To me this felt like the last Don DeLillo novel before his signature style was fully formed. Once WHITE NOISE was released, there was no going back, The DeLillo Novel became a thing recognizable from the first sentence. That’s mostly on display in THE NAMES, but here he’s shooting for something a little different, perhaps even a little more ambitious. A standard thriller plot lies buried just beneath the surface, and it’s actually rather compelling. A mid-east mystery cult in the late 1970s is murdering people, following an identifiable pattern, but their motives are unclear. Are these acts of terrorism? Are these religious rites? Do the cult members want their killing patterns to be solved and publicized?
Developing such a Hollywood-potential story is very rare for a writer who believes that all plots move towards death, but DeLillo seems conflicted about his own creation — as if a Robert Stone novel periodically tries to emerge, but is quickly snuffed out by philosophical asides and character study digressions. At times I felt DeLillo was too aware of the book’s place within postmodern theory and was trying too hard to throw in Wittgenstein concepts about the signified and signifiers into a text the poor, struggling reader was having enough difficulty following. And yet, even in the most confusing parts, where not only all the characters speak alike (true in every DeLillo book, and it’s not a complaint) but they seem to hold similar jobs and have similar preoccupations and are distinguishable only by name (always problematic for me,) the reader is never more than a couple paragraphs away from a passage of astonishing insight or beauty.
It’s no accident that this is one of the most acclaimed books of the past 50 years to have no plot summary in Wikipedia, nor have many brave souls on this site attempted an encapsulation. You may leave the book wondering if the main story was all MacGuffin and the joke’s on us. Or maybe DeLillo’s ambitions outran him, making the development of his style-in-full one book later an admission that a novel of this scope will inevitably elude him. One final possibility — maybe DeLillo is enacting his own ritual murder of plot. Whatever the answer, DeLillo’s writing is self assured in a way his story telling isn’t, making it easy to let go of the plot and let it rise and fall as it may.
I give this book 5 stars for much the same reason I give the Coen brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing” a perfect score — here is the work of a master attempting something great and, uncharacteristically, struggling to stick the landing. Reviews of future DeLillo works will depend on the reader’s expectations about how much DeLillo he should serve us each time — was UNDERWORLD too much? THE SILENCE too little? THE NAMES feels, simultaneously, like far too much and too little, but still so close to outright greatness that maybe it attains it. This is, quite possibly, the best novel by the world’s greatest living writer. It deserves to be read, debated, loved and hated by far more than have done so to date.
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Top reviews from other countries
starlight
One of the best books I've read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 29, 2021
Asher
Symbols, language, and the names . . . . And oh, the dialogues.
Reviewed in India on November 20, 2015Pocket Satire
intriguing, But Something Missing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2021