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.

Secretly written by Don DeLillo, this "memoir" by the first woman to play in the NHL is by turns hilarious and lyrical. Lots of old-world/eccentric New York City, frank, untortured sex scenes, and philosophical digressions on modern America. Highly recommend. I wrote an essay about some of the themes in the book, which you can find here:

http://www.theawl.com/2014/02/everyon...

Probably the best (ostensibly) hockey book I've read. Recommended to anyone who is a fan of hockey and/or Don DeLillo.

Characters were a little unbelievable, but that is typical Don DeLillo - you just have to have a suspension of disbelief.

a sort of hypersexualized screwball comedy taking place through the eyes of the first woman to play in the nhl, cleo birdwell. cleo birdwell, the author, is a pseudonym of Don DeLillo, and it reads like a Delillo book from start to finish. There's very little hockey in there, in spite of the premise. What the book is mostly about is men who are surrounded by other men in what is basically a testosterone/masculinity contest seeking out the warmth and tenderness of a woman who can give them a reprieve from that: most of these men are scumbags. there is also a massive subplot about the distinction between sickness and health and that arbitrariness of disease. in some ways this novel is remarkable, and in some ways it is really dull. out of print, unfortunately, but worth reading if you can get your hands on it.

A perfect novel

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

Well then.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time and I’ve tried many times. I’m a diehard New York Rangers fan and I thought a fictional take on what it would be like to be a female Ranger would be a blast. But after 10 pages, I soon realize that’s not what “Cleo Birdwell” (aka Don DeLillo) is going for here.

This book is really about sex. Lots and lots of sex. Sexual exploration, etc.

Which is fine. I’m not a prude. But wanting to read about one thing (hockey, the Rangers, gender dynamics) and instead getting another (sexuality, postmodernism, satire), especially with a male perspective makes this tough for me to appreciate.

The big issue is: can a man write all about female sexuality from a female’s perspective? I feel like in most instances, DeLillo handled it well. There are some predictably squicky moments too. I’m forever leery of men writing female POVs in the same way I am white people writing non-white ones, straight people writing gay ones, etc. I get the sex is a only a gateway to examine the socio-cultural norms DeLillo wants to autopsy but still. I can at least appreciate how he makes the larger point of a female philandering athlete and how that would be received differently versus a male one.

Can’t make this clear enough, if you’re reading it solely for the hockey, give it the hardest of hard passes. But if you like satire and are a fan of DeLillo, you should check it out because there are plenty of moments of inspired comedy and sharp satire. It also functions as a good snapshot of New York City at the dawn of the 80s. DeLillo treats it respectfully and realistically instead of making it out to be the giant toilet bowl most of America thought it was at the time.