August 11, 1977

Players

By JOHN LEONARD

Books of the Times

PLAYERS by Don DeLillo

omeone, probably Lyle, says somewhere in Don DeLillo's fifth novel: "I wanted so very much for us to be brilliant together this evening." And they are: Lyle, a broker on the Stock Exchange, and his wife Pammy, who works for the Grief Management Council—grief having been bureaucratized by teams of behaviorist assembled in the sewers" of the World Trade Center—and J. Kinnear, the double agent who knows all about Oswald in New Orleans, and Marina, the terrorist. They are brilliant together in the evening it takes to read "Players," playing games, jokes, being "too complex."

They are also zombies. "Players" is a willful book. The will belongs to Mr. DeLillo, who is too smart to let his characters get away with anything, or out of control. Consciousness in this novel is a disease, a pathological condition. Emotions and events are not experienced; they are reviewed, as though they were programs or ritual urns. Esthetically, life leaves a lot to be desired, but it's a good excuse for wit, and Mr. DeLillo—with his "per diem rates for terminal-illness counseling"—is extremely witty. He may be our wittiest writer.

So perhaps it isn't necessary that we care about Lyle, who feels the world is collapsing, or about Pammy, for whom buying fresh fruit is "an act of moral excellence." When Lyle gets involved with terrorists conspiring to bomb the Stock Exchange, he is merely switching channels on his nervous system, as he switches channels on his television set. When Pammy commits adultery—"they scribbled on each other's body. . . With slightly pious curiosity they handled and planed"—it is to rid herself of a "low-grade tension." I did rather care about "adorable, useless" Jack, with whom Pammy adults, but then he will kill himself.

Merely Abstractions

No. The whole point is that people like Pammy and Lyle aren't worth caring about, having played with marriage and money and grief as if all three were abstractions. Even their fantasies are programs on another channel, transpositions. Sex, revolution and death are options, roles, words. Pammy and Lyle would like to be real, and the only way they can think of to be real is to be clandestine. By numbers, by organization, by play, they hope to pull things and themselves into "the illusion of a systematic reality." At the end, the best we can say for either of them is that they are "well-formed sentient and fair."

And what is true of Pammy and Lyle is also true of other, larger ambiguities posing as abstractions, like money or government. As Kinnear tells Lyle, "Our big problem in the past, as a nation, was that we didn't give our Government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we'd imagined. More evil and much more interesting . . .Cameras, microphones, so forth. We thought they bombed villages, killed children for the sake of technology, so it could shake itself out, and for certain abstractions. We didn't give them credit for the rest of it. Behind every stark fact we encounter layers of ambiguity. This is all so alien to the liberal spirit."

It is not that government has too much imagination; it has too many fantasies—ours lived out. The "convulutions and relationships," the "haze of conspiracies and multiple interpretations," are our own dreams, by which we would authenticate ourselves, become real. We are so complex that nothing is known about us: "The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished."

Incantation Style

What remains for us to care about, then, is wit, intelligence, and language. As Mr. DeLillo in the last several years has gone about demystifying—or alchemizing, or eviscerating—such abstract ambiguities as sports, advertising, rock culture and science, in such novels as "Americana," "End Zone," "Great Jones Street" and "Ratner's Star," he has developed a prose style that amounts to incantation. It is full of stops and magic, an abrupt keening, here and there glissando, crazy syllogisms, rogue puns. It thumps, winks, foreshortens, slides. For instance, and any single instance does him an injustice, this recipe for an F.B.I. man:

"Just another Fordham and Marquette lad. Studied languages and history. Played intramural sports. Revered the Jesuits for their sophistication and analytical skills. Voted for moderates of either party. Knows how to strangle a German shepherd with rosary heads." Or: "If the elevators in the World Trade Center were places, as she believed them to be, and if the lobbies were spaces, as she further believed, what then was the World Trade Center itself? Was it a condition, an occurrence, a physical event, an existing circumstance, a presence, a state, a set of invariables? Or: "This drink needs about eleven more ice cubes."

English gets pleated on an irony board. He has listened so much, he holds us in brilliant contempt. See: This is how you look, what you sound like, the clutter of your tired thinking, trendy pretense, bloody jargon, remorse and tics. According to Mr. DeLillo, we don't measure up. On the gramophone, our blank uneasiness plays badly, lacks fidelity. He is the cackling, friendless student of epistemology. Everybody else flunks.