Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:
From the publication of his first novel, Americana, Don DeLillo has been praised for his imaginative power, for his originality, his wit, his style. With five succeeding novels, among them End Zone and Ratner's Star, his reputation has grown. And now, in his seventh novel--his finest and most ambitious--he plumbs new depths of experience and of feeling.
The time is late 1979, early 1980--the time of the Iranian revolution, of terrorist kidnappings, of "hostile oil" in North Africa and the Gulf. The settings are exotic, sensual, and often brought into high relief by a single telling detail. There is the windswept island where men go fishing with explosive charges, the runway where vultures sit amid the suitcases; there are the Greek villages, the centrues-old cities of the Mideast, the airport terminals erected to "examine souls." The people are expatriates--Americans mostly--who try to conduct business, maintain their families, and just make conversation in worlds where the language is always foreign, the customs elusive, and the air often full of vague menace.
At the center of the book: James Axton, an American, a "risk analyst" for a company that insures multinational corporations against the hazards of political upheaval. A newcomer to the work and to the area, Axton is exhilarated by his connection with large events--until on a visit to his estranged wife and their son, who are living on a Aegean island, he learns of a ritual murder, perhaps one of series of such crimes.
Who are the people in the cult? What is their "program"? Why does he find himself so strangely fascinated--fascinated against his will, beyond his understanding? From his homebase in Athens, Axton begins to follow the trail of the cult and of the elderly American archaeologist who alone has seen and spoken with its members. Slowly, inexorably, he is drawn into a search for clues that will take him to the wild mountains of the southern Peloponnese, to the Armenian quarter of Jersualem, and, finally, to the ancient city of Lahore, as the cult and its secret meaning threaten to overshadow everything else in his life.
The Names, with its profound and resonant vision of our embattled world and time, is a major achievement.