When I enter a bookstore, and pick up a book that might interest me, I always ignore the blurb on the inside flap. Usually, it offers only boring plot summary lanced with buzzwords, plus reviews of previous books by the same author, but rarely reviews of this one.
Instead, I just read the first page. By this standard, Don DeLillo’s The Names is a winner.
Have you ever felt a certain dread when you approach a great historic site – that sense that whatever you do, you cannot possibly experience this site in a way that will retain its real power in your memory? This, perhaps, is why many of us take pictures. For these reasons, DeLillo’s opening went straight to my heart. I have been to Athens, and I know exactly what he means, but could never have described it so well:
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit.
Then there was the question of its renown. I saw myself climbing the rough streets of the Plaka, past the discos, the handbag shops, the rows of bamboo chairs. Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy, mingling in one unbroken line up to the monumental gateway.
What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.
This brilliant bit of travel writing sets the stage for a complex novel that jumps around the Middle East and India, but always comes home to Greece. If you love Greece – as a landscape, a culture, or a sacred site – you will at least be drawn into this book. If you know Greece as the Everest of tourism – perhaps the hardest destination in the world to experience with any authenticity – you will certainly find in this opening, and the pages that follow, a fellow-feeling with the narrator that will carry you deep into the book.
But this is still an earlyish book. Surely a later DeLillo would have edited the above passage to make it even more taut, pulling out meaningless, overused phrases like "the question of" in the third paragraph. The second sentence of the first paragraph, so well amplified later, could also go. Like many writers, DeLillo trends toward a more taut, spare expression in his later work. Even the colossal Underworld is more economically crafted than this.
DeLillo’s favorite literary disguise, the thriller genre, still cloaks his intentions here. (Only the 1985 breakthrough White Noise would throw off this cloak entirely). Of course, many of DeLillo’s greatest books invoke a genre’s conventions only to violate them. Here, though, the genre’s requirements can cloak his brilliance. DeLillo feels compelled to spin out a convoluted plot laced with seemingly portentious but – in the end – somewhat gratuitous mysteries.
The protagonist, James Axton, is a somewhat boorish but not unlikable man, recently separated from a wife he still loves. Based in Greece, he travels the Mideast region collecting information for a company that provides big corporations with "political insurance." This very expensive product will pay ransoms for kidnapped executives, make companies whole for facilities destroyed by terrorism, and in an extreme case, even bail out a company if it loses its assets due to a change of regime. (The Shah of Iran has just fallen, hugely exposing Axton’s employer. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he reminds us repeatedly, is yet to come. The hostages have not yet been taken. So we are in the early Carter years, probably 1978.)
The employer, though, is a distant thing, never named. It has a "parent" with diversified holdings that help cover crises such as Iran. Like many distant authorities, this one seems ethereal, light. Axton is content to do its bidding without much question. In one comic passage, a conversation with his boss Rowser, DeLillo seems to be setting up a bookful of adventures that will follow from Axton’s line of work:
"Lloyd’s wants to declare the Gulf a war zone." [Rowser] said. "That could double the tanker premium."
"How do you know?"
"I got some playback from a Kuwaiti defense meeting. They’re figuring a worst-case scenario. Lloyd’s is. Tanker hulks lining the strait. The robed ones are muttering in their beards. Even the parent is nervous about the prospect. It impacts on almost everything they’re involved in."
"A war zone."
"It has a ring, doesn’t it."
This passage could be from any of zillions of lesser writers whose books festoon our airports. Perhaps the only mark of DeLillo’s dry wit (and higher purposes) comes through in matters so subtle as the lack of a question mark on the last line.
Strategically misled by this passage and others like it, we gradually find that this book is about something else entirely. The plot revolves around James’s relationship with his thinly separated wife and their son, who live on an Aegean island, and through them with two deeply peculiar men. Owen Brademas, the moody, intellectual archaeologist leading the dig where James’s soon-to-be-ex-wife works, and Frank Volterra, a fallen avant-garde filmmaker. Together, these three men work their way into an obsession about a peculiar cult, one that murders old men and women when they wander into a location whose initials match those of their own names.
Did I give away too much plot? Not really. All the above is revealed early on. The core mystery is not what this cult is doing, or even why, but why Axton, Brademas, and Volterra have become so obsessed with it. The novel takes each man on his own spiraling path toward the heart of the cult, toward understanding its inverted but internally consistent "logic."
It all comes together in the end, as much as the logic of madness ever does. More interesting than the plot, though, is the modulation between the mysteries evoked by the cult and the life of Axton’s exploded family – his attempt to maintain some relationship with his ambitious wife and his wildly precocious son, who by age 9 has invented his own language and is already at work on his first novel (written, fortunately, not in his own language, but not quite in English either). This latter plotline, which foreshadows the imminent White Noise a bit, gives this novel most of its moments of humor, and also its heart.
NOTE: This review was written in August 2001, and posted under "Suggest Products" because this book was missing from the database. Now that the book is listed, I am happy to repost it properly.
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