A novel by Don DeLillo
Published by Knopf, 1977, 212 pages. Jacket painting by Cecile
Gray Bazelon, jacket design by Lidia Ferrara.
Paperback issued by Ballantine, 1978 (cover
image), and later by Vintage (cover
image). Here's the 1991 British
paperback.
No dedication.
What it's about:
A Wall Street couple run off with terrorists.
Here's the original dust jacket
copy.
First lines:
"Someone says: 'Motels. I like motels. I wish I owned a chain,
worldwide. I'd like to go from one to another to another, There's
something self-realizing about that.'"
What it's really about:
From the LeClair interview: "The original idea for Players
was based on what could be called the intimacy of language. What
people who live together really sound like. Pammy and Lyle were
to address each other in the private language they'd constructed
over years of living together. Unfinished sentences, childlike
babbling, animal noises, foreign accents, ethnic dialicts, mimicry,
all of that. It's as though language is something we wear. The
more we know someone, the easier it is to undress, to become childlike.
But the idea got sidetracked, and only fragments survive in the
finished book."
Other tidbits:
The first section of the book is titled "The Movie"
and is set in an airplane bar, where passengers are drinking and
a film is being shown with piano accompaniment. The film shows
a group of golfers being murdered by terrorists, matching in many
ways the escapade described in DeLillo's 1970 story "The
Uniforms".