The Names (Vintage Contemporaries (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: fascination from a distance
Review: There are, I suppose, two reasons we keep turning the pages: the plot and the prose. The most commercially popular authors tend to focus on the former, the critically acclaimed on the latter. It's a joy to find a book in which the two are successfully combined. In my view, The Names - my first Delillo book - comes close but never quite makes it. Certainly the prose is magnificent, and Delillo is a master of creating an atmosphere. And certainly the milieu is intriguing: here is the Middle East in one of its more tumultuous periods, Greece both old and new, a world of risk and uncertainty. The characters are less interesting, having that quality of being something off which ideas are bounced rather than living beings round whom the story twists. And the plot? Well, the plot, in as much as you can say there is a single plot, is intriguing too, but the reader is always at one remove. We are not involved in the deciphering of the cult of The Names; we are involved in James Axton's experience of that deciphering. The distinction is crucial and will dictate your enjoyment of the book: do you prefer the journey or the arrival? Those who read for love of language will be in heaven. But I ultimately found myself reading from curiosity rather than absorption. I couldn't help wondering what Umberto Eco, say, would have done with the same ideas.

Rating:
Summary: The Heights?
Review: Though White Noise--the academic novel meets family sitcom meets apocalyptic event--is more directly humorous and linearly plotted and Mao II--the author and the terrorist--has more immediate relevance to September 11 and Underworld--individuals in the shadow of the Cold War--operates on a grander scale, The Names may be the most successful DeLillo novel. As with the other books I've listed, don't approach The Names with the hopes that it will reach a clean resolution. But, even if somewhat infuriating, the experience will nonetheless be rewarding. DeLillo's skill at crafting sentences that stay with you, that make you laugh, that strike you as impossibly true has never been greater than in The Names. The book's "failure" may be that the individual sentences, the exchanges between the various couples are more satisfying, certainly less flat than the larger plot--the cult with their patterns. But the latter provides an element of suspense, of genuine scariness that gives the former a great immediacy. This book will stay with you if you give it a chance.