Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:
With each new novel, Don DeLillo's stature--and talent--continue to grow. A stylist of incandescent energy, and inspired mimic, a penetrating observer of our private anxieties, his virtuosity seems limitless. And now he returns to one of the dominant themes of his four previous books. In Players he confronts that clandestine mentality--the compulsive gamesmanship, the obsessively disguised intentions, the irresistible urge to conspire--which plagues our private as well as our public lives.
We begin with the Wynants, Pammy and Lyle, a bright, attractive, successful, contemporary young couple. But for all their good fortune, something is terribly wrong. He spends his evenings watching television, switching channels incessantly. She takes tapdancing lessons and worries about the Mister Softee truck that stops on their street every night. When they talk, it's mostly chatter, bored and hostile ("What'd you get me for Valentine's Day?" "A vasectomy"); sometimes it's just noises. When they make love, it's mostly a matter of "service," "satisfaction," and "interaction." Both of them worry that they've become too complex to enjoy, to feel, to experience things directly.
Then it happens: A man is killed--by terrorists--on the floor of the Stock Exchange where Lyle is a broker. And suddenly Pammy and Lyle are precipitated out of their familiar banalities into new relationships, into new worlds.... Lyle, attracted to the nighttime thrill of a double life, connects with the terrorist themselves, plunging into their febrile intrigues, their deceptions and "disinformation"; Pammy, bored with her job, with New York, with everything ("All I want's a new head," she says), and angry at Lyle's unexplained absences, flies off to Maine with a pair of homosexual lovers who have been the Wynants' friends. Giving up their uneasy, random lives, Pammy and Lyle have joined the "players." The consequences are shattering for them both.
Players is beautiflly shaped, dazzlingly achieved--a luminous book of extraordinary power and resonance.