140
PARTISAN REVIEW
exhausted by their insistent pressure. Perhaps this is why DeLillo decided
to take a sabbatical in 1982 from his usual fixations and grim preoccupa–
tions. In
The Names,
the only one of his novels with a foreign setting–
Greece in the main, then the Middle East, and finally India - DeLillo
trained his intense curiosity and considerable erudition on such matters as
archaeology, linguistics, Hindu mysticism, the history of alphabets, and
the nature of cults. What is most haunting about
The Names
is DeLillo's
graphic rendering of the color and air of the Greek landscape; the pol–
luted bustle of Athens; the jagged, stony desolation of the rugged region
of southern Greece called the Mani; and the uneasy world of American
businessmen in unstable countries, working under the constant threat of
terrorism.
The narrator is an American "risk analyst," James Axton, based in
Athens, who gathers information for multinational corporations about
the conditions in various countries that might lead to terrorist attacks on
their employees. In the course of the story, Axton happens upon a cult
of wandering assassins who choose their victims by matching initials with
place names, and the cult's murderous use of names leads DeLillo in tum
to lengthy meditations about language: its sources, its magic, its vanishing
purity. Neither the cult nor the circumJocutory observations about lan–
guage yield their meaning completely - they remain, in fact, maddeningly
obscure much of the time. Nor can DeLillo resist ending the novel with
the terrorist murder of an American executive and Axton's discovery that
his supposedly independent company is an arm of the CIA. Nonetheless,
The Names
brilliantly attests to DeLillo's stylistic virtuosity, his nimble
control of difficult subjects, and it is atmospherically the most engrossing
of his books.
Yet DeLillo's passions are most insistently engaged with America, and
in
White Noise
he returned to his familiar obsessions about his familiar
fictional territory: "large and reduplicating" cities like Washington,
Dal–
las, and New York, as well as the suburban hinterland; shabby apartments
and motels; glittering supermarkets stuffed to the rafters with the gaudy
fruits of excess. Within these drab settings lies the America of consumerist
junk and detritus, including the arrogantly deceptive television images
that rain down mercilessly on innocent and guilty alike, feeding their
appetite for disaster. In
White Noise,
which lifted DeLillo out of relative
obscurity when it won a National Book Award in 1985, he launched
his
most caustic attack on what he regards as a grungy, overfed culture
soaked in brand-names and advertising slogans, "the everyday drift of
effiuents, pollutants, contaminants and delirients." All the characters
appear to live in a state of greedy hysteria exacerbated by their constant
