This page lists the known reviews of Don DeLillo's 1982 novel, The Names.
DeLillo is a writer of growing worth.
But what genuinely recommends DeLillo's novel is the way in which Axton, though he connects with the cult's recognition of the source of language's power, moves beyond the cult's nihilistic vision to a sacramental vision of language, and the extent to which DeLillo's style is equal to his material.
The Names will make many readers (this one included) feel dull and inadequate. I suspect that one could read it most productively with a thorough knowledge of semiotics, and that it will gladden the hearts of many structuralists. To the common reader it may only seem dauntingly factitious.
DeLillo is immediate, intense and, in a word that critics may like too well, accessible. He also creates glorious prose that in its freshness, precision, and eloquence is continuously exciting to read.His newest novel, The Names, his seventh, may revise sharply upward the size of his readership. It stands above and out from any novel I've read in months: exotic, atmospheric, curiously suspenseful, full of characters at once unusual and fully realized.
His second, End Zone, has been a special favorite of demanding and perceptive critics; The Names is a complex, mature, extended continuation of it. Characters, settings and styles are different; the elegance has a higher polish; the sensibility is subtler. But End Zone's admirers will welcome The Names as a further installment of those old conversations and amusements. Languages, words, silence, individuality and collectivity, orders, spaces and spatial relations - they're all back. Glossolalia is back, the black rock, even the Kaaba, newly spelled. Happy days.
By thus breaking up the story line DeLillo has kept The Names from assuming the shape that we conventionally associate with novels of quest or revelation. What he achieves is a deliberate unshapeliness, a sense of fragmentation, menace, and loose ends that seems appropriate enough to our experience of the final, ominous decades of this extraordinary century. What he loses is some of the potential force that a greater concentration of his effects might have produced.
We probably ought to treat The Names precisely as James Axton treats the Parthenon - not be daunted by its complex meanings, but enjoy it for the offering of language it has inspired.
It is true that American fiction is full of people stranded between plotlessness and paranoia, between making no sense of their lives and making too much, and it would be a good defense of Mr. DeLillo to say that he has dramatized this dilemma strongly. But it would only be a defense, and The Names is still a hard book to hold in the mind. I would rather concentrate on Don DeLillo's extraordinary verve and wit and the particular riches - Axton, the Americans abroad, the always looming politics of the late century - to be found between the tidy scheme and the easygoing diffusion of The Names.
DeLillo, in fact, doesn't seem to need cults and spies and nude storytellers any more: Axton could have made his transformation - and might have made a more persuasive one - without the trek across an alien genre. And DeLillo's prose, though too often put in the service of Axton's magisterial ruminations, respons as securely to the fullness of intimate observation and psychology as it once did to the cool disjunctions of surrealism. This may not be DeLillo's farewell to CIA agents, mock-thrillers, and metaphoric vilence; it may be merely a failed attempt to expand and explicate the old formulas. But there's more than a hint here of a Prospero-like valediction here, and more than a hind that fantasy's loss could be realism's gain.
It is difficult to know what much of this is intended to mean - the business trips, the cult, the café conversations - but Mr. DeLillo is a compelling writer, and if he leaves us generally mystified he nevertheless leaves us with a satisfying sense of having almost grasped something strange and wonderful and frightening.
Almost every page of Don DeLillo's seventh novel gives evidence of its author's brilliance and originality. Yet reading it is oddly like the experience of waiting out an unexpected delay in the transit lounge of a foreign airport where one does not speak the language. That group of men shouting and gesticulating in the corner, are they arguing football scores or deciding how to dispose of hostages? One might be afraid if only it weren't so hard to stay awake.
The mediation of television and movies in DeLillo's novels becomes more important than people. Humans are gradually refined out of existence, along with their language, until all they are capable of is babble, glossolalia, meaningless noise. The irony of the theme is that DeLillo is a master of style, creating in his novels intricate and meaningful stories. The Names is his best and most ambitious work to date; easy to read, believe it or not, almost impossible to decipher fully.
The author's main weapon, and his most fomidable defense, is the word in description and dialogue. As Axton finally ascends the Acropolis, a pilgramage he formerly dismissed as touristy, he speaks the author's mind as well as his own: "I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language."
Is an analogy of some kind intended bwtween the cult members (leftover hippies, with a touch of the Manson family) and the international businessmen? Why is the cult so secretive about its name, and what is the name's significance? Why do these shadowy people always turn up just where Axton expects to find them, and why do no policemen seem to be investigating their murders? These questions are raised but, maddeningly, never answered. We never see the cult closely enough to understand it or their doings.
The breakthrough in The Names is that DeLillo's characters finally begin to talk to each other. Part of his books' surreal atmosphere comes from the way people in them address eloquent, oblique monologues vaguely in each other's direction, using bursts of words as a shield. In The Names just as words connect minds to objects, they can connect people to one another - particularly members of couples and families. DeLillo has started to write about relationships - stable ones, the tricky kind - along with careers. He captures the private talk of people who have known each other for years, the intimacy of angry couples: friction for contact's sake.
To describe The Names as self-indulgent is perhaps unfair, but DeLillo allows Axton's quest to follow too many dead-end lanes and to wander too far from the subject about which he is most provocative, that of the rootless and cynical American internationalists.