It should come as no surprise that David Foster Wallace's archive at University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center contains Wallace's annotated copy of Amazons. (The Harry Ransom Centre is also home to Don DeLillo's archive). Wallace was a huge fan of DeLillo and the two corresponded by mail. The thing that immediately stood out to me about Amazons is how strong an influence it must have been on Wallace's first novel, The Broom Of The System. Some of the dialogue here is strikingly similar and the rational and overwhelmed central female protagonist, Lenore Beadsman, struggling through a world of neurotic men in Wallace's novel seems heavily based on Cleo Birdwell and her many suitors.

This is an excellent book, laugh-out-loud funny, and the best of the five or six DeLillo novels I've read. It's a shame that such a comic masterpiece has been out of print for almost 30 years. If you can find a copy, pick it up. Especially if you're a DFW fan.

Howlingly, fall off your chair funny; beautiful sentences; postmodern riffs on advertising culture, second wave feminism, professional sports, and globalization... despite the name on the cover this novel is pure Delillo and highly worth seeking out. David Foster Wallace even lifted a minor character from this book for Infinite Jest. Unfortunately all the recent attention has driven copies from the modest price of $16.00 I paid a year and a half ago to $70.00 and up, which is too bad since it was a best seller and there are plenty of copies around (mine is ex-library and has DISCARD indignantly stamped on the fly-leaf and the title page).

I'm a big Don DeLillo fan but man was this book terrible. It's no wonder he's done everything he can to disassociate himself from the thing. Being a DeLillo and an NHL fan I was looking forward to reading the book, however it was so ludicrously over the top that I had to laugh and decided that there just wasn't enough time for me to be bothered with finishing this drivel.

As the lengthy subtitle suggests, Amazons is the 1980 memoir of one, Cleo Birdwell, the first woman to play hockey in the NHL. Covering the span of only part of a single season, Birdwell expands on her many sexual liaisons with men within the ambit of the New York Rangers Hockey Organization, including the team president, coach, former players, reporters, and agents. Given Birdwell’s glass ceiling–breaking position in sports history, surprisingly little about sports appears in these pages, to the point where you get the sense that Birdwell was just totally bored of discussing hockey by time of the writing. Here, then, the few descriptions of games that exist in the book sit dead on the page, leaving the reader wanting a lot more detail that is never to come. Floating in the background of this memoir is the vogue popularity of obscure author, Wadi Assad, whose “pseudo profound” works are the talk of the league, coming up again and again in Birdwell’s conversations with her teammates and partners (he also provides the memoir’s epigraph). The book’s tension – as thin on the ground as descriptions of her games – is the well-being of Shaver Stevens, the former player who was forced into retirement after his diagnosis of Jumping Frenchmen disease, a rare neurological disorder that manifests in the sufferers’ elaborate tics, who is put into a medically induced coma for five months by a doctor on the fringes of the medical sciences. By memoir’s end the Rangers are out of the playoffs, Stevens is still in his coma, and Birdwell is considering whether she wants to start a life with him after he wakes up (if he wakes up (and assuming the coma helps)). The book ends with Birdwell in a reverie about her future with Stevens after having a conversation with her agent, Floss Penrose, about writing a memoir, which we’re led to believe is what we’re holding in our hands.

But then of course none of that is really true, since it’s about the worst-kept secret in publishing history that “Cleo Birdwell” is really Don DeLillo (with Sue Buck, it should be noted) and that this is really a novel posturing as a memoir. Naturally, this changes the way the work is received, adding, if nothing else, a narrative layer between reader and text while simultaneously pretending to do the opposite. What you’ve got here is a novel by DeLillo (and Buck) that attempts to tell some cultural truth from behind the veil of fiction, posing as a memoir by Birdwell that attempts to tell some cultural truth by removing the veil of fiction. This is the kind of narrative game that scratches a very hard-to-reach itch in the recesses of my brain—it’s a beautiful reduction of the postmodern paradox: by being more explicit about the artificial fabrication of fiction, novels become less real; by trying to reduce the narrative distance between author and text, that distance increases. So even though much of what you’re reading from page to page is prurient and base, this is an intellectual exercise from beginning to end.

And so probably because of the narrative layering and the I’m-never-really-saying-what-I-mean nature of postmodern fiction, getting to the bottom of what this is about is tough. The cultural commentary being made, though, seems to build out of the anxiety felt by the ever-fragile patriarchy at the prospect of women’s role in society expanding into positions traditionally held by men (e.g., NHL-level hockey). Here, Cleo has to endure the hyper-sexualization of her body along with concerns about her ability to compete in a world of men, while at the same time being forced to carry the figurative weight of the emotional labor men freely (and unknowingly (and constantly)) heap onto her. Cleo in effect becomes the vessel (an icky metaphor) for these men’s problems, and so has to listen to the Rangers’ president reveal his intimacy issues, and her coach pummel her with French (because it makes him feel less lonely to speak in his mother tongue (and because, as a woman, she’ll understand this emotional need)), and her agent’s deputy talk about his mother (who she’s later prevailed upon to meet). Birdwell’s recurring line – “I just want to play hockey” – lands, by the end of the book, a bit more poignantly than it did at the start.

If you’re a DeLillo completist and have a few extra dollars lying around, then this is definitely worth your time, but at the end of the whole everything this book aims for laughs and isn’t funny (at least, not anymore).

A lot of fun. Not DeLillo's best, but a sharp reminder that (in contrast to the joylessness of his most recent stuff) he could be hysterically funny when the mood struck--it's a much better, much more careful novel than his refusal to acknowledge it (while some material on it is collected in his papers at the Harry Ransom Center, he never spoke about it publicly and requested that his publisher keep it off official bibliographies) would suggest.

Of particular interest (and worth seeking out) to anyone who's particularly enamored of DeLillo's middle period (say, *Running Dog* to Mao II* or so), as you can spot in here a number of gags, bits, and set-pieces (as well as moments of ambient mood or predilections regarding the cultural mood post-Vietnam, mid-Cold War) that get recycled or fleshed out elsewhere--Murray Jay Suskind, of *White Noise* fame, plays an important role, for instance.

Don DeLillo doesn't do light farcical comedy well, at only halfway through this book it becomes clear why he has since disowned this novel.

Pretty weird book imho!!

I literally have spent the last few hours binging this bullshit because I knew that if I had to wake up one more time remembering it was the book I was reading that I would burn the copy in my fireplace. It's bad. Not just bad for DeLillo, but bad in general.

It has glimmers of DeLillo. He starts going on a philosophical tangent about death or something and then all of a sudden we're back in one of the what must be 50+ sex scenes with one of Cleo's (the female hockey player) male acquaintances.

If you took everything that made DeLillo unique and used it to tell a random straightforward boring narrative. This is what you would get. His oddities become grating. The only semi-interesting thing was the Kramer machine near the end, but it felt like it was just dropped in because DeLillo thought some contemporary lifestyle critique needed to be there.

Anyways, I don't want to talk about this book ever again. I need to treat myself to something really good after this hell.

(http://www.opinionless.com/goodreads-...)

Remember Cleo Birdwell? No? She was supposedly the first woman to play hockey in the NHL and “Amazons” is her supposed memoir. Funny thing is though, it was actually written by Don DeLillo in the early 80’s right around the same time as one of his most famous novels, “White Noise.” As a matter of fact, sportswriter character Murray Jay Siskind actually appears in both works.

Why does DeLillo refuse to acknowledge writing this in any of his official bibliographies and why hasn’t he allowed it to be republished since its initial release? Your guess is as good as mine, but the fact that it is not easily available to the masses is tragic because it’s one of his best efforts.

If you’re unfamiliar with Don DeLillo, most of his body of work tackles heavy topics such as nuclear war, global terrorism, mathematics, 9/11, and the Kennedy assassination. “Amazons” however is something altogether different; it’s a comic masterpiece that addresses the average American’s two greatest obsessions: sports and sex.

As previously mentioned, “Amazons” is the tale of Cleo Birdwell, supposedly the first woman to play hockey in the NHL. We follow her exploits, narrated by her, over the course of an entire season. When she’s not playing hockey, which is for most of the book, she’s sleeping with just about everyone who is somehow connected to the team. Each guy she hooks up with though, has his own, strange, fucked up thing when it comes to sex. One gets flaccid at the sound of the word “Watergate,” one can only get aroused by giving long speeches in French, one has jumping Frenchmen disease (yes, this is actually a real thing), one has to be told tales of small town America in order to become aroused, the list actually goes on and on. Our Cleo may be great on the ice, but she’s even better between the sheets.

Personally, my favorite thing about DeLillo as an author is the way he writes conversations and his ability to make beautiful the smallest of seemingly meaningless moments. Reading “Amazons” was like taking those best bits from any serious DeLillo novel, turning them on their head so they become over the top in their absurdity, and then inserting them into a comedy. Simply put it shouldn’t work at all, but it does perfectly.

I’m jonesing for an entire Cleo Birdwell series of novels. I want some up and coming “documentary” filmmaker to turn this thing into a mega movie franchise (though it may end up being a little too NC-17…). It’s hard for me to do because it’s so hilarious, but I have to admit that after “White Noise” this novel is my favorite thing DeLillo’s ever done.

I would say I was definitely interested in reading Don DeLillo writing a memoir about the first woman to play in the NFL. And there are parts of it that are great-- weird turns of phrase and some lovely sentences, flashes of his "big" themes, especially those that crop up in books like _White Noise_, for example, ideas about health and medicine (I wish there was a whole series of medical mysteries, a la the novels of Robin Cook, that DeLillo had written). Some stuff about consumerism, some about consumer churn. A lot about NYC, and a lot of broad pastiche about places that aren't NYC.

But the book as a whole is kind of an eh. I didn't expect it to be serious, but I didn't expect to be bored or find the last seventy-five pages of section two tedious, and I kind of did. There are striking moments throughout, but some of them-- especially the cross-cutting between sex and monologues, while funny at the level of concept, maybe didn't totally work as executed.

I'm glad I read it, but completely understand why some others who read it don't push it on everyone else.

Probably one of the funniest things I've read from DeLillo. Cleo's sexual encounter with a drunkenly passed out man who she has to drag from the Monopoly board to her room on a rug had me turned on with a laugh plastered on my face.

Oh Don DeLillo, you're so silly.