In the late '70s, after writing a nearly perfect early masterpiece/distillation of his sensibility and style in End Zone, and then the amusing maximalist funhouse of Ratner's Star, which he considered his favorite novel and hardest to write, and then Players, probably his most formally unconventional/artsy early novel, it seems like DeLillo wanted to sell-out and make some money and so there's a half-baked yet still pretty silly thriller (Running Dog), and then this one under a pseudonym after his primary publisher essentially rejected it, a novel that's really straightforward, mostly linear and episodic, following the narrator's first season as the first woman in the NHL with the New York Rangers, interspersed with occasional descriptions of the good simple life growing up in small-town Ohio.

The title relates to a TV commercial the narrator agrees to appear in but then quits on as filming begins, thinking it too stupid, which jibes with the idea that this is DeLillo's comic commercial sellout, something he ultimately believed too silly and stupid to publish under his own name. But I think this one is pivotal for DeLillo in that it leads to White Noise, wherein he ultimately fuses (and refines) conflicting sensibilities -- the silly and the serious ("the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints," per the end of WN's first paragraph). This is DeLillo putting all his weight on the sillier sensibility, having fun, not worrying too much about the language (few to no weighty sentence fragments and/or short phrases and single words strung along at the end of sentences; the general RPM, the energy and pace of the sentences, is also higher than usual — feels quickly handwritten like one of Cleo’s letters instead of typed?) but also incapable of writing weak or shaggy or unclear sentences, unable to write poorly but also unwilling in this case to let his competing dominant instinct for headiness gain much ground either.

In this one, there's no attempt at grand statement or metaphysics, there's a ton of conventional dialogue that's usually engaging, rangy, playful, and uncharacteristically intelligible for DeLillo (characters don't speak past each other as in Players, for example) and usually it's just two characters together talking since most scenes are intimate encounters between the narrator and her many suitors so it's clear most of the time who's speaking. Since this is essentially a comic novel, some of the underbaked characters are more forgivable than in his more serious novels, but this one also has some of DeLillo's most thorough and memorable characterization. The scene in Glenway's tiny spartan apartment is probably one of the funniest, clearest I've read by DD, as well as the seduction by the smoking French Canadian coach speaking French to her.

In the context of the late '70s, you also have to consider how this emerges from a decade of sexual liberation and the rise of feminism, not to mention the mainstream popularity of men's mags like Playboy and Penthouse (with its famous "Forum"). And this came out in January 1980, the year the US hockey team beat the CCCP in the winter Olympics, in my life the highpoint of interest in the sport. But I would definitely avoid this if you're just looking for a good hockey book.

So: a pivotal DeLillo novel in a way, in that it's a distillation of one side of his instinct, the accessible, silly, bawdy, rangy, playful, zany, outrageous side, descriptive and well-phrased language but not pared down with every sentence perfect, hefty, honed. He must have been working on this at the same time as The Names (1982), which to me seems like everything this novel isn't. Comparatively The Names seems totally pretentious, intentionally opaque, signaling but not really signifying, excessively concerned with identifying the pattern and discerning its meaning (DeLillo's thesis?), just as much pathological apophenia ("seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data") as salubrious literary association, insightful assembly/interweaving of disparate everything into a text unified by a single sensitive consciousness uniquely (and often deftly) able to approximate in language the true complexity of existence. The Names is a realist(ic) elaboration of the exaggerated, playful, maximalist silliness of deciphering the star code to fill the void core in Ratner's Star. There's mention of meaning in this one's brief intro section but it comes with a funny acknowledgment that this memoir propagates less meaning than life itself.

Some random notes: the first sentence in this is straight outta End Zone. It's a dig on Yalies, and since my wife is a Yalie, I read it to her when I first read it in End Zone and so immediately recognized it when it reappeared here. Also, at one point a cabbie lights up a joint at 4:20 am -- this could be a coincidence or DD could've been aware of 4:20 way before mainstream America. Per the internet, High Times didn't note 4:20 until the early '90s and I don't remember hearing it until around then either. And then there's also an exchange early on that seems like it may have influenced DFW's "This Is Water" speech (his copy of Amazons at the UT Austin archive is apparently highly annotated). Also DFW-related: this is a parade of aggressive, amorous, albeit not totally hideous men, possibly inspiring Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? Unrelated to DFW, it's funny that the novel's ideal man is asleep for months in stain-colored jumpsuit-like pajamas, recovering from a wicked case of Jumping Frenchman (a chronic tic expressed as random sudden exaggerated movement as though leaping away from a non-existent donkey kick).

If you're a DeLillo fan, it's worth trying to find a relatively inexpensive copy online. I found a first-edition hardcover with a dust jacket in good shape for $45 and consider myself lucky.

This was on Gary Wyshinski's list of MUST hockey reads for summer but after tracking it down from a book seller in France I have to say that it was a huge disappointment. It was more about how to have sex with weird men then it was about hockey.

Cleo Birdwell is a pseudonym for John DeLilo and he has no clue how a woman really thinks. He thinks he does, but it's painfully obvious during the long stretches in this book that he doesn't. When all he can come up with "I want to play hockey, just play hockey" as Cleo's hark to the rink amidst her constant sexual gymnastics, then you can be assured that he thinks like a man.

It was slightly entertaining, but otherwise it was pretty empty.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puc...

Voor de verandering een boek van matige kwaliteit gelezen. Als je hiervan een film zou maken, wordt het je reinste porno. De hoofdpersoon Cleo kan geen enkele man weerstaan en duikt met allen het bed in. Typisch geschreven door een man. Geen vrouwelijke auteur zou dit bedenken.
Geen karakteronwikkeling. Wel een hele serie van mannelijke onzekerheden en trauma’s zien we in dit verhaal voorbij trekken.
De achtergrond is de eerste vrouwelijke speler in de NHL. Hier zou je toch een véél betere roman over kunnen schrijven.

"Cleo's in a pretty unique position."

That's the first line of the back-cover copy. I like it better as an intro than the oft-quoted first line of the book: "If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forwards or backwards, it means he went to Yale." Cleo is referring there to a man named Sanders Meade, one of the many strange men vying for her attention.

You might wonder who an avowed sports cipher (I try to watch sports, it's just...nothing sticks) why I'd read a memoir about the first woman to play in the National Hockey League. You might wonder until you realize 1. it's a novel, not a memoir, and 2. it's by Don Delillo, not "Cleo Birdwell."

There you go. Now it all makes sense.

Because I dedicated myself a year and a half ago to reading all of Delillo's novels (we'll....we'll see about the plays), I had to go deep, and that included a book that he wrote under an assumed name and has since had officially expunged from his bibliography. It's long out of print, and you have to be pretty watchful to find a reasonably-priced copy, but I gotta say, it's worth the hunt! (If you need further professional/literary verification that it's good, it's received high marks from both Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace, whose annotated copy of Amazons can be found amongst his papers. Also, here's a cool article about Amazons by an author named Victoria Patterson, who wrote her own contemporary female-led fictitious sports memoir and her relationship to Delillo's book: http://www.theweeklings.com/vpatterso...)

As the lurid cover suggests, this is a relatively steamy (by Delillo standards) book about a female hockey player in a man's world. She's from the small town of Badger, OH, and she's pretty canny and smart and reads the works of the philosopher Wadi Assad (author of The Mystic Prince I, The Barefoot Rose, or The Romance of Being). I mean, most of the team (and a share of her paramours) are reading Assad, too. But still, she seems to understand it better than them.

This to me felt like the second part of a two-part investigation Delillo was conducting in the late '70s in which he was trying to write fully-formed female characters that were also sexually open without being a one-dimensional male fantasy. Moll in Running Dog is definitely Cleo's predecessor here. She jumped from situation to situation while still keeping her eye on the investigation, having fun and goin' for hers without having to be punished for it, or being regretful for not going with Mr. Right or whatever. Cleo has enough sex in this to make Southern's Candy blush, but without being thrown around by forces beyond her control. It helps that Cleo is smart and canny, but her guy suitors are in no way her equal. Some are sweet, some mean well, but many of them (especially the aforementioned Sanders Meade) don't realize how lucky (or broken) they are.

Amazons is a well-written sex farce in the classic style. One male after another tries to seduce Ms. Birdwell throughout her first season with the Philadelphia Rangers, but none of them seem up to the task. Cleo's agent, the perpetually nervous Floss Penrose, has a new tennis protege named Archie Brewster, who is always jetlagged and consents to regularly playing Strip Monopoly with Floss. Cleo tries to lure him away, but he falls asleep; she has to drag him to her room by throwing him on an area rug and dragging it like Edmund Hilary up the stairs. Then there's Shaver Stevens, an ex-hockey man himself and very much Cleo's equal. Sadly, he's afflicted with a hazy, hard to cure ailment called Jumping Frenchman Disease. He's later put into sleep state with a machine called a Kramer box for six months, hoping that his body will work itself out after six months of R&R. Then there's Sanders Meade, the Yale man with the interchangeable name. He wants to do it in the worst way, but certain subjects turn him off. One is the member of a certain member of the team -- Eric Torkleson, whose praiseworthy penis has been named Torkle by everyone else on the team. An ill-timed mention of "Torkle" sends Sanders into a shame spiral. The other is "the twin spectres of Vietnam and Watergate," to use his own words.

Then there's sportswriter Murray Jay Siskind, who eagle-eyed Delillo readers will remember is Jack Gladney's colleague in White Noise, a "visiting lecturer on living icons." (He and Jack pace the floor while comparing Elvis and Hitler.) He can barely control himself while Cleo describes her bucolic, quintessentially Midwestern upbringing in Badger, Ohio especially the traditions of Christmas night. Tell me about the carolers again. No...slower.....

The book is full of weird little storylines like this. Murray Jay is thinking about quitting sportswriting because of his new obsession, a story guaranteed to blow the lid off, as old newspaperman might say: it's an expose about how the snowmobile industry is entirely Mafia-run. Then there's James Kinross, the owner of the team who would rather tell Cleo about all his violent hyjinks as a youth then chase her around the office:

"Anyone come into our neighbourhood, we’d crack their fuggin heads open. I opened more heads than a brain surgeon. We used to break aerials offa cars and use them for weapons. Swish swish. Whip one of them things across somebody’s face, he’s gonna be looking at glass eyes on a jeweller’s tray. We used entire steering wheels. We ripped entire steering wheels out of cars. All our weapons came from cars, except for rocks. Not lot many cars have rocks for parts. Our rocks came from empty lots. We used to have rock fights at point-blank range in empty lots. You wouldn’t believe the blood, the guys out cold, the guys staggering around holding their open heads—it was fuggin urban mayhem."

As you might have gathered, Amazons is Delillo's funniest book by far. Really funny, not just "oh, how droll." Well, it's both, actually. It's funny like this: "I reached up with my right hand and grabbed the hair at the back of his head and just jerked the whole mass of hair, skull, and flesh back out of my face. It was like pulling a toy arrow with a rubber suction up off a wall. It made a noise that sounded like Platt, Utah, although I don’t know if there is such a place."

and it's droll like this:

"If the president is described as looking fit and trim, or trim and fit, it means he has had a good night’s sleep, he has had some fresh-squeezed orange juice upon awakening, and we have not lost further leverage in the Horn, the Rim, the Gulf, or the Corridor overnight. After presidential vacations, trim and fit becomes tanned and fit. This is automatic. Either way, it is a term I associate with people who have enough money to be happily obese, out of shape, and generally wasted, jowly, and dissipated, out drinking and screwing every night, but who have resolved to be fit and trim out of a deep sense of duty. In other words, fitness and trimness are moral qualities, and when the president is described as being fit and trim, we should all feel better. Power has its darker side, of course, and this same president will be described two days alter as looking tired and drawn. This isn’t so bad. When he is called pale and haggard, however, or grey and shaken, he is having problems right down the line, personal and otherwise. Weary and beat means the job is just too much for him, and if you read that he is looking haunted and ashen, it probably means he is getting ready to board Air Force One for the ultimate scenario."

Then there's this, a perfect summation of made-for-TV movies circa 1980:

"Natasha was watching a movie made for TV. It had that glossy look. They spritz the whole set with hair spray. The actors have carved faces and move about on casters. Every third shot is a zoom into a frightened woman’s teeth."

The book takes the occasional dark turn, and it's pretty long for a humor book, but it's got a far better hit ratio than I expected. The one clunker joke/thing is in the last third of the book, when a Saudi sheik buys the team and initiates compulsory 4 a.m. bed checks. They go even further by demanding that Cleo wear a veil the next season. Very "Up the Academy," minus ensuing hijinx.

I guess it's not for me as a dude to declare that another dude did a really good job writing a woman who is both sexually active but also dignified, so I'll leave that for my lady friends who might want to give this a try and decide for themselves. I liked it, I thought it erred on the right side of the equation -- making the dudes lunks rather than her a sexual naif -- while still keeping her flawed and intriguing. It's also a damn sight sexier than that awful sex scene in Americana.

Do you need to read this? Unless you're a Delillo obsessive, maybe not, and honestly, the scarcity of it doesn't make your decision that hard. If you do come upon a copy, though, I'd say go for it -- it's a nice harbinger of the more humorous and humane side that came out in White Noise, while being a far faster and more straightforward read -- no pondering over architecturally jaw-clenching sentences here. It's fast and loose and kooky and a lot of fun.

Strange how Don DeLillo's distanced himself from Amazons, which, with its deadpan asides, repetitions, absurd interactions, and set pieces, uniquely foregrounds his comic approach. It sits well against his other sports novel, End Zone; and the "Kramer box" anticipates the Convergence capsules in Zero K.

A fantastical comic novel, adeptly written by Don Delillo under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. While Delillo has famously never acknowledged the novel as his own there is nothing here to be ashamed of. The dialogue is acrobatic and engaging, the ensemble cast of characters flawed and memorable in all their neurotic flailing.

Pretty damn hilarious. Don DeLillo must have had a lot of fun with this one.

A little-known and out-of-print novel written pseudonymously by Don DeLillo. Very funny and well worth the effort of tracking down a copy.

An hidden DeLillo. Surely his most accessibile and funny novel, but nevertheless it shows all the typical DeLillian characteristics, from the quasi- philosophical rumblings to the hysteria of contemporary life. There are some memorable characters, some unforgettable scenes and even the parts written by Sue Buck (recognizable) have their own descriptive quality with a hint of nostalgia but, alas, it’s out of print. that’s a real pity

This was clearly DeLillo's guilty pleasure book. That's fine except that the guilt was well earned. It's just not a very good book. Yes, there are a few funny moments of social satire and a few characteristic metafictive reflections; however, they're just too few and far between. My biggest disappointment was that he didn't do more to mimic and/or play with the "fake memoir" form. After the first few pages, there was barely a mention of it being a memoir (or of it acting like a memoir). Really, a few pages in, it simply began to read like a standard first-person novel. The memoir ruse was all but gone as I read further into the book. Furthermore, there's much to be said (too much to get into here) about how masculinist the supposed female viewpoint here tends to be. All in all, I suppose I understand why DeLillo has yet to claim Cleo Birdwell. Apparently, he was writing this at the same time as White Noise, and it's clear that he made the right call as to which book to put his name on.

Video Review: https://youtu.be/gxR5jN_QAoM

This book is reminding me how vast the chasm between three and four stars is. This would've been a four last year but there's been some inflation with all the other exceptionally good stuff I've read lately. Sorry Cleo, maybe try being as compelling as an oral history of the Syrian War next time.

“This may be the whole point of West­ern civilization. How to be afraid intelligently. How to get more out of your fear than the other fellow gets out of his.”