The Names

Loved the beginning and middle but was left disappointed (and frankly a little confused) by the end. In my opinion infinitely better than "White Noise."

I started off liking the book, but about halfway through I was bored and annoyed by the characters' distanced, anthropological view of themselves and each other. Every connection explored was done so through intense analysis, but seemed to lack true feeling. It became really hard to care about any of the characters since they seemed so blase, even when discussing emotional ties. That combined with a meandering plot that was based more on mood and worldly observations than a narrative arc, made the second half of the book a drudge to the finish. Although I could appreciate the quality of the writing, the book made me at turns depressed and annoyed at such calculated distancing and witticisms.

OVERWHELMINGLY BEAUTIFUL

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).

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?).

Fairly certain that what begins as a seduction scene in chapter nine amounts to a rape by the narrator.

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.

Thank you Mr. Graye for recommending this book as my next Don DeLillo read, as I navigate thru his body of work, this being my fourth. There are few authors who have received the gift of perfecting every sentence laid down, absolutely right in the place they belong, throughout the length of the entire novel. Of course DeLillo is one of these artists, and he doesn't disappoint here. Sheer perfection throughout.

Honestly, uhhh, well, no, never mind. Some things are better left unsaid, left to the imagination. Burp.

Here lies the problem with book reviews. The people who think the book sucks often don't write reviews about it, leading to skewered perceptions of the book. I am one of the people who not only did not like this book, but found it terrible.

The book is appropriately called The Names, and by God are there names. Names and names of one bland character after another. The books structure is repetitive. Nothing happens, people talk with delillo dialogue and it just goes on and on.

Enter the cult, which is of course the thing Delillo uses at some attempt of drama. The cult is revealed to kill people for the completely uninteresting reason that their initials match the place name of the murders. DeLillo writes this as some sort of grand revelation, and it is. A revelation of bad plotting.

I ploughed through the book, convinced that there must be something at the end which justified its critical acclaim. Nope! Sat on my ottoman in a depressive k hole style funk from how bad the book was. Hopefully Zero K is better.

I don't want to write a lot. and I hate the star ranking system...this time: it's at least 5 stars and it's a clear transition of Delillo becoming the Delillo we talk about when we talk about Delillo.

I liked the expat portions of the book. James and his friends/colleagues make for interesting banter, and Delillo has plenty to say regarding geopolitics. The problem is the cult aspect of the book is really the main focus, and I just did not care for it. Is something real before it has been named? Sure, I guess. Kind of an interesting theme, but not enough for me to enjoy reading those pages.

There are some instances of Delillo landmark writing here, such as the immensely quotable but slightly unrealistic dialogue, but I do not understand why so many Delillo fans think this is one of his major works. For Delillo completionists only, in my mind. It's okay. Two stars.