The Names Says It All About Don DeLillo
A Celebrated American Novelist's Forgotten Masterpiece
Sep 1, 2009
The most fascinating moment in the 1993 The Paris Review interview with celebrated American novelist Don DeLillo is when he expresses complete bafflement that most of what’s been written about his work leaves out one huge aspect: His novels, for all their striking surface plots and myriad cultural references, are essentially about language.
That doesn’t mean that his painstakingly created sentences and paragraphs aren’t tools for communicating concepts beyond language. But it does mean that DeLillo’s core effort is to show how all human society was born and continues to evolve out of the human capacity to know and use language.
DeLillo’s Seminal Work
All this continues to get lost in the shuffle, as DeLillo, with novels such as Libra and Underworld, is more and more discussed as a critic of American society, rather than as a wordsmith with a more subtle purpose. It’s a good time, then, to revisit an earlier DeLillo novel, his seventh, The Names, published in 1982. DeLillo has noted that with this novel he slowed down his writing process, concentrating on each paragraph, the way Vladimir Nabokov did when writing Lolita, almost as if composing a series of prose poems.
That’s not to say that’s it’s not a novel with a narrative. Far from it. On top of its simple story of an American man living in Greece is a story about some unexplained murders and a strange “language cult” that’s behind them.
But unlike the black comedy narrative of White Noise, the novel that followed The Names, or the sense of an approaching apocalypse that the narrative of Mao II evokes, The Names, despite its crime fiction overtones, is more of a leisurely meditation on life, which allows the language to really breathe, and float to the surface of the reader’s consciousness.
Tell, Don’t Show
What is the heart of DeLillo’s style exactly, in terms of language? He rarely just describes the bare outline of a fact or an idea. Early on in The Names, for instance (a precursor of many more fascinating moments to come), when the narrator is detailing the atmosphere of modern-day Athens, we get this: “Rare nights, for whatever reason, you could hear planes taking off down by the water. The sound was mysterious, full of anxious gatherings, a charged rumble that seemed a long time in defining itself as something besides a derangement of nature, some onrushing nameless event.”
What’s crucial to note is that, while students of literature are often taught that too much explanation on a writer’s part robs readers of the chance to use their imaginations, DeLillo’s unashamed “telling” sends the reader into another stratosphere of meaning, as equally variable and undetermined as the ideas elicited by a writer’s restraint. It’s as if DeLillo is out to show us that we can’t know what language means to us unless we indulge in it and push it as much as we can beyond its limits.
All of DeLillo’s display this brand of writing style, but reading The Names is like hearing right through to the heartbeat, the essential rhythm, that makes all of DeLillo’s work tick.
