These separate "vacations" from each other both end in violence and unexpected consequences, and yet, both Pammy and Lyle remain essentially unchanged, essentially still bored. If anything, they begin, especially in Lyle's case, to vanish altogether. For as Lyle becomes a "player" in the world of international terrorism and counter-terrorism he indiscriminately "plays" both sides, or, perhaps more accurately, all three, four, five, ten sides of the game and thereby loses himself in a state of complexity where he and you ((the reader)) begin to wonder if the most harrowing truth of all is that *no one* really understands the game they're playing, who's winning, or even who's side anyone is on.

What elevates *Players,* however, from a thought-provoking thriller to the level of a small masterpiece is the effect of DeLillo's precise and poetic prose--a laser-like instrument of an intellect you can't help to observe with awe as it cuts, exposes, and illuminates even ordinary experience to reveal malignant truths one may have felt or suspected, but never seen or been able to articulate before. Don DeLillo is the rare writer who makes other writers, me included, take up woodworking or suicide in despair. He's that good, *&#@ him!

Delillo reviews the situation of high-powered young careers people who seek fulfillment in alternative forms of lifestyle. This takes the form of terrorism, furtive sex, jet-pack holidaying and general deceit. As with later novels 'White Noise' and 'Libra' the dialogue is charged and comes at you all at once, laden with piercing insight and the irony inherent in our 3 minute culture. All characters talk at once, like in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" amd confusion is added with the resulting sexual relationship between career-girl Pammy and her gay friend Jack. In the meaningless void of city-life, in the sensation-ridden lives of late-20th century automatons, meaning may only be a bi-product of new lifestyles. Change isn't necessarily good or bad, its just different, and the novel's anti-climactic ending heightens the general air of alienation and discontent prevalent in the modern, urban condition. I urge you to read it

I like Delillo's work. It is strong and disturbing. This is no great addition to his ouevre. Even if written by someone else, you still run up against a book w/ uneven quality.

Delillo loves his language here as he does in other books. Languages, those of ideas, suburban life, espionage and other jargons still strike the ear just right. When he deploys these, the effect can be stimulating. We read/listen to dialogue that piques our interest w/out ever laying down in so many words that great silent center where we live our lives.

The first scene...Its relation to the rest of the book is uncertain. Delillo often chooses words with an eye/ear to overall effect. This idea next to that one. They don't cohere as well @ times. This is the problem I had w/ Mao II. (He is a novelist of ideas, but when he loses sight of the narrative for the sake of these juxtapositions, well-you just want to shake him & ask, "Where'd the story go, Don?".) While interesting in the abstract, unless a real connection can be made between events-despite Delillo's contention stated and unstated that disparate events are what make up our lives in contemporary times-sometimes it (the book) seems an amusing mental game he's devised. NOt a story. A game.

Reading him, you think of Orwell's famous language essay of words retaining meaning. As one of his characters might say, "This thing's got levels. Lots of 'em."

Phrase he/she "wondered if (he/she) was too complex" to do whatever is leitmotif that doesn't work. It's supposed to bind the work together thematically, especially one like this one which jumps from idea to idea-but what it does is tire the reader & remind them of the book's broken promises of delivering a cogent AND engaging tale.

Sex scenes read like a vcr repair manual. Language is dry & supposed to reflect the aridness of character's lives, but in the end, it's only white noise of an author of trying to say something & not really saying it. He goes @ length in these scenes as if by sheer effort he will make the reader see what he sees. He doesn't. Read these scenes & try picturing them & you try staying awake. Maybe I've become too complex to enjoy these overworked scenes.

Anyway, this book is definitely not the one to start w/ if you want to read Delillo. Start w/ Libra, White NOise, or End zone.

I must admit that if this had been the only DeLillo novel I had read, now or in 1977 when it first came out, I would not have been enthusiastic. But to read it immediately after his most recent FALLING MAN is fascinating.

It is not merely the uncanny pre-echoes of the attack on the World Trade Center twenty-five years later. There are little things such as somebody saying in the midst of a gathering on a lower Manhattan rooftop: "That plane looks like it's going to hit." There are more fundamental matters such as the reflections of one of the main characters, Pammy, who works in the WTC for an organization called the Grief Management Council: "It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? [...] To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." And then there is the plot, one strand of which may (or may not) concern a terrorist plan to blow up the NYSE -- although the whole affair seems picayune and ill-organized as compared to what actually happened.

At a deeper level, the book is about the disengagement of otherwise successful individuals from the moral implications of their lives in society. The book begins with a brilliant image: a group of passengers in the piano bar in the first-class lounge of an airplane (they had those?), watching a scene of violence on a movie in the front cabin, sipping their cocktails while the pianist improvises an ironic keyboard commentary on the mayhem. There is no specific connection to the book that follows, except in theme, and that becomes all-pervasive, culminating in a similarly anesthetized set-piece at the end. The main characters are Pammy and her husband Lyle, a trader on the NYSE floor. They are well enough off, communicate with each other in bursts of jokey dialogue, and have effective sex. But their world has shrunk to almost nothing; Lyle, for example, spends hours switching TV channels at 30-second intervals, seeking distraction rather than content. Over the course of the book, each gets drawn (separately) into other lives, with serious or potentially serious consequences, but rather than being morally engaged, they remain spiritually with the cocktail sippers in the piano bar. Pages of this book are filled with dialogue so vapid as to be almost surreal; you could pick on these as examples of bad writing, but the vapidity, the verbal channel-flipping, is very much the point.

I now understand why DeLillo had to write FALLING MAN. The World Trade Center represented, in a way, the symbol of many of the attitudes that he dissects in PLAYERS. But if anything could shake people out of their roles as untouched spectators, it was surely this. When the characters in the later book exhibit patterns of minor obsession and larger detachment, I had thought that it was merely their protective reaction to an all-encompassing horror. After reading PLAYERS, I now see it more poignantly, as teetering on the balance beam between true responsibility and connection on the one hand, and, on the other, the state of anomie that DeLillo clearly finds endemic to modern life.

I like Delillo's work. It is strong and disturbing. This is no great addition to his ouevre. Even if written by someone else, you still run up against a book w/ uneven quality.

Delillo loves his language here as he does in other books. Languages, those of ideas, suburban life, espionage and other jargons still strike the ear just right. When he deploys these, the effect can be stimulating. We read/listen to dialogue that piques our interest w/out ever laying down in so many words that great silent center where we live our lives.

The first scene...Its relation to the rest of the book is uncertain. Delillo often chooses words with an eye/ear to overall effect. This idea next to that one. They don't cohere as well @ times. This is the problem I had w/ Mao II. (He is a novelist of ideas, but when he loses sight of the narrative for the sake of these juxtapositions, well-you just want to shake him & ask, "Where'd the story go, Don?".) While interesting in the abstract, unless a real connection can be made between events-despite Delillo's contention stated and unstated that disparate events are what make up our lives in contemporary times-sometimes it (the book) seems an amusing mental game he's devised. NOt a story. A game.

Reading him, you think of Orwell's famous language essay of words retaining meaning. As one of his characters might say, "This thing's got levels. Lots of 'em."

Phrase he/she "wondered if (he/she) was too complex" to do whatever is leitmotif that doesn't work. It's supposed to bind the work together thematically, especially one like this one which jumps from idea to idea-but what it does is tire the reader & remind them of the book's broken promises of delivering a cogent AND engaging tale.

Sex scenes read like a vcr repair manual. Language is dry & supposed to reflect the aridness of character's lives, but in the end, it's only white noise of an author of trying to say something & not really saying it. He goes @ length in these scenes as if by sheer effort he will make the reader see what he sees. He doesn't. Read these scenes & try picturing them & you try staying awake. Maybe I've become too complex to enjoy these overworked scenes.

Anyway, this book is definitely not the one to start w/ if you want to read Delillo. Start w/ Libra, White NOise, or End zone.