The Names

Re-reading some 20th-century Don DeLillo

Our book today is The Names, Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel whose old Vintage paperback cover caught my eye at the time even though I’d already read two books by this author, Players and Ratner’s Star, and found both of them pallid and boring. Half a century ago, I was less disappointed with The Names but no more impressed: I appreciated the long stretches of good prose, but almost all of the book had completely evaporated from my mind in only a month or two (as opposed to my usual evaporation time, which is never). Just recently, one-quarter of the way through a dire new century, I not only encountered The Names again but in the same old Vintage edition and re-read it on the fainting couch while one little Schnauzer slept primly in the crook of my elbow, as opposed to the first time, when I read it buried in sleeping, snoring, kicking beagles.