484
PARTISAN REVIEW
P
layers
represents an improvement over his earlier books. There
are fewer longwinded soliloquys, more believable characters, and at
least the semblance of a story. Like Conrad's
The Secret Agent
and
Paul Theroux's
The Family Arsenal,
its subject is terrorism. Lyle and
Pammy Wynant, a bored young New York couple, suffer the vague
depression that is a requirement of DeLillo's characters. Watching
television in their East Side apartment, drinking in cocktail lounges
after work, talking aimlessly on the phone, the Wynants exhibit the
sort of despair common to New Yorkers; their experience could be
defined by that word appropriated from psychoanalysis and now made
to serve as a description of the contemporary urban sensibility: the
Wynants are paranoid. Lyle contemplates the human detritus aswarm
in the streets, and thinks of them as "infiltrators": "Elements filtering
in. Nameless arrays of existence." Pammy works at the World Trade
Center, and worries about the elevators. Everyone converses in the same
primitive, inarticulate speech-"What's these?" "Brandy snaps."
"Triffic" -or resorts to banal sarcasm: "What'd you get me for Valen–
tine's Day?" Pammy asks, and Lyle replies, "A vasectomy." To remedy
their condition of monotonous dread, Pammy goes off to Maine with a
homosexual couple, and Lyle becomes involved in a plot to bomb the
New York Stock Exchange, where he works as a broker.
Players
is an accurate portrait of certain New York types: unhappy
business executives, listless secretaries, revolutionaries without poli–
tics. "The sensual pleasure of banality was a subject worth the deepest
investigation," DeLillo writes.
It
was for Flaubert, but DeLillo never
quite manages to escape the solemn, portentous abstractions that
marred his earlier novels. There is a great deal of wooden speculation
and labored symbolism in
Players-as
in the following semiological
excursus:
She walked beneath a flophouse marquee.
It
read: TRAN–
SIENTS. Somelhing aboul that word confused her.
It
took on an
abstract tone, as words had done before in her experience (although
rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units lhal had mysteri–
ously evaded the responsibilities of content. Tran-zhents. Whal it
conveyed could nOl itself be pUl into words. The functional value
had slipped OUl of ils bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped
walking, lurned her body complelely and looked once more al the
sign. Seconds passed before she grasped ilS meaning.
The characters in
Players
are given to wondering if they are "too
complex," but it occurs to me that perhaps they are too simple, too
