Don DeLillo is a formidable prose stylist; as Fred Allen once said of another literary craftsman, "He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose." From time to time DeLillo thinks as keenly as he writes, and it is in these moments that The Names,… achieves its greatest power and interest. Unfortunately, though, these moments are concentrated in the first of the book's three principal sections, leaving the reader to plow through the remaining two-thirds with comparatively slight reward. The Names is an accomplished and intelligent novel, the work of a writer of clear if chilly brilliance, but it takes on too many themes and wanders in too many directions to find a coherent shape.
It is for his second novel, End Zone, that DeLillo is perhaps still best known. There his subject was the American propensity for institutionalized, ritualistic violence, and his metaphor for it was intercollegiate football. In The Names he is once again concerned with violence, but this time on an international scale. The narrator, James Axton, is a 38-year-old former freelance writer who now works out of Athens as "associate director of risk analysis, Middle East," for a group "writing political risk insurance in impressive amounts." His clients are large corporations who want to insure their investments against worldwide political turmoil, and his job is to evaluate the risks involved….
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