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The Names
339 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1989
About the author
Don DeLillo
91 books6,807 followersDonald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
April 17, 2020
OVERWHELMINGLY BEAUTIFUL
August 14, 2020
I understand how this is probably an essential step en route to Libra and Underworld but it's overlong and diffuse, a failed marriage novel among Americans in Athens that edges into a thriller (an obscure murder in the hills!), that devolves into some sort of shadowy CIA conspiracy, the narrator falling apart in a way along with his marriage and the novel itself, subsumed by interest in a language-obsessed death cult whose victims' initials match the initials of the crime's location, hippie-ish devouts who speak Aramaic and Sanskrit, a cult with the same name as the novel albeit in Greek, suggestive of the ninety-names of God, among other shadowy obscure diffuse associations of meaning, like the really poorly characterized characters who all speak the same sans dialogue tags so you have no idea most of the time who's speaking, although the dialogue isn't as honed and fun as in Players, for example. Generally, it seems like DeLillo with this one is trying to be more serious, take on international politics, heavy shit like the Middle East, Pakistan, death cults, the CIA, extending his ambition from Running Dog, his rushed, kinda crappy thriller attempt that retained some of the humor and zaniness of his earlier novels. These thrillers aren't in any way thrilling but they're serviceable as transitions to Libra and Underworld when DeLillo finds the right focus with the JFK conspiracies and hones his diffusion techniques (Underworld's mushroom cloud structure). This has its moments -- the writing really clarifies and is charged as the narrator attempts to seduce an American woman and then essentially forces himself on her; there are some solid parts relating the breakup of the narrator's marriage too -- but it also SWITCHES POV on page 276 (of 340), something that really almost had me quitting the novel, especially as the third-person story about Owen seemed overburdened by description of rural India and related vocabulary. Also, I felt like this one suffered from excessive religiosity, never really DD's strong suit. The language, too, wasn't as honed as in Americana or Ratner's Star or even Players. More "worked" than Running Dog but inconsistently individuated -- that is, when he's on, every single sentence is absolutely DeLillo-ean. The percentage of such sentences/passages in this is higher but at times the language felt more rushed, somewhat ironic in a novel so much about language itself. Anyway, glad I read it but also very glad it's over.
January 13, 2016
A fairly impressive bait & switch, insofar as it begins as though it were domestic meditation (e.g., “What she and I needed was a way to be together without feeling there were issues we had to confront, the bloody leftovers of eleven years. We weren’t the kind of people to have haggard dialogues on marriage” (20)), but then develops through a weird set of cultic murders (“The alphabet itself. They were interested in letters, written symbols” (30)) into an espionage thriller of sorts.
Very much committed: “the politics of occupation, the politics of dispersal, the politics of resettlement, the politics of military bases” (57). Notes smartly that “it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place” (58).
Neo-colonialism as
Narrator does risk assessments for insurance coverages sold to multinational corporations against coups d’etat, war, and so on. Dude’s estranged spouse thinks that “there should be something higher than the corporation” (12) (dude responds, “There’s the orgasm”). She distrusts “the idea of investing,” “something secret and guilty” about it: “the wrong use of the future” (id.). He does “policy updates” on other states, “the political economic situation of the country in question,” under a “complex grading system. Prison statistics weighed against number of foreign workers,” attention to unemployment, military salaries, and so on (33). Objective is find likelihood of “collapse, overthrow, nationalization? Maybe a balance of payments problem, maybe bodies hurled into ditches. Whatever endangers an investment” (34). When ransom policies are marketed, “secrecy was important. If a terrorist group knew that a certain corporation insured its executives against kidnap and ransom, they’d clearly want to consider an action” (46), which is an oddity insofar as the fact of insurance typically does not make a true tort more likely. Novel is interested however in the “cost-effectiveness of terror” (id.). (Someone else “now worked on a consulting basis, advising mainly on fire safety, something of a drop in status and income, considering the living to be made in terror” (40).)
Narrator draws up a list of what he alleges his wife to hold as grievances against him, the “27 Depravities” (16-17), including such items as “Self-satisfied,” “You think being a husband and father is a form of Hitlerism,” “Politically neuter,” and “reluctant adulterer.” Text is very much about his relation to his wife, and includes many cool observations: “My mouth at the rim of her ear, all love’s words unvoiced. This silence is a witness to broader loyalties” (27). Dude knows his estranged wife will look at him as he stares at her: “This knowing was contained in the structure of my own seeing” (29). Marriage as bricolage, “something we make from available materials” (39).
Dude regards wife and son as “my place,” as “There was nothing to come back to if I failed, no place in particular I belonged” (49). Marital estrangement marked out as how “I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms” (69)—“feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers” (71). “We were full of ideas, having learned to interpret the failed marriage as an occasion for enterprise and personal daring” (83). Such as: “I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands’ way of life These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love” (194). On the other hand, novel does contemplate “a few seconds of pure pleasure. A platonic orgasm” (216), which is kickass.
By contrast, one couple has “entertaining arguments,” “they don’t waver from an even tone,” and have “been arguing since I’ve known them” (74). Narrator and his wife are rather “full of pettiness and spite, the domestic forms of assault, the agreed-upon reductions,” with the objective “to reduce each other and everything else” (122). Narrator is ultimately the “ass of the universe” (124).
Vietnam was “our favorite war”: “We were both against it but she insisted on being more against it than I was. It got to be a constant running battle. We used to have terrific arguments” (184). That said, “the hands and eyes as the truth-tellers of love, the things that redeem what we say” (203), which is kinda bizarre theological (cf. Dante regarding how the visual is the warrant of the rhetorical?).
Operative protocol of reading, as referenced in the internal section headers as well as the content of the bizarre epilogue: “[narrator's son is] writing a prairie epic, not a sea epic” (14). Wtf? It gets a bit too self-reflexive metafictional when dude notes that how his son will use as a “detail in his novel” how “A man standing near of the edge of the quay lifts his cane to waggle a warning at some children playing nearby” (18).
Further protocol of reading:
Spectres of Pynchon’s V: “To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. (43).
Something bizarre going on with archaeology. “Nobody just digs” (74). Instead, “This dig was designed partly as a field school” (73), indicative that archaeology itself is disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense.
“Adulterous sex as a function of geography,” wherein “you want to keep something for yourself that isn’t a tribal mask or figurine” (161). The same geography, however, also houses a “particular brooding woe”: “It hovers everywhere, war memory, a heaviness and death. Frankish castles, Turkish fortresses, ruined medieval towns” (181).
Dude “perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things. Being alone has components. I felt I was being put together out of these nameless things” (162).
Lotsa concern for cinema here, such as how “the desert was a frame” (198).
Recommended for those who respect other cultures by knowing the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts, those who want to preserve surprise in an opaque medium, and persons who enjoy one cigarette out of a thousand and still keep smoking, thinking pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing, and keep smoking to find this moment.
Very much committed: “the politics of occupation, the politics of dispersal, the politics of resettlement, the politics of military bases” (57). Notes smartly that “it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place” (58).
We can say of the Persians that they were enlightened conquerors, at least in this instance. They preserved the language of the subjugated people. This same Elamite language was one of those deciphered by the political agents and interpreters of the East India Company. Is this the scientific face of imperialism? The humane face? (80)."Americans choose strategy over principle every time and yet keep believing in their own innocence” (236). Occupation may be the master figure, such as in this counter-Foucauldian dissymmetry of vision: “Does your boss tell you that power must be blind in both eyes? You don’t see us. This is the final humiliation. The occupiers fail to see the people they control” (237). (“White people established empires. Dark people came sweeping out of Central Asia” (260).)
Neo-colonialism as
It’s about two kinds of discipline, two kinds of fundamentalism. You have Western banks on the one hand trying to demand austerity from a country like Turkey, a country like Zaire. Then you have OPEC at the other end preaching to the West about fuel consumption, our piggish habits, our self-indulgence and waste. The Calvinist banks, the Islamic oil producers. We’re talking across each other to the deaf and the blind. (193)Opens memorably with a reluctance to go to the Acropolis: “There are obligations attached to such a visit” (3). What relation, then, of this principle to “What ambiguity is in exalted things. We despise them a little” (id.), aside from the notion in Stallybrass & White that disgust always bears the imprint of desire?
Narrator does risk assessments for insurance coverages sold to multinational corporations against coups d’etat, war, and so on. Dude’s estranged spouse thinks that “there should be something higher than the corporation” (12) (dude responds, “There’s the orgasm”). She distrusts “the idea of investing,” “something secret and guilty” about it: “the wrong use of the future” (id.). He does “policy updates” on other states, “the political economic situation of the country in question,” under a “complex grading system. Prison statistics weighed against number of foreign workers,” attention to unemployment, military salaries, and so on (33). Objective is find likelihood of “collapse, overthrow, nationalization? Maybe a balance of payments problem, maybe bodies hurled into ditches. Whatever endangers an investment” (34). When ransom policies are marketed, “secrecy was important. If a terrorist group knew that a certain corporation insured its executives against kidnap and ransom, they’d clearly want to consider an action” (46), which is an oddity insofar as the fact of insurance typically does not make a true tort more likely. Novel is interested however in the “cost-effectiveness of terror” (id.). (Someone else “now worked on a consulting basis, advising mainly on fire safety, something of a drop in status and income, considering the living to be made in terror” (40).)
Narrator draws up a list of what he alleges his wife to hold as grievances against him, the “27 Depravities” (16-17), including such items as “Self-satisfied,” “You think being a husband and father is a form of Hitlerism,” “Politically neuter,” and “reluctant adulterer.” Text is very much about his relation to his wife, and includes many cool observations: “My mouth at the rim of her ear, all love’s words unvoiced. This silence is a witness to broader loyalties” (27). Dude knows his estranged wife will look at him as he stares at her: “This knowing was contained in the structure of my own seeing” (29). Marriage as bricolage, “something we make from available materials” (39).
Dude regards wife and son as “my place,” as “There was nothing to come back to if I failed, no place in particular I belonged” (49). Marital estrangement marked out as how “I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms” (69)—“feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers” (71). “We were full of ideas, having learned to interpret the failed marriage as an occasion for enterprise and personal daring” (83). Such as: “I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands’ way of life These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love” (194). On the other hand, novel does contemplate “a few seconds of pure pleasure. A platonic orgasm” (216), which is kickass.
By contrast, one couple has “entertaining arguments,” “they don’t waver from an even tone,” and have “been arguing since I’ve known them” (74). Narrator and his wife are rather “full of pettiness and spite, the domestic forms of assault, the agreed-upon reductions,” with the objective “to reduce each other and everything else” (122). Narrator is ultimately the “ass of the universe” (124).
Vietnam was “our favorite war”: “We were both against it but she insisted on being more against it than I was. It got to be a constant running battle. We used to have terrific arguments” (184). That said, “the hands and eyes as the truth-tellers of love, the things that redeem what we say” (203), which is kinda bizarre theological (cf. Dante regarding how the visual is the warrant of the rhetorical?).
Operative protocol of reading, as referenced in the internal section headers as well as the content of the bizarre epilogue: “[narrator's son is] writing a prairie epic, not a sea epic” (14). Wtf? It gets a bit too self-reflexive metafictional when dude notes that how his son will use as a “detail in his novel” how “A man standing near of the edge of the quay lifts his cane to waggle a warning at some children playing nearby” (18).
Further protocol of reading:
the whole thing is written in boustrophedon. One line is inscribed left to right, the next line right to left. As the ox turns. As the ox plows. This is what boustrophedon means. The entire code is done this way. It’s easier to read than the system we use. You go across a line and then your eye just drops to the next line instead of darting way across the page. Might take some getting used to. (23)Not sure what the trigger will be for deployment of this conceit, though the in-setting item sub judice concerns “criminal offenses, land rights and other things.” However: “There was a cosmology here, a rich structure of some kind, a theorem of particle physics. Reverse and forward were interchangeable” (65).
Spectres of Pynchon’s V: “To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. (43).
Something bizarre going on with archaeology. “Nobody just digs” (74). Instead, “This dig was designed partly as a field school” (73), indicative that archaeology itself is disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense.
In the tallgrass prairie what you did was work. All that space. I think we plowed [NB] and swung the pick and the brush scythe to keep from being engulfed in space. It was like living in the sky. (77)The ‘sky’ references are very Griffiny (Modernism and Fascism, yo).
Don’t look at my books. It makes me nervous when people do that. I feel I ought to follow along, pointing out which ones were gifts from fools and misfits. (85)“Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them” (114). Shares the misanthropic fear of Mao II in the “nightmarish force of people in groups” (276).
“Adulterous sex as a function of geography,” wherein “you want to keep something for yourself that isn’t a tribal mask or figurine” (161). The same geography, however, also houses a “particular brooding woe”: “It hovers everywhere, war memory, a heaviness and death. Frankish castles, Turkish fortresses, ruined medieval towns” (181).
Dude “perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things. Being alone has components. I felt I was being put together out of these nameless things” (162).
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s a drowning out of false voices. (118)Some intertextual traffic with Blood Meridian: “It was a staccato laugh, building on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter that we hear once in twenty years” (153).
Lotsa concern for cinema here, such as how “the desert was a frame” (198).
This space, this emptiness is what they have to confront. I’ve always loved American spaces. People at the end of a long lens. Swimming in space. But this situation isn’t American. There’s something traditional and closed-in. (198)Further, it’s an “extreme way of seeing,” “another part of the twentieth-century mind,” the world seen from inside” (200). “If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself” (200), which is kinda cool Kantian language.
Film is not part of the real world. This is why people will sex on film, commit suicide on film, die of some wasting disease on film, commit murder on film. They’re adding to the public dream [cf. Foucault regarding political dreams!]. (203)The novel’s anagnorisis: “Something in our method finds a home in your unconscious mind. A recognition. This curious recognition is not subject to conscious scrutiny […] We have in common that first experience, among others, that experience of recognition, of knowing this program reaches something in us” (208). And the program? “A place where it is possible for men to stop making history. We are inventing a way out” (209), which strikes me as the great anti-hegelian political dream, to step outside of history—or the great Marxist dream, to come to the end of history.
Recommended for those who respect other cultures by knowing the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts, those who want to preserve surprise in an opaque medium, and persons who enjoy one cigarette out of a thousand and still keep smoking, thinking pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing, and keep smoking to find this moment.
November 19, 2025
Listen I liked White Noise a while back but I just don't think it's working out between Mr. DeLillo and me and that is ok
September 22, 2015
DeLillo's writing is so pretentious. He disregards plot in order to create art, which is a noble effort to make but leaves many readers, including me, wanting more. The rape scene was also extremely distasteful and added nothing to the plot, only establishing the main character as a misogynist asshole. Necessary? No. I've heard that White Noise is better, but after reading The Names, I don't want to read any more of DeLillo's work unless academics compel me (which was the case for this one).
August 4, 2013
The Names by Don DeLillo is a fascinating but somewhat fuzzy book. Set primarily in Greece, it tells the story of James Axton, an American who develops risk analyses, those odd-sounding reports used by international investors and insurers. When the book was published in 1982, would readers have suspected that Axton worked for the CIA? It was the first thing I thought of.
But Axton's work is only a part of this intricate story about language, alphabets, secrecy, and cultural identity.
See the rest of my review here
But Axton's work is only a part of this intricate story about language, alphabets, secrecy, and cultural identity.
See the rest of my review here
August 21, 2026
When I'm reading a Don DeLillo novel, I notice things more. In my life. I'm making connections, thinking of motivations abstractly, big picture. I go for walks and the colors on the flowers pop with significance. This is the power of his work. He is a mystery author in the truest sense. Obsessed with the mystery of all things, he circles plot points, characters, knowledge itself, but never touches a center. He makes us aware there is no center to touch. It's somehow immensely satisfying to me.
I get this same feeling from the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Both Antonioni and DeLillo work in landscapes, immense and psychological vistas, and the man is plotted somewhere within its frame, which we find increasingly malleable. This relationship to place takes a prominent stage in The Names, the chapters titled The Island, The Mountain, The Desert, The Prairie. What do these words mean to us, DeLillo asks. He never answers his own questions. Again, I love this shit.
I don't love The Names however. It's a book that made me think a lot, and it's probably a great book, just not compared to other DeLillo works. The Names starts off a more experimental period of DeLillo's career, arguably his most famous, which continues on through his epic Underworld. These books see DeLillo grappling with the confluence of idea and style that doesn't, for me at least, really gel until his slim, late period offerings. What takes DeLillo 350 pages in The Names would be a 200 page book in his late period, and it would be so distilled, nothing superfluous. Is it unfair to think of The Names in such a wide scope, to not allow it to be its own thing without comparison? Maybe, but this is part of how DeLillo makes me think, author as landscape, stunning, ever expanding. Terrifyingly vast.
I get this same feeling from the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Both Antonioni and DeLillo work in landscapes, immense and psychological vistas, and the man is plotted somewhere within its frame, which we find increasingly malleable. This relationship to place takes a prominent stage in The Names, the chapters titled The Island, The Mountain, The Desert, The Prairie. What do these words mean to us, DeLillo asks. He never answers his own questions. Again, I love this shit.
I don't love The Names however. It's a book that made me think a lot, and it's probably a great book, just not compared to other DeLillo works. The Names starts off a more experimental period of DeLillo's career, arguably his most famous, which continues on through his epic Underworld. These books see DeLillo grappling with the confluence of idea and style that doesn't, for me at least, really gel until his slim, late period offerings. What takes DeLillo 350 pages in The Names would be a 200 page book in his late period, and it would be so distilled, nothing superfluous. Is it unfair to think of The Names in such a wide scope, to not allow it to be its own thing without comparison? Maybe, but this is part of how DeLillo makes me think, author as landscape, stunning, ever expanding. Terrifyingly vast.
July 27, 2025
I guess DeLillo got started near the end of an era where you could unquestioningly expect to earn a living as a writer of literary fiction? He quit the advertising business in 1964 and compensated for having no job by living in a somewhat uncharming area of east Midtown Manhattan, yet still going to Fire Island in the summer.
I am thinking particularly about his biography because I believe this novel (his eighth), set among an American expatriate community in Athens circa 1980 has as its background that DeLillo lived there at the time. He was not, from what I can tell, connected with an embassy nor teaching, was he just there because it was still so cheap you could reenact Henry Miller in 1939?
I think of all this because DeLillo, the same age as my father, is firmly within my lifetime (unlike Miller) and having lived with my parents in Finland in 1978, I can say nothing like the events of this book ever happened in my world.
The characters in the story itself are mostly employed: businessmen, spies, diplomats etc. Anyway, the particulars of the plot can be looked up anywhere - just pursuing the "text to self" angle here.
I am thinking particularly about his biography because I believe this novel (his eighth), set among an American expatriate community in Athens circa 1980 has as its background that DeLillo lived there at the time. He was not, from what I can tell, connected with an embassy nor teaching, was he just there because it was still so cheap you could reenact Henry Miller in 1939?
I think of all this because DeLillo, the same age as my father, is firmly within my lifetime (unlike Miller) and having lived with my parents in Finland in 1978, I can say nothing like the events of this book ever happened in my world.
The characters in the story itself are mostly employed: businessmen, spies, diplomats etc. Anyway, the particulars of the plot can be looked up anywhere - just pursuing the "text to self" angle here.
October 22, 2022
The Names was DeLillo's most thematically challenging novel yet. So many ideas flowing around regarding language as a savior and a demon. It is used for salvation and storytelling, but at the same time used for colonization and systematic oppression.
James, the main character, travels through some of the oldest "kingdoms" in the world -- Greece, the Middle East, India, etc. -- and finds the uses of language to call gods and to commit brutal cult murders. Similarly, does he watch his son write a simple novel, see his ex-wife uncover chiseled stones, or himself use language to manipulate. And it even ties into the American empire and how our intelligence agencies still use language to suppress specific national and international populations.
Overall, an incredible work of literature. The end is a bit uneven, which is why it doesn't reach that final star, but that is a minor complaint.
James, the main character, travels through some of the oldest "kingdoms" in the world -- Greece, the Middle East, India, etc. -- and finds the uses of language to call gods and to commit brutal cult murders. Similarly, does he watch his son write a simple novel, see his ex-wife uncover chiseled stones, or himself use language to manipulate. And it even ties into the American empire and how our intelligence agencies still use language to suppress specific national and international populations.
Overall, an incredible work of literature. The end is a bit uneven, which is why it doesn't reach that final star, but that is a minor complaint.
February 6, 2017
I have no idea what I just read. That being said, I read the reviews, I knew this was different from the rest of his work. Not my favourite by a long shot: forgettable almost instantaneously and yet DeLillo writes with such beauty and intellect, one- liners that will haunt you throughout time.
"Long slow empty quiet Sundays. When I was a boy these were the days I hated. Now I look forward to them. Prolonged moments, dead calm. I needed this one day, I'd found, of simply being."
"Long slow empty quiet Sundays. When I was a boy these were the days I hated. Now I look forward to them. Prolonged moments, dead calm. I needed this one day, I'd found, of simply being."
books-i-don-t-quite-seem-to-get
January 7, 2013This goes into my I'm-not-understanding-why-I'm-reading-this shelf.
There are some good books on that shelf, so clearly, Don, it's me, not you... probably....
But that said, it just doesn't feel authentic to me - that's a completely subjective response, to be sure -- so no rating on it --. At any rate, this one makes me appreciate Libra all the more....
There are some good books on that shelf, so clearly, Don, it's me, not you... probably....
But that said, it just doesn't feel authentic to me - that's a completely subjective response, to be sure -- so no rating on it --. At any rate, this one makes me appreciate Libra all the more....
December 3, 2025
This had redeeming moments (really just the beginning and the end) and some beautiful lines that stopped me in my tracks but I unfortunately hated 85% of it lol. I can’t believe this is from the same mind that wrote White Noise? I’ve apparently found the first postmodernist I’m just not that into. I’ll give Underworld a spin one of these days but I think I need a Delillo break.
August 11, 2009
Blech.
September 29, 2016
Totally baffled by this after one reading, but I hope to go back to it again.
October 22, 2020
that was ~awful~. It was like reading a book in French
June 25, 2026
The blurb on my copy of the book stated that The Names concerned an “expatriate’s quest” and “a series of cult murders.” Certainly, such ambiguous descriptors are arguably necessary to establish some immediate allure to a potential reader, but in truth, The Names is seldom concerned with the aforementioned cult, and the expatriate is less on a quest than he is merely existing, letting events and scenery and conversation wash over him, and by extension, the reader.
Predominantly set in Athens, Greece—though also taking notable detours to Middle Eastern countries (like Turkey and Pakistan) and India—The Names centers around James Axton, an American “risk analyst”—global wanderers with a knack for accruing thorough statistics, venturing through foreign countries, assessing frequencies and extents of political unrest and terrorist interference, all so corporations know whether or not it’s safe to setup commercial operations in one place or another.
Circling James is his ex-wife, Kathryn, a wholly devoted excavationist of ancient Greek sites, their 6-year-old son, Tap, an aberrant and immensely intelligent child who is working on a “nonfiction novel,” Owen Brademas, an archaeological director and epigraphist who often dispenses winding muses on language and existence, and a whole host of seedy corporate risk analysts and bankers and potential espionageists.
And on the fringes, barely perceptible, is a cult obsessed with language, a series of indiscriminate murders transpiring across random countries, and the cult’s peculiar bearing and operations garners something akin to respect from James Axton and others around him.
Evidently, this bombardment of narrative setdressing is fairly out there, chock full of eccentricities that any sense of normalcy circles back to being eccentric, which is quite par for the course for a DeLillo novel. However, unlike another novel of his, White Noise—whose tackling of generally grim themes was often juxtaposed with witty absurdism—The Names is consistently self-serious, self-mythologizing, and prioritizes atmosphericity at the cost of plot progression of any sort. Of course, saying a literary fiction novel is plotless is the equivalent of saying a crime thriller novel opens with a murder, but The Names is aggressively plotless, antagonizingly meandering, always keen to venture onto a new narrative thread, but just as keen to sever its growth and suddenly leap onto something new.
Surrounding characters feel like apparitions, abruptly appearing, dispensing dense ruminations on culture and language and what have you, and just as abruptly disappearing. They could or could not come back into the story, it never really feels like it matters. It’s a hazy, pessimistic travelogue stuffed with verbose philosophical diatribes.
And it’s odd, because I feel like everything I’ve described should add up to an absolute catastrophe of a novel, but I found The Names utterly engrossing. It never gives an easy in, it never offers satisfaction via character sympathy or the sensible closing of a narrative thread. Atmospherically, it’s despondent and airy, but that’s contrasted with prose that is so overwhelmingly fierce. I can’t remember the last book I’ve read where I found such enjoyment in how words are strung together, the physical (or mental?) act of traversing from sentence to sentence. There’s some abstract sense of syncopation to the way DeLillo approaches prose, a vague musicality that stimulates the mind in a way I haven’t felt in some time.
This is all in service to, in tribute of, and a loathing in language. The Names discusses and reflects on language as communication, language as preservation, language as barriers of history, language as arbiters of religion, language as secrecy, language as existence. Whether it’s the bustling bazaars in Istanbul or the marble serenity of the Rajsamand Lake in India, language is the unique bond that permeates every surface, drives every character, taints every page. I can’t say I ever pinpointed the predominant through-line in DeLillo’s usage of language in this novel, but perhaps his fascination lies in how language can be expressed right in front of you, yet its meaning can still be elusive. Linguistics constantly budding heads with epistemology, the crippling pit of knowing you can only know so much, and yet the hunger to want to understand everything—every language and its origins and transformations—persists.
I came out of The Names in a wondrous but uncertain daze, awash with merely half-realizations about one plot point and theme or another. There was no release of tension, no gratification in conclusions, only an attempt in trying to make sense of the shattered composite, and a slight reveling in knowing I was never going to be able to do such a thing.
Predominantly set in Athens, Greece—though also taking notable detours to Middle Eastern countries (like Turkey and Pakistan) and India—The Names centers around James Axton, an American “risk analyst”—global wanderers with a knack for accruing thorough statistics, venturing through foreign countries, assessing frequencies and extents of political unrest and terrorist interference, all so corporations know whether or not it’s safe to setup commercial operations in one place or another.
Circling James is his ex-wife, Kathryn, a wholly devoted excavationist of ancient Greek sites, their 6-year-old son, Tap, an aberrant and immensely intelligent child who is working on a “nonfiction novel,” Owen Brademas, an archaeological director and epigraphist who often dispenses winding muses on language and existence, and a whole host of seedy corporate risk analysts and bankers and potential espionageists.
And on the fringes, barely perceptible, is a cult obsessed with language, a series of indiscriminate murders transpiring across random countries, and the cult’s peculiar bearing and operations garners something akin to respect from James Axton and others around him.
Evidently, this bombardment of narrative setdressing is fairly out there, chock full of eccentricities that any sense of normalcy circles back to being eccentric, which is quite par for the course for a DeLillo novel. However, unlike another novel of his, White Noise—whose tackling of generally grim themes was often juxtaposed with witty absurdism—The Names is consistently self-serious, self-mythologizing, and prioritizes atmosphericity at the cost of plot progression of any sort. Of course, saying a literary fiction novel is plotless is the equivalent of saying a crime thriller novel opens with a murder, but The Names is aggressively plotless, antagonizingly meandering, always keen to venture onto a new narrative thread, but just as keen to sever its growth and suddenly leap onto something new.
Surrounding characters feel like apparitions, abruptly appearing, dispensing dense ruminations on culture and language and what have you, and just as abruptly disappearing. They could or could not come back into the story, it never really feels like it matters. It’s a hazy, pessimistic travelogue stuffed with verbose philosophical diatribes.
And it’s odd, because I feel like everything I’ve described should add up to an absolute catastrophe of a novel, but I found The Names utterly engrossing. It never gives an easy in, it never offers satisfaction via character sympathy or the sensible closing of a narrative thread. Atmospherically, it’s despondent and airy, but that’s contrasted with prose that is so overwhelmingly fierce. I can’t remember the last book I’ve read where I found such enjoyment in how words are strung together, the physical (or mental?) act of traversing from sentence to sentence. There’s some abstract sense of syncopation to the way DeLillo approaches prose, a vague musicality that stimulates the mind in a way I haven’t felt in some time.
This is all in service to, in tribute of, and a loathing in language. The Names discusses and reflects on language as communication, language as preservation, language as barriers of history, language as arbiters of religion, language as secrecy, language as existence. Whether it’s the bustling bazaars in Istanbul or the marble serenity of the Rajsamand Lake in India, language is the unique bond that permeates every surface, drives every character, taints every page. I can’t say I ever pinpointed the predominant through-line in DeLillo’s usage of language in this novel, but perhaps his fascination lies in how language can be expressed right in front of you, yet its meaning can still be elusive. Linguistics constantly budding heads with epistemology, the crippling pit of knowing you can only know so much, and yet the hunger to want to understand everything—every language and its origins and transformations—persists.
I came out of The Names in a wondrous but uncertain daze, awash with merely half-realizations about one plot point and theme or another. There was no release of tension, no gratification in conclusions, only an attempt in trying to make sense of the shattered composite, and a slight reveling in knowing I was never going to be able to do such a thing.
July 21, 2026
DeLillo was doing some incredible stuff here
September 9, 2021
I guess I really just didn’t get it. Some lovely sentences though.
That gaze of hers. Wondering who I am and what I want. The look in the dark I've never been able to answer. The look of the girl in the family album who asserts her right to calculate the precise value of what is out there.
——————-
23. Nurser of small hurts.
24. Whiskey sipper.
25. Underachiever.
26. Reluctant adulterer.
27. American.
——————
The argument had resonance. It had levels, memories. It referred to other arguments, to cities, houses, rooms, those wasted lessons, our history in words. In a way, our special way, we were discussing matters close to the center of what it meant to be a couple, to share that risk and distance. The pain of separation, the fore-memory of death. Moments of remembering her, Kathryn dead, odd meditations, pity the sad survivor. Everything we said denied this. We were intent on being petty. But it was there, a desperate love, the conscious hovering sum of things. It was part of the argument. It was the argument.
——————
"Don't tell me I'm crazy. I fucking know I'm crazy. Tell me I'm a little brave, a little determined. I want to hear someone say I follow things to the end."
——————
He made a barely perceptible sign, a head movement, the smallest action of eyes and lips. Total disdain. Utter and aloof and final dismissal of all subject matter pertaining to this question, now and forever. A soul shrug. A gesture that placed the question outside the human environment, the things men will rouse themselves to discuss.
———————
I came out above a slope of terraced earth, the empty sea. Several trees had become entangled in their growth, and the bare branches grappled and twisted and the smooth gray trunks were locked in what appeared a passionate and human fury. How strongly this element of humanness showed in that stark mingling. The wood resembled burnished stone. A mortal struggle, a nakedness, sex and death together.
——————
She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.
————-
The twig broom. The muted colors of the pillows and rugs. The angles of arranged objects. The floorboard seams. The seam of light and shade. The muted colors of the water jug and wooden chest. The muted colors of the walls.
We sat watching the room go dark. I judged the amount of time that had to pass before he would be ready to recite the ending, before the stillness would yield. This is what I was learning from the objects in the room and the spaces between them, from the conscious solace he was devising in things. I was learning when to speak, in what manner.
——————
The unwitting would be left to ponder the consequences, to work out the precise distinctions involved, the edges of culpability and regret.
That gaze of hers. Wondering who I am and what I want. The look in the dark I've never been able to answer. The look of the girl in the family album who asserts her right to calculate the precise value of what is out there.
——————-
23. Nurser of small hurts.
24. Whiskey sipper.
25. Underachiever.
26. Reluctant adulterer.
27. American.
——————
The argument had resonance. It had levels, memories. It referred to other arguments, to cities, houses, rooms, those wasted lessons, our history in words. In a way, our special way, we were discussing matters close to the center of what it meant to be a couple, to share that risk and distance. The pain of separation, the fore-memory of death. Moments of remembering her, Kathryn dead, odd meditations, pity the sad survivor. Everything we said denied this. We were intent on being petty. But it was there, a desperate love, the conscious hovering sum of things. It was part of the argument. It was the argument.
——————
"Don't tell me I'm crazy. I fucking know I'm crazy. Tell me I'm a little brave, a little determined. I want to hear someone say I follow things to the end."
——————
He made a barely perceptible sign, a head movement, the smallest action of eyes and lips. Total disdain. Utter and aloof and final dismissal of all subject matter pertaining to this question, now and forever. A soul shrug. A gesture that placed the question outside the human environment, the things men will rouse themselves to discuss.
———————
I came out above a slope of terraced earth, the empty sea. Several trees had become entangled in their growth, and the bare branches grappled and twisted and the smooth gray trunks were locked in what appeared a passionate and human fury. How strongly this element of humanness showed in that stark mingling. The wood resembled burnished stone. A mortal struggle, a nakedness, sex and death together.
——————
She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.
————-
The twig broom. The muted colors of the pillows and rugs. The angles of arranged objects. The floorboard seams. The seam of light and shade. The muted colors of the water jug and wooden chest. The muted colors of the walls.
We sat watching the room go dark. I judged the amount of time that had to pass before he would be ready to recite the ending, before the stillness would yield. This is what I was learning from the objects in the room and the spaces between them, from the conscious solace he was devising in things. I was learning when to speak, in what manner.
——————
The unwitting would be left to ponder the consequences, to work out the precise distinctions involved, the edges of culpability and regret.
December 7, 2013
Generally, I try to write my reviews closer to the completion of the book. Two things caused the delay this time: the holidays and more intriguingly, I did not know what to write. So, before I add another review for different book, I suppose I had better write something.
Perhaps I should start with some facts to get me started.
(1) This was my second time through this book.
(2) I have read several of Delillo's novels, start with my English professor's recommendation for White Noise during college. That was a good - but not great novel. The same can be said of Mao II> and Cosmopolis. After The Names, I probably like them best in the order listed.
(3) I left it in seat back pocket (8A) of a US Airways commuter flight to Boston and elected, a week later, to return to the bookstore a buy another copy. My plan to save money on books and reread some of my favorites was foiled by a 6:00 am flight.
The best part of The Names is Delillo's language. The descriptions of Europe and the Middle East blend beautifully with his phenomenological rumination on language. As a frequent traveller, the flavor of airport idiosyncrasies and the murals foreign streets and cafés that provide the novel's backdrop immersed me in the world Delillo's world. Uncannily, much of the dinner conversation revolves around the dangers to Americans abroad. Coups in Africa. Hostages in Iran. On second thought, perhaps, it is uncanny that it has not changed in thirty years.
This, I believe, is critical for the reader. The primary motion of the plot , after all, involving a cult of killers, seems so distant that I believe the reader needs this tie to bind the reading experience coherently. Perhaps travel - specifically as an American to the cradles of civilization from Greece to India - is a determining factor in a reader's opinion of the novel. There is quite a polarity of opinions in the reviews I read. This could be someone's Freshmen paper.
I digress.
Once one digests the story, and looks and the subtext, which may or may not be thinly veiled, hit has a beauty to it. It proves questions that turn in the reader's mind, both at a conscious and subconsciousevel. Are we merely our names? Is dasein (existence) the sum of Sein (Being)? Or is there something more, something transcendent? And if there is, does the brutality of the cult's actions, the symbolism in the violence wrought upon the person-place-name, bring them closer to breaking down the modern world's collapse of Heidegger's dichotomy? Have we rendered the spiritual obsolete; something that only a return to a more base existence can reinstate? Must you enjoy early 20th century philosophy to enjoy this book as well?
Or perhaps, Delillo would tell us that the simplicity of a young boy's re-telling of life on dust bowl farm is all that one needs to regain their Sein.
In either case, I think that in few years, this will require a third read.
Perhaps I should start with some facts to get me started.
(1) This was my second time through this book.
(2) I have read several of Delillo's novels, start with my English professor's recommendation for White Noise during college. That was a good - but not great novel. The same can be said of Mao II> and Cosmopolis. After The Names, I probably like them best in the order listed.
(3) I left it in seat back pocket (8A) of a US Airways commuter flight to Boston and elected, a week later, to return to the bookstore a buy another copy. My plan to save money on books and reread some of my favorites was foiled by a 6:00 am flight.
The best part of The Names is Delillo's language. The descriptions of Europe and the Middle East blend beautifully with his phenomenological rumination on language. As a frequent traveller, the flavor of airport idiosyncrasies and the murals foreign streets and cafés that provide the novel's backdrop immersed me in the world Delillo's world. Uncannily, much of the dinner conversation revolves around the dangers to Americans abroad. Coups in Africa. Hostages in Iran. On second thought, perhaps, it is uncanny that it has not changed in thirty years.
This, I believe, is critical for the reader. The primary motion of the plot , after all, involving a cult of killers, seems so distant that I believe the reader needs this tie to bind the reading experience coherently. Perhaps travel - specifically as an American to the cradles of civilization from Greece to India - is a determining factor in a reader's opinion of the novel. There is quite a polarity of opinions in the reviews I read. This could be someone's Freshmen paper.
I digress.
Once one digests the story, and looks and the subtext, which may or may not be thinly veiled, hit has a beauty to it. It proves questions that turn in the reader's mind, both at a conscious and subconsciousevel. Are we merely our names? Is dasein (existence) the sum of Sein (Being)? Or is there something more, something transcendent? And if there is, does the brutality of the cult's actions, the symbolism in the violence wrought upon the person-place-name, bring them closer to breaking down the modern world's collapse of Heidegger's dichotomy? Have we rendered the spiritual obsolete; something that only a return to a more base existence can reinstate? Must you enjoy early 20th century philosophy to enjoy this book as well?
Or perhaps, Delillo would tell us that the simplicity of a young boy's re-telling of life on dust bowl farm is all that one needs to regain their Sein.
In either case, I think that in few years, this will require a third read.
June 22, 2026
100/100
“Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, their journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean? She wanted to know if the risk analyst had an opinion. “Bank loans, arm credits, goods, technology. Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them. New uses for death. New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They’re all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive” “Good, keep going” “America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S, I automatically assume he’s either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another” “what percentage of these grievances is justified?” I pretended to calculate (DeLillo 114)”
This is like a paranoid Kubrickian anti thriller combined with Oliver Stones bombastic paranoia and Finchers precision for conversation with even a bit of Linklater esque hangout atmosphere. This book is a true verbal and artistic delight. I really hope someone makes this into a movie someday because that would be truly phenomenal.
“Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, their journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean? She wanted to know if the risk analyst had an opinion. “Bank loans, arm credits, goods, technology. Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them. New uses for death. New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They’re all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive” “Good, keep going” “America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S, I automatically assume he’s either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another” “what percentage of these grievances is justified?” I pretended to calculate (DeLillo 114)”
This is like a paranoid Kubrickian anti thriller combined with Oliver Stones bombastic paranoia and Finchers precision for conversation with even a bit of Linklater esque hangout atmosphere. This book is a true verbal and artistic delight. I really hope someone makes this into a movie someday because that would be truly phenomenal.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2016
When I first heard of Don DeLillo, I began, as most people do, with White Noise. It was my second literary epiphany (Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot being the first). A book that utterly changed for me what a book could do. The vast unease of American life floating just above the edges of everyday, highly stylized moments, much like the Toxic Airborne Event itself. I reread word pairings, sentences, paragraphs, chapters. I told everyone I knew to read it. From there I read mostly his big novels and a few of his early ones. Secretly, without forethought, I was saving him for later years to stumble back upon to freshly relive some of that sensation.
In The Names I have done just that.
DeLillo himself claims that he was aware in the seventies that he was not writing serious literature (mostly referring to Players and Running Dog I suppose because Ratner's Star was a massive undertaking) and if anything could mark the beginning of that feeling of seriousness that would permeate the rest of DeLillo's literary trajectory, The Names would be that marker. Here we find DeLillo concentrating with words as logical poetics, hell bent on maintaining the style of his earlier prose (which was oftentimes plagued by lazy talent). Here we find beautiful loneliness in his characters. The descriptions. The way the book is never about the plot, yet somehow the plot still manages to surprise and delight. Like Libra and White Noise (not coincidentally his next two works), it's him at his best. And most likely it's because the world first really found DeLillo with this novel, without knowledge of what was to come, and were completely paying attention when White Noise was published and then Libra, that The Names has had the rare privilege of being a true hidden, brilliant gem. A book patiently waiting to be unearthed and loved.
No book has quite hit so hard for me as The Names and yes, maybe it's completely because of where I am with my life and the profound loneliness or guided aimlessness that I've been tramping through, but strangely that's the whole point isn't it? Like the ominous, straggling cult that waits for the unfit victims to arrive in the cities that share their initials in the novel, that strange, random, mathematical logic is sometimes everything we need to see purpose. You read a novel and you become aware that it was waiting for you all along.
We'll see where it ranks for me after I've reread his next two novels, but right now it's easily in his top 3.
A must read. An absolute pleasure to experience.
In The Names I have done just that.
DeLillo himself claims that he was aware in the seventies that he was not writing serious literature (mostly referring to Players and Running Dog I suppose because Ratner's Star was a massive undertaking) and if anything could mark the beginning of that feeling of seriousness that would permeate the rest of DeLillo's literary trajectory, The Names would be that marker. Here we find DeLillo concentrating with words as logical poetics, hell bent on maintaining the style of his earlier prose (which was oftentimes plagued by lazy talent). Here we find beautiful loneliness in his characters. The descriptions. The way the book is never about the plot, yet somehow the plot still manages to surprise and delight. Like Libra and White Noise (not coincidentally his next two works), it's him at his best. And most likely it's because the world first really found DeLillo with this novel, without knowledge of what was to come, and were completely paying attention when White Noise was published and then Libra, that The Names has had the rare privilege of being a true hidden, brilliant gem. A book patiently waiting to be unearthed and loved.
No book has quite hit so hard for me as The Names and yes, maybe it's completely because of where I am with my life and the profound loneliness or guided aimlessness that I've been tramping through, but strangely that's the whole point isn't it? Like the ominous, straggling cult that waits for the unfit victims to arrive in the cities that share their initials in the novel, that strange, random, mathematical logic is sometimes everything we need to see purpose. You read a novel and you become aware that it was waiting for you all along.
We'll see where it ranks for me after I've reread his next two novels, but right now it's easily in his top 3.
A must read. An absolute pleasure to experience.
June 4, 2026
4 stars. “How many languages do you speak?”
Rich, evocative, low-key, vibey as hell, brilliant, beyond my pay grade, funny (the bit about trying to get a drunk Hardeman on an airplane is simply hilarious)… this is the language I have to offer in describing The Names. I love DeLillo so much wow. What The Names lacks in plot or narrative thrust, it more than makes up for in atmosphere and ideas that…. seep. DeLillo’s fascination (and paranoia re:) power structures and language resonates and itches my brain on such a bedrock level that I struggle to explain why, but man do I feel it. DeLillo has a way of describing ideas/systems in a way that helps me see them more clearly, sort of like an inkling of a thought that nestled was in my brain but tucked away out of focus only for DeLillo to hold a magnifying glass to it and make it all so vivid and obvious. Pretentious of me? Maybe. Nonetheless true? Certainly. But it’s not all cold and clinical brilliance as I had expected with DeLillo (much of it is; see, e.g., “I go everywhere twice. Once to get an impression, once to strengthen it” or “we barely consider the victims except as elements in the pattern” or countless other examples I jotted down), but there’s warmth and wisdom about the importance of even the banal and what we take for granted (“the seeping love of small talk and family chat”). There’s a kindness and a mournful quality to this. Ending on Tap’s book is perfection. I can’t ascribe an explanation for, or a name to, all of the thoughts and feeljngs kicking around in my head after reading this one but I keep coming back to them even weeks after finishing. A terrific book.
Rich, evocative, low-key, vibey as hell, brilliant, beyond my pay grade, funny (the bit about trying to get a drunk Hardeman on an airplane is simply hilarious)… this is the language I have to offer in describing The Names. I love DeLillo so much wow. What The Names lacks in plot or narrative thrust, it more than makes up for in atmosphere and ideas that…. seep. DeLillo’s fascination (and paranoia re:) power structures and language resonates and itches my brain on such a bedrock level that I struggle to explain why, but man do I feel it. DeLillo has a way of describing ideas/systems in a way that helps me see them more clearly, sort of like an inkling of a thought that nestled was in my brain but tucked away out of focus only for DeLillo to hold a magnifying glass to it and make it all so vivid and obvious. Pretentious of me? Maybe. Nonetheless true? Certainly. But it’s not all cold and clinical brilliance as I had expected with DeLillo (much of it is; see, e.g., “I go everywhere twice. Once to get an impression, once to strengthen it” or “we barely consider the victims except as elements in the pattern” or countless other examples I jotted down), but there’s warmth and wisdom about the importance of even the banal and what we take for granted (“the seeping love of small talk and family chat”). There’s a kindness and a mournful quality to this. Ending on Tap’s book is perfection. I can’t ascribe an explanation for, or a name to, all of the thoughts and feeljngs kicking around in my head after reading this one but I keep coming back to them even weeks after finishing. A terrific book.
February 16, 2024
3.50. This is a complicated book. It contains an abundance of profound life observations, philosophical frustrations, keen insight into political world views, religious fanaticism, Greek archaeology, a murder mystery and even some hilarious shenanigans. I was often marking passages to reflect upon later. At times I read at a rapid pace, convinced I was finally in the right rhythm and would finish it in a day but the problem is this book has no conventional plot, it’s all basically vignettes, all revolving around high-brow conversations and business dealings. And because of this it drags, it confuses, who is talking to who—who thinks this way? Do these people even like each other? Sometimes the dialogue is preposterously pretentious because no one would speak this way all the time, and other times I was right there, sitting across the table, engaged in the debate, hungry for the answers.
September 14, 2014
[rating = C+]
A very impressive book with a wonderful style. The main character, James, is a risk-analyst and travels frequently. From Greek HQ to his wife and son on a nearby island. The names is about identifying people and understanding the world about you. DeLillo had a masterful ability to describe a scene then incorporate dialogue flawlessly. Although the dialogue is at times confusing it is deliberate and guiding. A cult seems to plague, not the world, but the men about James. They, including James are fascinated by this clandestine organization. It is what leads them to discovery of Names and a language beyond words; a feeling of the soul, of the world. Not a light read, the novel is quite introspective and illuminating on issues and character personalities. A very deft but difficult read.
A very impressive book with a wonderful style. The main character, James, is a risk-analyst and travels frequently. From Greek HQ to his wife and son on a nearby island. The names is about identifying people and understanding the world about you. DeLillo had a masterful ability to describe a scene then incorporate dialogue flawlessly. Although the dialogue is at times confusing it is deliberate and guiding. A cult seems to plague, not the world, but the men about James. They, including James are fascinated by this clandestine organization. It is what leads them to discovery of Names and a language beyond words; a feeling of the soul, of the world. Not a light read, the novel is quite introspective and illuminating on issues and character personalities. A very deft but difficult read.
May 5, 2018
Meh.
A risk analyst travels around the world but mostly in Greece having conversations about names and language. Meanwhile there's a cult going around killing people who's names have the same initials as the places their in. There's some interesting points made about Americans and their role in the world at the time but most of the musings of the characters went over my head. Also I just didn't care.
I must be missing something because clearly a lot of people have sizable hardons for this book.
A risk analyst travels around the world but mostly in Greece having conversations about names and language. Meanwhile there's a cult going around killing people who's names have the same initials as the places their in. There's some interesting points made about Americans and their role in the world at the time but most of the musings of the characters went over my head. Also I just didn't care.
I must be missing something because clearly a lot of people have sizable hardons for this book.
June 14, 2024
Having always been fascinated with cults, especially at the time I first read this, I was fully expecting the plot about the language cult to be my main interest in the book. I discovered, instead, that not only was the cult really a relatively minor subplot, but that I was far more interested in the characters, their interactions, and their philosophies. DeLillo writes the most interesting and fascinating people, however realistic, or not, they may be.
December 25, 2024
A bit more ambling of a novel than you might expect given the pitch, but that's classic DeLillo. He does have this compellingly surrealistic way of writing conversations that makes the 8th wine drunk Hellenic night just as engrossing as the first. It feels appropriate that The Names largely just flit around the edges of these affairs as a spectre, an omnipresent but unstated presence that threatens to unravel the relationships at play.
May 5, 2015
This book is dense, but not unreadable. You can choose to read for the in depth discussion of language and its workings, or you can focus more on the plot (a murderous cult!!). If you read for plot, know that it's not exciting like one would expect from a murder mystery novel. It's still worth the read, however, and does get surprisingly exciting toward the end!
July 29, 2022
The power (and endless mystery) of language, written and spoken, provides fertile ground for DeLillo in this masterwork. I could feel the diurnal temperatures of Athens heat and cool as I read. Cities of the ancient world and the manner in which their most meaningful symbols are juxtaposed with modern mayhem come vividly to life. Hot-weather reading; perfect summer mystery. LovOBed OBit.
December 8, 2024
I think I like Don DeLillo more in theory. I think his novels are well written in a unique prose, I just find it often leads me to disassociate with the work at points and it’s hard to keep focus. The plot is also a little too vague at some points, I understand it’s a character study, but it just lacks momentum because of this.
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