"You add the heavy cream and sugar at low speed because you want a heavy cheesecake. The original Lindy's is heavy. If you beat at high speed, you get air pockets and that gives you a feathery cheesecake, which is the last thing you want. If you beat at moderate speed, you get a well-balanced, midwestern cheesecake. We want to be extremist here. So we go low speed. The best cheesecake sits in your stomach like a gold bar. Cheesecake has to hurt a little. That means it cares."

–Murray Jay Siskind

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.

Playful far past the point of fatigue.

Laugh-out-loud funny novel by Don Delillo writing as Cleo Birdwell, a faux-memoir by the first female hockey player in the NHL. Delillo has since disavowed the book and refused his publisher's request to reprint it. It was his 7th novel and until White Noise (his ninth) came out in the mid-80s, it was his top selling book. Not sure why he's distanced himself from it. A handful of scenes aren't PC, maybe that's why. Hard to find, but worth it for the Delillo completist. Next up is Ratner's Star.

"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.

I was expecting more from this secret Don Delillo novel. basically, the first female hockey player has a lot of sex in her search for love.... a let down.