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Players
In this remarkable novel of menace and mystery Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation which leads both of them into separate but equally fatal adventures. And still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create.
212 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
73 people are currently reading
1667 people want to read
About the author
Don DeLillo
106 books6,489 followersDonald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 191 reviews
August 4, 2020
Many modern novels could quite easily be edited into stories that happened a hundred years ago. In other words they're essentially about personal relationships which take place in confined spaces and much of the background and even foreground detail is little more than shading. They have little to say about the forces of history. This could never be said about any of DeLillo's novels. His way of composing story is often to work inwards from the the exterior world. Environment - perhaps one should call it datasphere these days - often has as much, if not more, character than the characters themselves. JG Ballard is probably his British equivalent. He's always interested in the forces of history in the making. Always has a vision of where the world is going and is probably more prescient about the unseen forces that shape our lives than any other novelist I know. He also writes about alienation almost as well as Kafka.
This is a very early novel of his and the only one I hadn't read. It's about the ennui of a New York stockbroker and his wife and the appetite for violence that ensues. It bears most of his trademarks. He can take what in embryo is an exciting plot - in this case the plan to bomb the brokerage - and rinse it clean of all the manipulative cheap tricks beloved by authors of commercial fiction. DeLillo wants us to think rather than feel. Which is why he's sometimes classified as a cold writer. Not one of his best novels but better than some of his more recent efforts.
This is a very early novel of his and the only one I hadn't read. It's about the ennui of a New York stockbroker and his wife and the appetite for violence that ensues. It bears most of his trademarks. He can take what in embryo is an exciting plot - in this case the plan to bomb the brokerage - and rinse it clean of all the manipulative cheap tricks beloved by authors of commercial fiction. DeLillo wants us to think rather than feel. Which is why he's sometimes classified as a cold writer. Not one of his best novels but better than some of his more recent efforts.
April 11, 2018
She remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind, she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse.Typically brilliant writing that deconstructs a modern, upwardly mobile couple's lack of engagement with the world and themselves. DeLillo is a master of the postmodern form, or should that be lack of form? New forms; the author is ingenious at creating new ways to look at life and that skill is certainly highlighted here. Less successful: the publisher's attempt to market this as some sort of "urban thriller" - surely DeLillo had a good chuckle over that.
Typical lack of heart, soul, and emotional resonance as well, but then this is early DeLillo, so perhaps unsurprising. Unfortunately, uninteresting characters are often uninteresting to read about. I did enjoy the couple's ongoing contemplation of their own supposed complexity. And I particularly enjoyed the prologue (and, essentially, a summation of the novel), which portrays a group of upwardly mobiles briefly contemplating a movie about a terrorist massacre of various members of the bourgeoisie, and then quickly growing restless and bored. Less enjoyable: parallel narratives that appear to explore the husband and wife's separate attempts to break out of their norms, but ultimately only reify uninteresting gender norms, i.e. man = action and woman = emotion. That said, DeLillo's thesis - how lack of affect and lack of a subjective perspective will often result in a lack of effect and a dehumanizing "objectivity" - was occasionally compelling.
"Your view of our unit is a special perception. An interpretation, really. You see a certain cross-section from a certain angle."
June 20, 2017
Over, Under, Outside, In
The more you read both Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, the more it becomes apparent that, for all their similarities, Pynchon defines his world in terms of underground versus over- (or above-)ground, while DeLillo defines his in terms of outside versus inside. They are not big substantive differences, they are more differences of nuance.
La Pufferie de L’Éclair
I wonder whether, when the well-meaning literary critic Tom LeClair coined the term "systems novel" (to kickstart his Ph. D. thesis and his subsequent academic career), he realised that he would send dozens of cultish mega-brow postgraduate touch typists, editors and readers down the post-modern rabbit hole in search of 800-odd page maximalist novels for the next thirty years.
I'm not sufficiently "in the loop" (LeClair's book of that name is hard to get at a reasonable price) to know whether the neologism was inspired in part by DeLillo's "Players". Of DeLillo's five earliest novels, it seems the one most overtly concerned with systems. However, the irony is that it is a mere 212 pages short. Thus, it is ample proof that you don't need 800 plus pages to constitute a systems novel. You can deconstruct a system by focussing on a microcosm of it. You don't need to bulk out the book with acutely attentive helmet cam detail or repetition. The one can stand for the many. "E pluribus unum", after all is said and done. You don't have to keep all of your research a la Vollmann.
Equally, LeClair recognises that even protesters have to take a leak and, out of necessity, one might sometimes have to stand (or sit) on a pedestal meant for the few:
"I fold my sign into my bag and enter to use the [Trump] Tower’s underground marble toilet."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
Tom LeClair protesting outside Trump Tower by way of tribute to a character in Don Delillo's novel, who spent over 18 years, professing clearly his opposition, trying to forge a counter-narrative against the system.
The Man and His Sign
"The man was often there, standing outside Federal Hall, corner of Wall and Nassau. Lean and gray-stubbled, maybe seventy, sweating brightly in a frayed shirt and slightly overused suit, he held a homemade sign over his head, sometimes for whole afternoons, lowering his arms only long enough to allow blood to recirculate. The sign was two by three feet, hand-lettered on both sides, political in nature. Loungers at this hour, most of them sitting on the steps outside the Hall, were too distracted by the passers-by to give the man and his sign - familiar sights, after all - more than a cursory glance. Down here, in the district, men still assembled solemnly to gape at females. Working in a roar of money, they felt, gave them that vestigial right." - Don DeLillo
The Global Financial System
DeLillo set this novel in the heart of the Global Financial System, which Wiki defines here.
The symbol of the system is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange located at 11 Wall Street. However, DeLillo defines the System as more than this physical space where trading occurs. It is more abstract, a concept. It is the “mazes and intricate techniques” which facilitate the circulation of money around the world. It incorporates and uses people, who are “nurtured on realities, the limitations of things”. Each of these people is “a tiny human hankering for something, and it becomes a way of life, the obsession of the ages.” People work inside this space, but live outside it. DeLillo describes this in terms of “the suggestions of a double life” or a clandestine life "enmeshed in a psychology of stealth", although it’s apparent that the life is more like a death.
Reduced Sensibility
The two main characters, husband Lyle Wynant and wife Pammy, he the youngest ever partner in a broking firm, she a grief counsellor working on the 83rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre (the book was first published in 1977), despite being a relatively affluent middle class couple (“we sound like a pompom girl and a physics major”), live a relatively dehumanised life in which they have become detached from their friends and peers (as well as each other), and now suffer a “reduced sensibility” (even though they share a history of going to restaurants and frequenting “clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised”). “Gradually their range diminished...What seemed missing was the desire to compile.”
Their past experiences had almost become something they named, numbered and stored, in order to preserve. Despite the apparent vitality of the financial system, the outside world is approaching total decay. As in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, entropy is at play, if not necessarily at work:
“Is it still there? I thought we’d effectively negated it. I thought that was the upshot.”
“It’s so modern-stupid. It’s this thing that people are robots that scares me. And the environment.”
“He imagined the district never visited, empty of human transaction, and how buildings such as these would seem to hold untouchable matter, enormous codifications of organic decay. He tried to examine the immense complexity of going home.”
However, on the outside is now only “unmemorised faces and uniform cubes of being.”
The language that Lyle and Pammy use with each other is abbreviated and coded, shorthand and short shrift, not necessarily comprehensible to us outsiders. The instruments of intimate communication have decayed as well. People have plunged into sullen entropy (see the soundtrack below).
The Glamour of Revolutionary Violence
DeLillo introduces two counter-narratives, one involving terrorism, the other sex.
The floor of the Stock Exchange has already experienced one attempted terrorist attack, in which a colleague of Lyle’s (George Sedbauer) was shot and killed. Through a mutual work colleague, Rosemary Moore, Lyle meets some of the people responsible for the attack. He learns that they “still have the intent to hit Eleven Wall.” Gradually, Lyle is lured into their plans (although it’s not clear whether the attack ever eventuates).
The participants include double agents, notwithstanding the fact that Lyle attempts to pass on information to a third party, supposedly from the FBI. The plot of the novel is clearly secondary. However, there is enough to constitute a thriller, once you compile it and work it into a coherent narrative. The following comments could almost apply to the novel as a whole:
“He summarised what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.”
The terrorists belong to a radical, revolutionary movement that wants to destabilise and undermine the system with acts of violence. They seem to be home-grown, although they are described (not always reliably) as from a Swedish or Spanish background.
DeLillo refers to “the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul”, which we may infer includes Lyle, to the extent that he is ever more than a mere informant or witness. It seems that it definitely included his predecessor, George Sedbauer, who had become “involved with terrorists, these total crazies from the straight world’s point of view…[George] was hanging around with wide-eyed radicals, with the bomb-throwers. He was doing business with the other side. A white collar.”
Effete Diversion or Calculated Madness?
There are two conflicting motives for the movement to which the terrorists belong:
“Rafael [Vilar] wanted to disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money. It’s this system that we believe is their secret power. It all goes floating across that floor. Currents of invisible life. This is the centre of their existence. The electronic system. The waves and charges. The green numbers on the board. This is what my brother [Luis Ramirez] calls their way of continuing on through rotting flesh, their closest taste of immortality. Not the bulk of all that money. The system itself, the current...It was this secret of theirs that he wanted to destroy, this invisible power. It’s all in that system, bip-bip-bip-bip, the flow of electric current that unites moneys, plural, from all over the world. Their greatest strength, no doubt of that. They have money. We have destruction.”
“I operate on basic, really visceral levels. Terror is purification. When you set out to rid society of repressive elements, you immediately become a target yourself, for all sorts of people. There’s nobody who mightn’t conceivably stick it to you. Being killed, or betrayed, sometimes seems the point of it all.”
On the other hand, J. Kinnear has different views:
“J. is all theory. He’s waiting for the instruments of world repression to fall apart on their own. It will happen mystically in a pink light. The people will step in and that will be that. One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it. We don’t only make doctrines, my brother and I. We’re here to destroy. When we did the dynamite in Brussels, the embassy, it was beautiful because we were technicians completing an operation. In and out. The cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness.”
The FBI thinks it understands Vilar:
“Vilar in his revolutionary fervour decides it’s time for the ultimate gesture. He will give his life for the cause. Perfectly in keeping. Vilar has always had tendencies. The rightist kills his own leader. The leftist kills himself. Taking as many people with him as can be accommodated in a given era. In this case a superb sadomasochistic coup. Half the Exchange goes with him.”
This is the point at which Lyle gets involved, sympathetic to their social justice aspirations:
“Marina would be the type who dedicated herself to exacting satisfaction for some wrong. She would work on personal levels, despite the sweeping references to movements and systems. It was possibly at the centre of her life, the will to settle things, starkly. Coercive passions sometimes had a steadying element in their midst. To avenge, in a sense, was simply to equalise, to seek a requisite balance. There was forethought involved, precision of scale...Lyle had never felt so intelligent before. His involvement was beginning to elicit an acute response. They had no visible organisation or leadership.. they had no apparent plan. They came from nowhere and might be gone tomorrow. Lyle believed it was these free-form currents that he found so stimulating, mentally. They gave no indication of membership in anything. They didn’t even have a nationality, really.”
What Sweet Vistas and Sweeter Mediations
Lyle’s introduction to the movement comes from two women, Rosemary and Marina:
“Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.”
“Was he coming to understand the motivating concepts that led to obsession, despair, crimes of passion? Haw haw haw. Denial and assertion. The trap of wanting. The blessedness of being wronged. What sweet vistas it opens, huge neurotic landscapes, what exemptions.”
However, he realises that both sides are just as bad as each other:
“Our big problem in the past, as a nation, was that we didn’t give our government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we imagined. More evil and much more interesting. Assassination, blackmail, torture, enormous improbable intrigues. All these convolutions and relationships. Assorted sexual episodes...”
Which pretty much summarises DeLillo’s novel, one in which the system seems to need and deserve a counter-narrative (even if it has fatal consequences).
Faithlessness and Desire: The Touch of Love
Speaking of assorted sexual episodes, there are several sex scenes, some involving Lyle, some Pammy, and some both, that contain some of DeLillo’s best writing. In order to avoid spoilers, I’ll assemble some of them into one representative passage:
"She was at her desk, sorting mail. These surroundings no longer made sense. He’d seen her in a half slip, in panties, naked. He’d stood in the toilet doorway and watched her dress, an itemising of erotic truths, until she’d spotted him and turned, off-balance, to elbow the door. At her desk, passing time, he marvelled at the ease with which they fitted into slots of decorum. People must be natural spies.
The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence.
She was obviously aware of the contemplative interest she’d aroused in him...Her body would never be wrong, inexplicable as it was, a body that assimilated his failure to understand it. He nourished her by negative increments. A trick of existence.
Her flesh, her overample thighs, the contact chill of her body were the preoccupations of his detachment from common bonds.
She sought release in long tolling strokes. What she felt, the untellable ordeal of this pleasure, would evolve without intervention, a transporting sequence of falling behind and catching up to her own body, its pre-emptive course, its exalted violence of feeling, the replenishments that overwhelm the mortal work of the senses, drenching them in the mysteries of muscles and blood. This ending segment then was ‘factual’, ‘one-track’, and she would close, slaked.
He pressed onto her constantly, all his body, ravenous for flesh, his hands mixing and working her into a mass of mild discolouration. She never approached orgasm. He accepted this not as a deficiency he might correct (as people often interpret the matter), using patience and skill, the bed mechanic’s experience; nor as a deeper exhaustion, a failure of the spirit. It was simply part of their dynamics, the condition of being together, and he had no intention of altering the elements of the spell or even of wishing them otherwise. One kind of sex or another was not the question. The triteness that pervaded their meetings supplied what he wanted of eroticism and made ‘one’ or ‘the other’ a question of recondite semantics. He gripped her fiercely. There was never any point at which he guided himself past a certain stage or prepared to approach a culmination. It was too disorganised, the moments of intensity only loosely foreseen. He would climax unexpectedly, barely aware, feeling both criminal and naive.
Her eyes were instruments of incredibly knowing softness. At her imperceptible urging he felt himself occupy his body. It made such sense, every pelvic stress, the slightest readjustment of some fraction of an inch of flesh...when it ended, massively, in a great shoaling transit, a leap of decompressing force, they whispered in each other’s ear, wordlessly, breathing odours and raw heat, small gusts of love.
He held her hand, occasionally putting his lips to the ends of her fingers. He realised this was an endearment.
It became for a time a set of game-playing moods. They scribbled on each other’s body. They touched reverently. They investigated with the thoroughness of people trying to offset years of sensory and emotional deprivation. At last, they seemed to be saying, we are allowed to solve this mystery. This was part of the principle of childlikeness that she had sought to establish as their recognised level of perception. With slightly pious curiosity they handled and planed. It was the working-out of a common notion, the make-believe lover. They were deliberate, trying to match the tempo of their mental inventions, hands seeking a plastic consistency.
This crossing over. The recomposition of random parts into something self-made. For a time it seemed the essential factors were placement, weight and balance. The meaning of left and right. The transpositions.
The aspect and character of these body parts, the names, the liquid friction. Dimly she sought phrases for these configurations.
This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment.
This interval would pass, these midafternoon abstractions, the mild loving by touch, the surface contact."
All the Men and Women Are Merely Players in a Drama
In "Players", DeLillo has created a systematic and systemic drama in which the characters are the players, even though they are oppressed and repressed by the system they find themselves either inside or outside. Fortunately, some of them find comfort and pleasure in touch and play. We readers, given less choice, can find much pleasure in the language, construction and enchantment of the drama.
I wish I had been tempted to read this novel much earlier. I hope I've convinced you that something in it might appeal to you, especially in this pre-post-Trump era. It should definitely not be dismissed as a lesser DeLillo novel. In it, you can find both a demonstration and a foreshadowing of the themes and styles he would develop in his mid- to later-works. And it's 212 pages long.
SOUNDTRACK:
March 20, 2017
The more you read both Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, the more it becomes apparent that, for all their similarities, Pynchon defines his world in terms of underground versus over- (or above-)ground, while DeLillo defines his in terms of outside versus inside. They are not big substantive differences, they are more differences of nuance.
La Pufferie de L’Éclair
I wonder whether, when the well-meaning literary critic Tom LeClair coined the term "systems novel" (to kickstart his Ph. D. thesis and his subsequent academic career), he realised that he would send dozens of cultish mega-brow postgraduate touch typists, editors and readers down the post-modern rabbit hole in search of 800-odd page maximalist novels for the next thirty years.
I'm not sufficiently "in the loop" (LeClair's book of that name is hard to get at a reasonable price) to know whether the neologism was inspired in part by DeLillo's "Players". Of DeLillo's five earliest novels, it seems the one most overtly concerned with systems. However, the irony is that it is a mere 212 pages short. Thus, it is ample proof that you don't need 800 plus pages to constitute a systems novel. You can deconstruct a system by focussing on a microcosm of it. You don't need to bulk out the book with acutely attentive helmet cam detail or repetition. The one can stand for the many. "E pluribus unum", after all is said and done. You don't have to keep all of your research a la Vollmann.
Equally, LeClair recognises that even protesters have to take a leak and, out of necessity, one might sometimes have to stand (or sit) on a pedestal meant for the few:
"I fold my sign into my bag and enter to use the [Trump] Tower’s underground marble toilet."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
Tom LeClair protesting outside Trump Tower by way of tribute to a character in Don Delillo's novel, who spent over 18 years, professing clearly his opposition, trying to forge a counter-narrative against the system.
The Man and His Sign
"The man was often there, standing outside Federal Hall, corner of Wall and Nassau. Lean and gray-stubbled, maybe seventy, sweating brightly in a frayed shirt and slightly overused suit, he held a homemade sign over his head, sometimes for whole afternoons, lowering his arms only long enough to allow blood to recirculate. The sign was two by three feet, hand-lettered on both sides, political in nature. Loungers at this hour, most of them sitting on the steps outside the Hall, were too distracted by the passers-by to give the man and his sign - familiar sights, after all - more than a cursory glance. Down here, in the district, men still assembled solemnly to gape at females. Working in a roar of money, they felt, gave them that vestigial right." - Don DeLillo
The Global Financial System
DeLillo set this novel in the heart of the Global Financial System, which Wiki defines here.
The symbol of the system is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange located at 11 Wall Street. However, DeLillo defines the System as more than this physical space where trading occurs. It is more abstract, a concept. It is the “mazes and intricate techniques” which facilitate the circulation of money around the world. It incorporates and uses people, who are “nurtured on realities, the limitations of things”. Each of these people is “a tiny human hankering for something, and it becomes a way of life, the obsession of the ages.” People work inside this space, but live outside it. DeLillo describes this in terms of “the suggestions of a double life” or a clandestine life "enmeshed in a psychology of stealth", although it’s apparent that the life is more like a death.
Reduced Sensibility
The two main characters, husband Lyle Wynant and wife Pammy, he the youngest ever partner in a broking firm, she a grief counsellor working on the 83rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre (the book was first published in 1977), despite being a relatively affluent middle class couple (“we sound like a pompom girl and a physics major”), live a relatively dehumanised life in which they have become detached from their friends and peers (as well as each other), and now suffer a “reduced sensibility” (even though they share a history of going to restaurants and frequenting “clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised”). “Gradually their range diminished...What seemed missing was the desire to compile.”
Their past experiences had almost become something they named, numbered and stored, in order to preserve. Despite the apparent vitality of the financial system, the outside world is approaching total decay. As in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, entropy is at play, if not necessarily at work:
“Is it still there? I thought we’d effectively negated it. I thought that was the upshot.”
“It’s so modern-stupid. It’s this thing that people are robots that scares me. And the environment.”
“He imagined the district never visited, empty of human transaction, and how buildings such as these would seem to hold untouchable matter, enormous codifications of organic decay. He tried to examine the immense complexity of going home.”
However, on the outside is now only “unmemorised faces and uniform cubes of being.”
The language that Lyle and Pammy use with each other is abbreviated and coded, shorthand and short shrift, not necessarily comprehensible to us outsiders. The instruments of intimate communication have decayed as well. People have plunged into sullen entropy (see the soundtrack below).
The Glamour of Revolutionary Violence
DeLillo introduces two counter-narratives, one involving terrorism, the other sex.
The floor of the Stock Exchange has already experienced one attempted terrorist attack, in which a colleague of Lyle’s (George Sedbauer) was shot and killed. Through a mutual work colleague, Rosemary Moore, Lyle meets some of the people responsible for the attack. He learns that they “still have the intent to hit Eleven Wall.” Gradually, Lyle is lured into their plans (although it’s not clear whether the attack ever eventuates).
The participants include double agents, notwithstanding the fact that Lyle attempts to pass on information to a third party, supposedly from the FBI. The plot of the novel is clearly secondary. However, there is enough to constitute a thriller, once you compile it and work it into a coherent narrative. The following comments could almost apply to the novel as a whole:
“He summarised what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.”
The terrorists belong to a radical, revolutionary movement that wants to destabilise and undermine the system with acts of violence. They seem to be home-grown, although they are described (not always reliably) as from a Swedish or Spanish background.
DeLillo refers to “the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul”, which we may infer includes Lyle, to the extent that he is ever more than a mere informant or witness. It seems that it definitely included his predecessor, George Sedbauer, who had become “involved with terrorists, these total crazies from the straight world’s point of view…[George] was hanging around with wide-eyed radicals, with the bomb-throwers. He was doing business with the other side. A white collar.”
Effete Diversion or Calculated Madness?
There are two conflicting motives for the movement to which the terrorists belong:
“Rafael [Vilar] wanted to disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money. It’s this system that we believe is their secret power. It all goes floating across that floor. Currents of invisible life. This is the centre of their existence. The electronic system. The waves and charges. The green numbers on the board. This is what my brother [Luis Ramirez] calls their way of continuing on through rotting flesh, their closest taste of immortality. Not the bulk of all that money. The system itself, the current...It was this secret of theirs that he wanted to destroy, this invisible power. It’s all in that system, bip-bip-bip-bip, the flow of electric current that unites moneys, plural, from all over the world. Their greatest strength, no doubt of that. They have money. We have destruction.”
“I operate on basic, really visceral levels. Terror is purification. When you set out to rid society of repressive elements, you immediately become a target yourself, for all sorts of people. There’s nobody who mightn’t conceivably stick it to you. Being killed, or betrayed, sometimes seems the point of it all.”
On the other hand, J. Kinnear has different views:
“J. is all theory. He’s waiting for the instruments of world repression to fall apart on their own. It will happen mystically in a pink light. The people will step in and that will be that. One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it. We don’t only make doctrines, my brother and I. We’re here to destroy. When we did the dynamite in Brussels, the embassy, it was beautiful because we were technicians completing an operation. In and out. The cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness.”
The FBI thinks it understands Vilar:
“Vilar in his revolutionary fervour decides it’s time for the ultimate gesture. He will give his life for the cause. Perfectly in keeping. Vilar has always had tendencies. The rightist kills his own leader. The leftist kills himself. Taking as many people with him as can be accommodated in a given era. In this case a superb sadomasochistic coup. Half the Exchange goes with him.”
This is the point at which Lyle gets involved, sympathetic to their social justice aspirations:
“Marina would be the type who dedicated herself to exacting satisfaction for some wrong. She would work on personal levels, despite the sweeping references to movements and systems. It was possibly at the centre of her life, the will to settle things, starkly. Coercive passions sometimes had a steadying element in their midst. To avenge, in a sense, was simply to equalise, to seek a requisite balance. There was forethought involved, precision of scale...Lyle had never felt so intelligent before. His involvement was beginning to elicit an acute response. They had no visible organisation or leadership.. they had no apparent plan. They came from nowhere and might be gone tomorrow. Lyle believed it was these free-form currents that he found so stimulating, mentally. They gave no indication of membership in anything. They didn’t even have a nationality, really.”
What Sweet Vistas and Sweeter Mediations
Lyle’s introduction to the movement comes from two women, Rosemary and Marina:
“Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.”
“Was he coming to understand the motivating concepts that led to obsession, despair, crimes of passion? Haw haw haw. Denial and assertion. The trap of wanting. The blessedness of being wronged. What sweet vistas it opens, huge neurotic landscapes, what exemptions.”
However, he realises that both sides are just as bad as each other:
“Our big problem in the past, as a nation, was that we didn’t give our government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we imagined. More evil and much more interesting. Assassination, blackmail, torture, enormous improbable intrigues. All these convolutions and relationships. Assorted sexual episodes...”
Which pretty much summarises DeLillo’s novel, one in which the system seems to need and deserve a counter-narrative (even if it has fatal consequences).
Faithlessness and Desire: The Touch of Love
Speaking of assorted sexual episodes, there are several sex scenes, some involving Lyle, some Pammy, and some both, that contain some of DeLillo’s best writing. In order to avoid spoilers, I’ll assemble some of them into one representative passage:
"She was at her desk, sorting mail. These surroundings no longer made sense. He’d seen her in a half slip, in panties, naked. He’d stood in the toilet doorway and watched her dress, an itemising of erotic truths, until she’d spotted him and turned, off-balance, to elbow the door. At her desk, passing time, he marvelled at the ease with which they fitted into slots of decorum. People must be natural spies.
The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence.
She was obviously aware of the contemplative interest she’d aroused in him...Her body would never be wrong, inexplicable as it was, a body that assimilated his failure to understand it. He nourished her by negative increments. A trick of existence.
Her flesh, her overample thighs, the contact chill of her body were the preoccupations of his detachment from common bonds.
She sought release in long tolling strokes. What she felt, the untellable ordeal of this pleasure, would evolve without intervention, a transporting sequence of falling behind and catching up to her own body, its pre-emptive course, its exalted violence of feeling, the replenishments that overwhelm the mortal work of the senses, drenching them in the mysteries of muscles and blood. This ending segment then was ‘factual’, ‘one-track’, and she would close, slaked.
He pressed onto her constantly, all his body, ravenous for flesh, his hands mixing and working her into a mass of mild discolouration. She never approached orgasm. He accepted this not as a deficiency he might correct (as people often interpret the matter), using patience and skill, the bed mechanic’s experience; nor as a deeper exhaustion, a failure of the spirit. It was simply part of their dynamics, the condition of being together, and he had no intention of altering the elements of the spell or even of wishing them otherwise. One kind of sex or another was not the question. The triteness that pervaded their meetings supplied what he wanted of eroticism and made ‘one’ or ‘the other’ a question of recondite semantics. He gripped her fiercely. There was never any point at which he guided himself past a certain stage or prepared to approach a culmination. It was too disorganised, the moments of intensity only loosely foreseen. He would climax unexpectedly, barely aware, feeling both criminal and naive.
Her eyes were instruments of incredibly knowing softness. At her imperceptible urging he felt himself occupy his body. It made such sense, every pelvic stress, the slightest readjustment of some fraction of an inch of flesh...when it ended, massively, in a great shoaling transit, a leap of decompressing force, they whispered in each other’s ear, wordlessly, breathing odours and raw heat, small gusts of love.
He held her hand, occasionally putting his lips to the ends of her fingers. He realised this was an endearment.
It became for a time a set of game-playing moods. They scribbled on each other’s body. They touched reverently. They investigated with the thoroughness of people trying to offset years of sensory and emotional deprivation. At last, they seemed to be saying, we are allowed to solve this mystery. This was part of the principle of childlikeness that she had sought to establish as their recognised level of perception. With slightly pious curiosity they handled and planed. It was the working-out of a common notion, the make-believe lover. They were deliberate, trying to match the tempo of their mental inventions, hands seeking a plastic consistency.
This crossing over. The recomposition of random parts into something self-made. For a time it seemed the essential factors were placement, weight and balance. The meaning of left and right. The transpositions.
The aspect and character of these body parts, the names, the liquid friction. Dimly she sought phrases for these configurations.
This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment.
This interval would pass, these midafternoon abstractions, the mild loving by touch, the surface contact."
All the Men and Women Are Merely Players in a Drama
In "Players", DeLillo has created a systematic and systemic drama in which the characters are the players, even though they are oppressed and repressed by the system they find themselves either inside or outside. Fortunately, some of them find comfort and pleasure in touch and play. We readers, given less choice, can find much pleasure in the language, construction and enchantment of the drama.
I wish I had been tempted to read this novel much earlier. I hope I've convinced you that something in it might appeal to you, especially in this pre-post-Trump era. It should definitely not be dismissed as a lesser DeLillo novel. In it, you can find both a demonstration and a foreshadowing of the themes and styles he would develop in his mid- to later-works. And it's 212 pages long.
SOUNDTRACK:
March 20, 2017
February 1, 2025
At the turn of the year I read three more DeLillo novels, and now with Players done and dusted that brings to a close another three: Libra & Mao II being the other two, that just leaves four to go - Underworld, Zero K, End Zone & Ratner's Star. To be honest, I'm not looking forward to reading Ratner's Star, and I know very little about the world of American Football so End Zone might not be my thing either, but, I'm this close! So it would be a shame to omit those two, and who knows I might end up liking them. Mind you, I'm in no rush to complete the lot so will save these for another time. His fifth novel sees him wittily deploy terrorists to explore all the secret places in contemporary sensibility. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are a Manhattan professional couple who appear interesting and seem to do interesting things, but do not interest themselves. Their richness is only superficial. The story doesn't show any sort of romantic side to the couple, and instead of looking at how they don't get along in society, it's rather how they are of society and their normality is what we don't like to recognize. He works for the Stock Exchange and she works in the for a Grief Management firm in the World Trade Center. They feel like cool people on the outside but deep down you know they are not. Through boredom Pammy goes off to Maine on a holiday with a pair of homosexual men and ends up having sex with one of them, whilst Lyle drifts dangerously into a terrorist group that is planning to bomb Wall Street. What made this novel quite intriguing is that we know nothing about either of them. DeLillo doesn't go down the road of ordinary assumption of fiction that action is caused by character and character by experience, as from our point of view Pammy and Lyle have no history. They are without pasts, were never children, and come from nowhere. They worry that they have become too complex to experience things directly and acutely, when in fact the opposite is true. The tightly balanced structure, recapitulating the book's idea of people's appetite for boundaries, might have seemed too rigid to contain the unruly, even violent, strangely comic events. Instead, it suggests the ruthless tendency of people to establish order over chaos. When thinking of the likes of White Noise, Libra, or The Names: which I think is a vastly underrated DeLillo novel, this wasn't as good, but I'm still in two minds over what to make of it, so, I really do think it would benefit reading again. For now it's 3/5
half-read
May 6, 2019Read up to p.114. It is a pleasure to swim around in DeLillo’s surreal prose when the nodes come together with an iridescent lustre (White Noise, Mao II). It is not a pleasure to spend time in a swamp of surreal incoherent waffling with non-characters who speak almost entirely in non sequiturs. I thought my brain was unravelling.
November 25, 2016
I actually liked this book even less than Falling Man. I felt no affinity to any of the characters and was pretty uninterested in the story. As I have said elsewhere, I found that when DeLillo is on, he is brilliant. When he is off, it is painful to read.
August 11, 2023
Unbelievably strong writing in this novel.
July 22, 2020
My paperback had 212 pages -- on page 200 there appeared these potentially representative sentences: "He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God."
A beguiling mid-'70s NYC novel, chaotic and divergent more than surreal, tormentous, or aberrant, its spiritual side quasi-mystical at best, abstractly expressed by its lack, by a desire not quite stated as such for immersion in sex, violence, the master plan, the ambition as simple as the idea of "Maine," something to say so people know what you're about for a time. A super-subtle ambiguous moral tale in a way.
Three sections (a seven-page intro frame, a 195-page central story, and a four-page coda)-- the first short one takes place on an airplane, a bar area with a piano player having fun playing dramatic music along with an in-flight movie he can't hear involving white male golfers getting gunned down by charismatic revolutionaries/terrorists. Seven passengers are noted, four men and three women, including a gay male couple, who to a degree appear in the main section of the novel, which mostly follows a hetero couple as they break apart, Lyle, who works on the New York Stock Exchange, and Pammy, who works in the World Trade Center with Ethan, who's always with Jack, who he supports, a guy mostly characterized by a white patch of hair on the back of his head. Lyle likes sitting in front of the television and turning the channels more than watching, his perception and consciousness expressed in traditional DeLillo prose, phrases modulated, extended, and repositioned by secondary and tertiary clauses, always balanced, solid, sonic, sculpted, hewn.
A man is gunned down on the floor of the Exchange, Lyle gleamingly pursues a tall blond bland woman, his boredom giving way to involvement in a plot to detonate a device on the floor of the Stock Exchange at night, but it's not totally clear, the currents are streaked with counter-plot currents, disinformation, two guys named Berks, the whole thing seemingly no more real or urgent than Pamela's trip to Maine with Ethan and Jack, lounging around on the deck, cold at night, drinking, ordering escargot ice cream as a joke, always joking, not catching the references to Pull My Daisy and Lord Buckley (says Ethan), until something drastic happens (won't spoil it).
In the four-page coda at the end is set in a motel room in which the tall blond bland woman who had recently emerged from the bathroom wearing a strap-on lounges in bed as Lyle dissolves into light?
Five or six sex scenes, all interesting primarily as sex scenes written by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, I suppose Roth and Updike were bearing the literary soft-porn standard and DeLillo wanted to put in his bid?
As in all DeLillo, the characters talk past each other, never responding to questions, as though he writes ten pages of ordinary dialogue and then deletes nine pages of stray lines and phrases until it's a sort of poetry or comedy routine punctuated by associative punchlines, like Beat (Pull My Daisy) or crazy hip Lord Buckley rap, albeit refined and literary and "contemporary."
Eerie line early on about how the World Trade Center seems somehow temporary.
Overall I enjoyed reading this, the prose, the phrases, laughing at them when it gets almost too DeLillo-ish, builds up into a sort of self-parody of individuated style, like Bernhard at his most Bernhardian. That's something: the amusement a reader experiences when exposed to passages wholly a writer's own in form and content. This novel is filled with that, almost to the point of parody, but it never gets to be too much, thanks in part to regular chapter breaks and changes of scene and character.
When the story switches perspective from Pammy to Lyle there's no space break, nothing more than a hard return, giving the impression of chaos, easily losing me for a moment unless I cautioned myself to read more slowly and be careful for sudden changes.
Also, very importantly, I pictured the tall bland blond woman as Nick Torelli's wife Loretta on Cheers: https://vhistory.files.wordpress.com/...
What's it about? It's not easy to say in a sentence or two -- it's more like a core sample of mid-'70s NYC, a poem built on association, playing with language, jokes that aren't funny so much as they maintain a level of clever, the glow of the TV, the allure of the guy behind the guy, of doing something for real for once, of experiencing something "metaphysical" instead of repeating the word as part of a pickup, crying for once without thinking one's become too complex to cry?
It's a period piece, overall, an intuitive zeitgeist register, streaked with obtuse political thriller. Not quite another systems novel but Lyle exists inside the system of the Stock Exchange, all those numbers meaning something. But mainly for me at least it was about the prose, the language, semi-perceptual atmospheric crosscurrents, urban emanations, understood as premonitions, that typical DeLillo extra-sensory static, evocation of the city I first encountered as I came into consciousness as a kid, a sense of psychosocialgeographic time, place, and space now past.
Need to think about this more to make sense of it, maybe even check out some reviews/essays about it.
The original NYT review: http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/0...
DFW's handwritten notes inside his copy -- mostly what looks like notes for The Pale King (IRS/boredom): http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcenterm...
Glad he didn't call it "Foes of God."
A beguiling mid-'70s NYC novel, chaotic and divergent more than surreal, tormentous, or aberrant, its spiritual side quasi-mystical at best, abstractly expressed by its lack, by a desire not quite stated as such for immersion in sex, violence, the master plan, the ambition as simple as the idea of "Maine," something to say so people know what you're about for a time. A super-subtle ambiguous moral tale in a way.
Three sections (a seven-page intro frame, a 195-page central story, and a four-page coda)-- the first short one takes place on an airplane, a bar area with a piano player having fun playing dramatic music along with an in-flight movie he can't hear involving white male golfers getting gunned down by charismatic revolutionaries/terrorists. Seven passengers are noted, four men and three women, including a gay male couple, who to a degree appear in the main section of the novel, which mostly follows a hetero couple as they break apart, Lyle, who works on the New York Stock Exchange, and Pammy, who works in the World Trade Center with Ethan, who's always with Jack, who he supports, a guy mostly characterized by a white patch of hair on the back of his head. Lyle likes sitting in front of the television and turning the channels more than watching, his perception and consciousness expressed in traditional DeLillo prose, phrases modulated, extended, and repositioned by secondary and tertiary clauses, always balanced, solid, sonic, sculpted, hewn.
A man is gunned down on the floor of the Exchange, Lyle gleamingly pursues a tall blond bland woman, his boredom giving way to involvement in a plot to detonate a device on the floor of the Stock Exchange at night, but it's not totally clear, the currents are streaked with counter-plot currents, disinformation, two guys named Berks, the whole thing seemingly no more real or urgent than Pamela's trip to Maine with Ethan and Jack, lounging around on the deck, cold at night, drinking, ordering escargot ice cream as a joke, always joking, not catching the references to Pull My Daisy and Lord Buckley (says Ethan), until something drastic happens (won't spoil it).
In the four-page coda at the end is set in a motel room in which the tall blond bland woman who had recently emerged from the bathroom wearing a strap-on lounges in bed as Lyle dissolves into light?
Five or six sex scenes, all interesting primarily as sex scenes written by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, I suppose Roth and Updike were bearing the literary soft-porn standard and DeLillo wanted to put in his bid?
As in all DeLillo, the characters talk past each other, never responding to questions, as though he writes ten pages of ordinary dialogue and then deletes nine pages of stray lines and phrases until it's a sort of poetry or comedy routine punctuated by associative punchlines, like Beat (Pull My Daisy) or crazy hip Lord Buckley rap, albeit refined and literary and "contemporary."
Eerie line early on about how the World Trade Center seems somehow temporary.
Overall I enjoyed reading this, the prose, the phrases, laughing at them when it gets almost too DeLillo-ish, builds up into a sort of self-parody of individuated style, like Bernhard at his most Bernhardian. That's something: the amusement a reader experiences when exposed to passages wholly a writer's own in form and content. This novel is filled with that, almost to the point of parody, but it never gets to be too much, thanks in part to regular chapter breaks and changes of scene and character.
When the story switches perspective from Pammy to Lyle there's no space break, nothing more than a hard return, giving the impression of chaos, easily losing me for a moment unless I cautioned myself to read more slowly and be careful for sudden changes.
Also, very importantly, I pictured the tall bland blond woman as Nick Torelli's wife Loretta on Cheers: https://vhistory.files.wordpress.com/...
What's it about? It's not easy to say in a sentence or two -- it's more like a core sample of mid-'70s NYC, a poem built on association, playing with language, jokes that aren't funny so much as they maintain a level of clever, the glow of the TV, the allure of the guy behind the guy, of doing something for real for once, of experiencing something "metaphysical" instead of repeating the word as part of a pickup, crying for once without thinking one's become too complex to cry?
It's a period piece, overall, an intuitive zeitgeist register, streaked with obtuse political thriller. Not quite another systems novel but Lyle exists inside the system of the Stock Exchange, all those numbers meaning something. But mainly for me at least it was about the prose, the language, semi-perceptual atmospheric crosscurrents, urban emanations, understood as premonitions, that typical DeLillo extra-sensory static, evocation of the city I first encountered as I came into consciousness as a kid, a sense of psychosocialgeographic time, place, and space now past.
Need to think about this more to make sense of it, maybe even check out some reviews/essays about it.
The original NYT review: http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/0...
DFW's handwritten notes inside his copy -- mostly what looks like notes for The Pale King (IRS/boredom): http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcenterm...
Glad he didn't call it "Foes of God."
May 26, 2018
My least favorite DeLillo so far. But it is STILL a DeLillo and seems to capture and color a specific zone of the pre-9/11 America well.
June 28, 2020
Players is Don Delillo’s fifth novel. I am working my way through his books in publication order (although I have to confess that it is not that long since I re-read his fourth, Ratner’s Star, and I really didn’t like it so I skipped over it in this sequence). I have a theory based on my original readings, some of which happened about 30 years ago, that his best work was all done in the 1980s and 1990s and this re-read is partly an excuse to check that out whilst also picking up a couple of books along the way that I somehow have not yet managed to read.
Reading this book, published in 1977, fits in with my theory, I think. There is just one book more to go before The Names (I am not counting the one he published under a pseudonym in 1980) and it feels like things are warming up towards that. The Names, for me, is the first of Delillo’s great works.
Enough background. One of the really notable things about classic Delillo is the dialogue. Writing in Granta magazine, Norman Bryson said, ”Perhaps the most striking feature in DeLillo’s novels is the extraordinary nature and importance of their dialogue…”. It felt to me as I read Players that this is the first novel where that dialogue really shapes up. And there really isn’t anything that compares to dialogue in a Delillo novel. Part way through Players, I paused to make a note that said “The intimacy of language and the language of intimacy”. When people talk to one another in Players, you begin to feel that most other authors are putting too much padding, hiding too much exposition in the conversations their characters have. In Players, our two main characters Lyle and Pammy are a couple. When they talk, their language is loaded with private significance, they leave sentences unfinished knowing the other will understand, they jump backwards and forwards in their conversation often skipping back in mid-sentence to pick up an old topic then skipping forward again to pick up the current thread. And this approach applies also, to one degree or another, to conversations between work colleagues or other acquaintances.
Players is a strange story. Pammy and Lyle are a modern couple enjoying a relatively wealthy 1970s lifestyle in New York. At the start of the novel, we follow them into their separate days with the two strands interleaved, jumping from one to the other until they come together in the evenings. But behind all this, there’s some kind of emptiness. And this leads both of them to set off on separate adventures. Lyle witnesses an act of violence at his work place and gets drawn towards a mysterious world of terrorism. Pammy heads to Maine with a gay couple she knows. But, even as events darken around them, they seem to remain distant and unengaged.
I don’t think this is the most memorable story to read. But I do think that, for fans of Delillo, it is a significant book for the development of his style. Next up is Running Dog which is the one remaining Delillo book that I have not yet read. I know that everything starts to really come together in terms of style and themes in The Names, so it will be fascinating to see what comes in the intervening novel.
3.5 stars rounded down for now.
Reading this book, published in 1977, fits in with my theory, I think. There is just one book more to go before The Names (I am not counting the one he published under a pseudonym in 1980) and it feels like things are warming up towards that. The Names, for me, is the first of Delillo’s great works.
Enough background. One of the really notable things about classic Delillo is the dialogue. Writing in Granta magazine, Norman Bryson said, ”Perhaps the most striking feature in DeLillo’s novels is the extraordinary nature and importance of their dialogue…”. It felt to me as I read Players that this is the first novel where that dialogue really shapes up. And there really isn’t anything that compares to dialogue in a Delillo novel. Part way through Players, I paused to make a note that said “The intimacy of language and the language of intimacy”. When people talk to one another in Players, you begin to feel that most other authors are putting too much padding, hiding too much exposition in the conversations their characters have. In Players, our two main characters Lyle and Pammy are a couple. When they talk, their language is loaded with private significance, they leave sentences unfinished knowing the other will understand, they jump backwards and forwards in their conversation often skipping back in mid-sentence to pick up an old topic then skipping forward again to pick up the current thread. And this approach applies also, to one degree or another, to conversations between work colleagues or other acquaintances.
Players is a strange story. Pammy and Lyle are a modern couple enjoying a relatively wealthy 1970s lifestyle in New York. At the start of the novel, we follow them into their separate days with the two strands interleaved, jumping from one to the other until they come together in the evenings. But behind all this, there’s some kind of emptiness. And this leads both of them to set off on separate adventures. Lyle witnesses an act of violence at his work place and gets drawn towards a mysterious world of terrorism. Pammy heads to Maine with a gay couple she knows. But, even as events darken around them, they seem to remain distant and unengaged.
I don’t think this is the most memorable story to read. But I do think that, for fans of Delillo, it is a significant book for the development of his style. Next up is Running Dog which is the one remaining Delillo book that I have not yet read. I know that everything starts to really come together in terms of style and themes in The Names, so it will be fascinating to see what comes in the intervening novel.
3.5 stars rounded down for now.
December 19, 2023
"Гравці" Дона Делілло - гарний трамплін у подальшу творчість автора. Тут точечно можна побачити, як попередні його романи, так і більш пізні "золотого періоду". Саме з цієї книги автор вперше починає досліджувати майбутні важливі теми для творчості. Зародження тероризму, як протидія та невід'ємна частина розвиненого суспільства, вбивство ДжФК та "героїзація" Освальда, тема скорботи та вежі-близнюки (візіонерський привіт "Підземному світу" та окремо реальності..). Відчутно звідки беруть початок романи "Мао ІІ", "Падаюча людина", "Терези", "Імена" та навіть "Білий шум".
Роман, де герої пізнають себе через виклили та де нудьга стає каталізатором радикальних змін в житті. Сімейна пара, в якій кожен себе відчуває самотнім. Чоловік Лайл - "вовк з Волл-стріт", який себе починає вважати героєм політичного триллеру з умовної "бондіани". Зраджує дружині з різними жінками, занурюється в терористичне угрупування й одночасно з тим співарацює зі спецслужбами. Косплеїть подвійного агента та веде власну гру лише заради забавки та хоч якогось "драйву" в житті.
Його дружина Пем іншої натури людина. "Красуня", що теж не знаходить хоч якихось розваг в житті. Часто позіхає, нудьгує на роботі та неспокійно себе відчуває перебуваючи "в центрі уваги". Працює у відділі скорботи, де пише різного роду брошурки на тему горя, знаходячи різні для цього евфемізми. Скорботу перетворює на "товар". Зваблює гея, який не витримавши катастрофічних наслідків власної зради, спалює себе на звалищі.
Майже всі герої себе вважають гравцями, не розуміючи, що вони самі в результаті лише "іграшка" у чужих руках. Наскрізна тема ігор проходить через увесь роман. Пошук розваг/пригод/ігор - немов основний інстинкт для виживання у нецікавому світі. Хтось з кимось бавиться, хтось кимось маніпулює, хтось навпаки когось опікає, але не завжди відразу відчутно, хто саме гравець, а хто лише фігура на ігровому полі. Люди-іграшки ютяться разом з людьми-ляльководами. Та у випадку життя - це завжди закінчується трагедією.
Роман дуже нагадує кінофільми. Жонглювання жанрами виглядає як безсистемне перемикання каналів (чим забавляється вдома Лайл). Навіть оповідь цікаво побудована - герої немов змагаються між собою за керуюче місце в сюжеті, як за пульт від телевізора - чий канал буде пріоритетнішим. Дві історії (чоловіча та жіноча) хоч і паралельні між собою (навіть більш побудовані на віддаленні), але постійно чередуються. Один сюжет витісняє інший. Іноді речення на речення, іноді абзац на абзац, слово на слово, але чим далі герої заходять у руйнації власного життя та віддаляються один від одного, тим менше пускають у свої сюжетні розділи іншого.
Це великий роман, який, несправедливо, обмежений увагою. Порпатись в ньому досить цікаво.
Якось узагальнити його складно, але якщо дати порівняння, то мені це схоже на щось середнє між "Сьомим континентом" Ханеке, "Загубленою" Фінчера та серіалом "Рубікон". Маючи на увазі, що роман створено під впливом Годара та Бекета)
Роман, де герої пізнають себе через виклили та де нудьга стає каталізатором радикальних змін в житті. Сімейна пара, в якій кожен себе відчуває самотнім. Чоловік Лайл - "вовк з Волл-стріт", який себе починає вважати героєм політичного триллеру з умовної "бондіани". Зраджує дружині з різними жінками, занурюється в терористичне угрупування й одночасно з тим співарацює зі спецслужбами. Косплеїть подвійного агента та веде власну гру лише заради забавки та хоч якогось "драйву" в житті.
Його дружина Пем іншої натури людина. "Красуня", що теж не знаходить хоч якихось розваг в житті. Часто позіхає, нудьгує на роботі та неспокійно себе відчуває перебуваючи "в центрі уваги". Працює у відділі скорботи, де пише різного роду брошурки на тему горя, знаходячи різні для цього евфемізми. Скорботу перетворює на "товар". Зваблює гея, який не витримавши катастрофічних наслідків власної зради, спалює себе на звалищі.
Майже всі герої себе вважають гравцями, не розуміючи, що вони самі в результаті лише "іграшка" у чужих руках. Наскрізна тема ігор проходить через увесь роман. Пошук розваг/пригод/ігор - немов основний інстинкт для виживання у нецікавому світі. Хтось з кимось бавиться, хтось кимось маніпулює, хтось навпаки когось опікає, але не завжди відразу відчутно, хто саме гравець, а хто лише фігура на ігровому полі. Люди-іграшки ютяться разом з людьми-ляльководами. Та у випадку життя - це завжди закінчується трагедією.
Роман дуже нагадує кінофільми. Жонглювання жанрами виглядає як безсистемне перемикання каналів (чим забавляється вдома Лайл). Навіть оповідь цікаво побудована - герої немов змагаються між собою за керуюче місце в сюжеті, як за пульт від телевізора - чий канал буде пріоритетнішим. Дві історії (чоловіча та жіноча) хоч і паралельні між собою (навіть більш побудовані на віддаленні), але постійно чередуються. Один сюжет витісняє інший. Іноді речення на речення, іноді абзац на абзац, слово на слово, але чим далі герої заходять у руйнації власного життя та віддаляються один від одного, тим менше пускають у свої сюжетні розділи іншого.
Це великий роман, який, несправедливо, обмежений увагою. Порпатись в ньому досить цікаво.
Якось узагальнити його складно, але якщо дати порівняння, то мені це схоже на щось середнє між "Сьомим континентом" Ханеке, "Загубленою" Фінчера та серіалом "Рубікон". Маючи на увазі, що роман створено під впливом Годара та Бекета)
December 9, 2020
It was an okay book with a decent story but it wasn't my thing. Good written though
October 10, 2016
Nutshell: stop neo-luddite attacks on the stock exchange or else open marriages.
Thsi novel is perhaps the master text for the DeLillo cocked-up marriage, structuring all subsequent cocked-up marriages in his writings. Wife, for instance, “found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party” (70).
Couple “traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral décor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity” (15).
The local setting, NYC, “functioned on principles of intimidation” (24):
She “is on the edge of something” (36)—and it is difficult to avoid the inference provided by stock exchange workers who “didn’t drift beyond the margins of things” (28) and “infiltrators,” supra, who did drift beyond the margin, and only in drifting beyond the margin began to exist, for zoe terrorist “never existed before today” (30). Revealed that she is or becomes a true nihilist who can’t abide “the idea of tomorrow” (42). Dunno about these two: “To the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul” (8).
“Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of easily halved a life can become” (54). Cf. Greene. Ugh.
Her job is “grief management” (63)—fully Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness: “Her job, in the main, was a joke” (id.). “If people wanted to merchandise anguish and death, and if others wished to have their suffering managed for them, everybody could at least go about it with a measure of discretion and taste” (id). Eww. However: market specialization is one of capitalism’ principle merits—illiberal therefore to object to “grief management”?
After the attack, both wife and husband bugger off their separate ways; she considers that “it would be a separation from the world of legalities and claims” (88) whereas as he notes that “their separations were intense” (89).
‘Terrorist’ group wants to “disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money,” the “system that we believe is their secret power” (107). So, some overlap with the concerns of Falling Man, The Names, and Mao II. Overlap with Libra to the extent one loser maybe knows LHO and was in NOLA.
Some cool observations: “One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it” (107), which I’ve long though is kinda true about Marxism, which perhaps diagnosed somethings about capitalism and then, at least in its classical formulation, did not take into account directly the effect of the publication of that diagnosis on both lefty revolutionaries (who might perhaps seize power prematurely) as well as state power (which might take cognizance thereof and develop appropriate agambenian countermeasures). Revolutionaries are silly insofar as “the only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness” (108), which is not a worthy leftwing thesis.
Slick observation: “watched her dress, an itemizing of erotic truths” (125). Cool sex scenes: “The aspect and character of these body parts, the names, the liquid friction. Dimly she sought phrases for these configurations” (167).
Recommended for those with a desire to compile, wine drinkers whose cellar was auctioned off to pay taxes on the estate, and readers who find that terror is purification.
Thsi novel is perhaps the master text for the DeLillo cocked-up marriage, structuring all subsequent cocked-up marriages in his writings. Wife, for instance, “found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party” (70).
Couple “traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral décor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity” (15).
The local setting, NYC, “functioned on principles of intimidation” (24):
But unexpectedly it slowed as she began to cross. The driver had one hand on the wheel, his left, and sat with much of his back resting against the door. He was virtually facing her and she was moving directly toward him. She saw through the window that his legs were well apart, left foot apparently on the brake. His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing. […] The driver looked directly art her, then glanced at his hand. […] She felt acute humiliation, a sure knowledge of having been reduced in worth. […] In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer. To see the offer made was to accept, automatically. He’d taken her into his car and driven to some freight terminal across the river, where he’d parked near an outbuilding with broken windows. There he’d taught her his way of speaking, his beliefs and customs, the names of his mother and father. Having done this, he no longer needed to put hands upon her. They were part of each other now. She carried him like a dead beetle in her purse. (24-5)The occurrence is not gendered, though the internal response is:
Lyle stepped out of the booth and headed down Lexington. It was late. A car turned toward him as he moved off the curb. The driver braked, a man in his thirties, sitting forward a bit, head tilted toward Lyle, inquisitively, one had between his thighs, bunching up fabric and everything beneath it. Clearly a presentation was being made. Lyle, who was standing directly under a streetlight, averted his eyes, looking out over the top of the car as if at some compelling sight in a third-story window across the street, until the man finally drove off. (161)He otherwise observes that in the “financial district,” at least, “everything tended to edge beyond acceptability” (27)—“by the close of trading, people would be looking for places to hide” (id.). This was a “test environment for extreme states of mind” (id.), “elements filtering in,” “infiltrators in the district,” “living rags [!]”, what Agamben might regard as zoe, the “bare life” identified by Aristotle and made Real in 20th century concentration camps: “the use of madness and squalor as texts in the denunciation of capitalism did not strike him as fitting here, despite appearances. IT was something else these men and women come to mean [NB: the character’s semiurgical nihilism—the primary touchstone of bios confronting zoe?] shouting, trailing vomit on their feet. (27-8) Novel’s precipitating event is an armed attack on stock exchange workers. She asks him “Puerto Ricans again?” (33) (a reference to Leninist FALN, likely, which had probably committed at least eight bombings in New York City between 1974 and the time this novel was published in 1977), and he replies, while undressing her,
I wouldn’t say porta rickens. I wouldn’t want to say coloreds or any of the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle, not knowing, you see, that the capitalist system and the power structure and pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It’s not an easy matter, being the oppressor. A lot of work involved. Hard unglamorous day-to-day toil. Pounding the pavement. Checking records and files. Making phone call after phone call. Successful oppression depends on this. So I would say in conclusion that they are struggling against the struggle. (34)This colloquy leads seamlessly into hard fucking,
It is time to ‘perform,’ he thought. She would have to be ‘satisfied.’ He would have to ‘service’ her. They would make efforts to ‘interact.’ (35)Despite the radical alterity of his expectations, “the room was closed off to the street’s sparse evening, the hour of thoughtful noises, when everything is interim” (34), when “she twisted into him, their solitude become a sheltering” (35).
She “is on the edge of something” (36)—and it is difficult to avoid the inference provided by stock exchange workers who “didn’t drift beyond the margins of things” (28) and “infiltrators,” supra, who did drift beyond the margin, and only in drifting beyond the margin began to exist, for zoe terrorist “never existed before today” (30). Revealed that she is or becomes a true nihilist who can’t abide “the idea of tomorrow” (42). Dunno about these two: “To the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul” (8).
“Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of easily halved a life can become” (54). Cf. Greene. Ugh.
Her job is “grief management” (63)—fully Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness: “Her job, in the main, was a joke” (id.). “If people wanted to merchandise anguish and death, and if others wished to have their suffering managed for them, everybody could at least go about it with a measure of discretion and taste” (id). Eww. However: market specialization is one of capitalism’ principle merits—illiberal therefore to object to “grief management”?
After the attack, both wife and husband bugger off their separate ways; she considers that “it would be a separation from the world of legalities and claims” (88) whereas as he notes that “their separations were intense” (89).
‘Terrorist’ group wants to “disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money,” the “system that we believe is their secret power” (107). So, some overlap with the concerns of Falling Man, The Names, and Mao II. Overlap with Libra to the extent one loser maybe knows LHO and was in NOLA.
Some cool observations: “One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it” (107), which I’ve long though is kinda true about Marxism, which perhaps diagnosed somethings about capitalism and then, at least in its classical formulation, did not take into account directly the effect of the publication of that diagnosis on both lefty revolutionaries (who might perhaps seize power prematurely) as well as state power (which might take cognizance thereof and develop appropriate agambenian countermeasures). Revolutionaries are silly insofar as “the only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness” (108), which is not a worthy leftwing thesis.
Slick observation: “watched her dress, an itemizing of erotic truths” (125). Cool sex scenes: “The aspect and character of these body parts, the names, the liquid friction. Dimly she sought phrases for these configurations” (167).
Recommended for those with a desire to compile, wine drinkers whose cellar was auctioned off to pay taxes on the estate, and readers who find that terror is purification.
October 22, 2022
Quinto romanzo di DeLillo, uscito nel 1977. Dove si parla di terrorismo anticapitalistico, Borsa di New York, gestione del dolore, World Trade Center, relazioni e tradimenti. Personaggi oscuri, fughe di informazioni, isteria, paure.
È una recita di puro stile, in cui la trama, gli equilibri tra i protagonisti e le connessioni causa/effetto sono una questione marginale. L’intro (Il film) e l’outro (Il motel) sono micidiali. Resta il migliore nel trasformare la lingua da mezzo a oggetto della narrazione.
Marco Trainini nel suo saggio monografico (Don Delillo, Castelvecchi 2016) la definisce l’opera meno riuscita del primo decennio, puro giocattolo narrativo. Consiglia invece il successivo Running Dog, che mi procurerò in fretta.
Adatto ai fan, quindi a me.
[77/100]
Frasario minimo/
Ø A Pammy le torri non sembravano strutture permanenti. Nonostante la loro mole non erano piú consistenti di una qualsiasi distorsione di luce.
Ø La cosa fondamentale è dar l’impressione di essere sul punto di fare qualcosa.
Ø Mi piace quel quartiere, nonostante la gente dica Queens, cosa, dove, mio Dio. È metafisico.
Ø – Non c’è niente là fuori. Ecco cosa voglio dire. Tutti se ne sono andati. Senti le porte che sbattono nel vento. Gli scienziati sono disorientati.
Ø L’intervistatrice fece delle domande sui colori e le forme, sulla solitudine tra le stelle.
Ø – Ma come fate a chiacchierare la mattina, – disse Pammy. – A fare paralleli, analogie, per quanto stupidi siano, subito dopo il risveglio. Io riesco a malapena ad aprire la bocca per bere.
Ø Sembrava sprofondare nel terreno, diventando sempre piú piccolo, in qualche modo piú pericoloso, come se non avesse piú quella forza aggregante, quella concentrazione che impedisce alle persone di disintegrarsi.
Ø In quei momenti riuscí a udire, o ad avvertire, sotto alle mani, un rombo costante, pressante, uno spazio oceanico, la sua conchiglia, il suo nucleo di mondo infantile, tutte cose morbide, il pacifico ronzio di animali al sole. Quando espirò il rombo c’era ancora. Aveva creduto che i due fenomeni fossero legati.
È una recita di puro stile, in cui la trama, gli equilibri tra i protagonisti e le connessioni causa/effetto sono una questione marginale. L’intro (Il film) e l’outro (Il motel) sono micidiali. Resta il migliore nel trasformare la lingua da mezzo a oggetto della narrazione.
Marco Trainini nel suo saggio monografico (Don Delillo, Castelvecchi 2016) la definisce l’opera meno riuscita del primo decennio, puro giocattolo narrativo. Consiglia invece il successivo Running Dog, che mi procurerò in fretta.
Adatto ai fan, quindi a me.
[77/100]
Frasario minimo/
Ø A Pammy le torri non sembravano strutture permanenti. Nonostante la loro mole non erano piú consistenti di una qualsiasi distorsione di luce.
Ø La cosa fondamentale è dar l’impressione di essere sul punto di fare qualcosa.
Ø Mi piace quel quartiere, nonostante la gente dica Queens, cosa, dove, mio Dio. È metafisico.
Ø – Non c’è niente là fuori. Ecco cosa voglio dire. Tutti se ne sono andati. Senti le porte che sbattono nel vento. Gli scienziati sono disorientati.
Ø L’intervistatrice fece delle domande sui colori e le forme, sulla solitudine tra le stelle.
Ø – Ma come fate a chiacchierare la mattina, – disse Pammy. – A fare paralleli, analogie, per quanto stupidi siano, subito dopo il risveglio. Io riesco a malapena ad aprire la bocca per bere.
Ø Sembrava sprofondare nel terreno, diventando sempre piú piccolo, in qualche modo piú pericoloso, come se non avesse piú quella forza aggregante, quella concentrazione che impedisce alle persone di disintegrarsi.
Ø In quei momenti riuscí a udire, o ad avvertire, sotto alle mani, un rombo costante, pressante, uno spazio oceanico, la sua conchiglia, il suo nucleo di mondo infantile, tutte cose morbide, il pacifico ronzio di animali al sole. Quando espirò il rombo c’era ancora. Aveva creduto che i due fenomeni fossero legati.
May 5, 2022
50 pages in i proclaimed this as the most incredible thing i'd read then some people said some clever more critical things and i felt embarrassed but really i'm affected i'm touched. the language here is so unemotional but so affective, like (simile:) each sentence is a cold or sterile container that holds years of pathetic thought and feeling ... i love the bits about pammy's fruit and lyle's television and their philosophical sex (with others) and the weird fractured identities of the terrorists. but elise's comment on mao ii is sticking with me, both 'soft and guileless characters' and 'intellectual circlejerks'. i found massive Underworld at the wharf, that's a bit intimidating but on the list
August 31, 2011
I've read Underworld and White Noise and figured that I understood Delillo -- why people consider him one of teh great American authors. I was not sure if I whole heartedly agreed. And then, in an interview with The Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen mention The Players as possibly Delillo's best work.
And, havng read this book I understand much more why people love Delillo. He pushes the edge of the story so that he can further investigate characters. And this book showed a more beautiful, more poetic type of writing from Delillo than the other books -- with lines that you want to carry around with you forever.
And, havng read this book I understand much more why people love Delillo. He pushes the edge of the story so that he can further investigate characters. And this book showed a more beautiful, more poetic type of writing from Delillo than the other books -- with lines that you want to carry around with you forever.
August 22, 2022
It feels weird to slam DeLillo here for things I'd praise him for elsewhere, since he creates the usual DeLillo world and I know not to hold that vision of society to anyone's terms except his. Yet it's a world I can't take even on its own terms, too divorced, too free of motive or consequence to divest in as anything but a thought experiment. Not as dull as Point Omega or Falling Man, with just the right DeLillo touches in the dialog, but too often my answer to this novel is "who cares?" This guy's early period had a few hidden gems, but Players isn't one of them.
July 11, 2019
один із найкращих романів ДД. історія про сім'ю, яка шукала звільнення від рутини й знайшла гея (що спалює себе) і панянку з ділдо (яка просто спить), і все це на тлі терористичної змови підірвати біржу задля того, щоб знищити гроші як ідею. а ще тут уперше Делілло дуже докладно описує секс як відчуження і перемикання каналів як мастурбацію. шикарний роман.
August 12, 2016
Pammy and Lyle are bored. It's not that they have nothing to do, it's that routine is killing them. They want their lives to change; and when that happens, they pay the price.
![Profile Image for Jeffrey Paris [was Infinite Tasks].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1280795564i%2F4099259._UX200_CR0%2C10%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
January 5, 2014
If you need clear-cut motivational structures for your literary characters, avoid this book. If, on the other hand, you think that finding oneself in the midst of a situation that carries you, wave-like, is a definitive mode of human existence, you are probably enough of a fan of DeLillo that no caution is necessary.
Even so, this is a challenging read, since it does not age so well as Great Jones Street or Endzone. Consider it a stopping point on the way to Mao II, if you like. With a lot of sex. And objects.
Even so, this is a challenging read, since it does not age so well as Great Jones Street or Endzone. Consider it a stopping point on the way to Mao II, if you like. With a lot of sex. And objects.
September 8, 2019
Whatever else a DeLillo novel is about it is always about language, how we make use of it, what it means, and what we think it means. And, perhaps no other novelist since Nabokov is as masterful with language.
June 16, 2015
Now, this here's a story about Lyle and Pammy Wynant. Cute couple, living in New York City. They've been together a long time. It's almost like they have their own language together.
"Pant, pant."
"Out of shape."
"Way out of shape," she said. "You wouldn't believe what's inside this body. What a little old dried-up crone. It's down there, hear it? Bang crash, you son of a bitch. I'd like to call someone. Run over a dog, truck, and get shot by its owner, oompty boom."
"Right, complain."
"Sympathize or you can't read my book that I purchased."
"I'm saying complain. Call Broadway Maintenance. They'll come with a light bulb next Tuesdsay."
Lyle works on Wall Street, Pammy for a company called the Grief Management Council. They work in opposite towers of the World Trade Center. They still like each other fine, and the sex is great, but there's something missing.
"Pammy & Lyle didn’t go out much anymore. They used to spend a lot of time discovering restaurants. They traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral décor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity. They went clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised. On spring weekends they bought plants at greenhouses in the suburbs and went to boatyards on City Island or the North Shore to help friends get their modest yachts seaworthy. Gradually their range diminished. Even movies, double features in the chandeliered urinals of upper Broadway, no longer tempted them. What seemed missing was the desire to compile." [emphasis mine]
In this, his tidy (180 page) follow-up to his mammoth and hyper-complex Ratner's Star, Delillo starts out picking and poking at the micro-fine details of the habits and longings of the long-term but detached urban couple. In comparison with Ratner's Star, which feels like the last of Delillo Phase I, Players is the start of the interpersonal era, smaller plots and less absurdity and more emphasis on sharp dialogue and realistic moments amidst unlikely scenarios.
As I said, Lyle works on Wall Street, working amidst what Delillo calls "a roar of money." In figures that seem to presage his great 2003 book Cosmopolis, Lyle maps out the deep, endless longing at the heart of the financial sector, read out as he looks at a strip of ticker-tape: "Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night."
If you like this side of Delillo, just frantic descriptions of market forces and shadow power-sources, what Lyle calls "an occult theory of money," you'll love this one. At the same time, this is the start of Delillo the terrorist analyzer. In a lot of ways, this is an early trial balloon for Mao II and its endless ruminations on the terrorist as the one thing that market forces can't co-opt. It's here, too:
"In and out, the cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness."
and
"Terror is purification. When you set out to rid a society of repressive elements, you immediately become a target yourself, for all sorts of people. There’s nobody who mightn’t conceivably stick it to you. Being killed, or betrayed, sometimes seems the point of it all."
After seeing one of his co-workers gunned down on the stock floor (or, rather, missing the event by five minutes), Lyle becomes intrigued by a woman who is picked up outside his office once a week by a pair of shady people in a big car. He asks to go with her, maybe to flirt, or maybe to get some new energy into his life.
Meanwhile, Pammy prepares to go on vacation to Maine with a gay co-worker and his romantic partner. She's looking forward to getting out of the city, but once she's out, she has the same complaint I think a lot of us have in this situation:
"That’s all we do here. We plan meals at great length with all this business about fresh vegetables, fresh lobster, country-fresh eggs, this bullshit routine. We talk about it, right? Then we actually plan it, the specifics. Then we make it. Then we sit down and eat it, talking about it all the while."
Ha ha ha. That paragraph above sounds like it could have been written this year, doesn't it? Just replace "Farm Fresh" with "Farm-to-Table." Well done.
Delillo's original intention was to make a book about the ways we talk to each other in relationships, the private language we create, but he said he got diverted along the way. The diversion is a tryst between Pammy and the partner of her co-worker, while Lyle's diversion carries more and weirder consequences. The woman who he sees outside his office is a spy for a terrorist organization. The man who was shot was the previous disaffected Wall Street drone who decided to Make A Difference. When he got cold feet, he was neutralized by his own people. Now it's Lyle's turn.
I like more of this book than I don't. It's a leap forward in style and humor from the first four, and it's also not bogged down in ponderous structural formalism like Ratner's Star. It hatches the embryonic forms of certain theories and subjects that will become recurring motifs for the rest of his career. But it's not perfect. The storyline with Pammy and her gay couple friends up in Maine is a bit slight against the terrorist main plot, and suffers from some dated "Whoops, I thought I was gay, but maybe not!" situational humor. Lyle's double-dealings with the terrorists, as well as his counter-spying with another organization, got really bogged down and confusing after a while, to no real benefit. It's similar to the end of his next book, Running Dog, in which the spying agencies all start converging on one another, entangling themselves so haphazardly, they almost neutralize. Delillo gets much better at orchestrating these kinds of dense plots a bit later, with The Names, and, especially, with Libra. But for now, it's confusing enough to require slow re-reads, but not important enough to bother.
All that being said, Players is probably my vote for his best book of the '70s, probably because it reads so much like his books from the '80s. A lot of the things that bug me about the earlier books -- the ponderousness, the obsession with mocking health food and holistic doctors and other '70s tropes, the endings that just kind of veer off into absurdity, are all downplayed in favor of sharper dialogue, heavier stakes, better-drawn characters, and all-around better plotting. And as I said, it's a real harbinger of better things to come. If you like White Noise or Mao II or Cosmopolis, you should definitely give this dark-horse Delillo book a chance. At the very least, grab the book from your local bookstore and read the prologue. That oughtta grab you.
"Pant, pant."
"Out of shape."
"Way out of shape," she said. "You wouldn't believe what's inside this body. What a little old dried-up crone. It's down there, hear it? Bang crash, you son of a bitch. I'd like to call someone. Run over a dog, truck, and get shot by its owner, oompty boom."
"Right, complain."
"Sympathize or you can't read my book that I purchased."
"I'm saying complain. Call Broadway Maintenance. They'll come with a light bulb next Tuesdsay."
Lyle works on Wall Street, Pammy for a company called the Grief Management Council. They work in opposite towers of the World Trade Center. They still like each other fine, and the sex is great, but there's something missing.
"Pammy & Lyle didn’t go out much anymore. They used to spend a lot of time discovering restaurants. They traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral décor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity. They went clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised. On spring weekends they bought plants at greenhouses in the suburbs and went to boatyards on City Island or the North Shore to help friends get their modest yachts seaworthy. Gradually their range diminished. Even movies, double features in the chandeliered urinals of upper Broadway, no longer tempted them. What seemed missing was the desire to compile." [emphasis mine]
In this, his tidy (180 page) follow-up to his mammoth and hyper-complex Ratner's Star, Delillo starts out picking and poking at the micro-fine details of the habits and longings of the long-term but detached urban couple. In comparison with Ratner's Star, which feels like the last of Delillo Phase I, Players is the start of the interpersonal era, smaller plots and less absurdity and more emphasis on sharp dialogue and realistic moments amidst unlikely scenarios.
As I said, Lyle works on Wall Street, working amidst what Delillo calls "a roar of money." In figures that seem to presage his great 2003 book Cosmopolis, Lyle maps out the deep, endless longing at the heart of the financial sector, read out as he looks at a strip of ticker-tape: "Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night."
If you like this side of Delillo, just frantic descriptions of market forces and shadow power-sources, what Lyle calls "an occult theory of money," you'll love this one. At the same time, this is the start of Delillo the terrorist analyzer. In a lot of ways, this is an early trial balloon for Mao II and its endless ruminations on the terrorist as the one thing that market forces can't co-opt. It's here, too:
"In and out, the cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness."
and
"Terror is purification. When you set out to rid a society of repressive elements, you immediately become a target yourself, for all sorts of people. There’s nobody who mightn’t conceivably stick it to you. Being killed, or betrayed, sometimes seems the point of it all."
After seeing one of his co-workers gunned down on the stock floor (or, rather, missing the event by five minutes), Lyle becomes intrigued by a woman who is picked up outside his office once a week by a pair of shady people in a big car. He asks to go with her, maybe to flirt, or maybe to get some new energy into his life.
Meanwhile, Pammy prepares to go on vacation to Maine with a gay co-worker and his romantic partner. She's looking forward to getting out of the city, but once she's out, she has the same complaint I think a lot of us have in this situation:
"That’s all we do here. We plan meals at great length with all this business about fresh vegetables, fresh lobster, country-fresh eggs, this bullshit routine. We talk about it, right? Then we actually plan it, the specifics. Then we make it. Then we sit down and eat it, talking about it all the while."
Ha ha ha. That paragraph above sounds like it could have been written this year, doesn't it? Just replace "Farm Fresh" with "Farm-to-Table." Well done.
Delillo's original intention was to make a book about the ways we talk to each other in relationships, the private language we create, but he said he got diverted along the way. The diversion is a tryst between Pammy and the partner of her co-worker, while Lyle's diversion carries more and weirder consequences. The woman who he sees outside his office is a spy for a terrorist organization. The man who was shot was the previous disaffected Wall Street drone who decided to Make A Difference. When he got cold feet, he was neutralized by his own people. Now it's Lyle's turn.
I like more of this book than I don't. It's a leap forward in style and humor from the first four, and it's also not bogged down in ponderous structural formalism like Ratner's Star. It hatches the embryonic forms of certain theories and subjects that will become recurring motifs for the rest of his career. But it's not perfect. The storyline with Pammy and her gay couple friends up in Maine is a bit slight against the terrorist main plot, and suffers from some dated "Whoops, I thought I was gay, but maybe not!" situational humor. Lyle's double-dealings with the terrorists, as well as his counter-spying with another organization, got really bogged down and confusing after a while, to no real benefit. It's similar to the end of his next book, Running Dog, in which the spying agencies all start converging on one another, entangling themselves so haphazardly, they almost neutralize. Delillo gets much better at orchestrating these kinds of dense plots a bit later, with The Names, and, especially, with Libra. But for now, it's confusing enough to require slow re-reads, but not important enough to bother.
All that being said, Players is probably my vote for his best book of the '70s, probably because it reads so much like his books from the '80s. A lot of the things that bug me about the earlier books -- the ponderousness, the obsession with mocking health food and holistic doctors and other '70s tropes, the endings that just kind of veer off into absurdity, are all downplayed in favor of sharper dialogue, heavier stakes, better-drawn characters, and all-around better plotting. And as I said, it's a real harbinger of better things to come. If you like White Noise or Mao II or Cosmopolis, you should definitely give this dark-horse Delillo book a chance. At the very least, grab the book from your local bookstore and read the prologue. That oughtta grab you.
January 26, 2025
goes to show the silly logic of my goodreads ratings... this book is really just one for the fans, but it's flawless in its own way. i can't not give it five stars bc i was mentally in lockstep with DD for every sentence. it's a joy. insane that he has so many more books that are surely so much better that i haven't read yet, but will soon, finally <3
November 13, 2021
DeLillo fest 2021/2022. For some unknown reason this is the lone DeLillo novel I hadn’t read. Shame on me. Loneliness, disruption, tumultuous relationships. All part of the American day. It’s breezy 200 pages is anything but simple. Loved.
May 15, 2015
Players is a novel that could have been written last year but was written in 1977. It's set in New York, Maine, and ultimately the outskirts of Toronto. In New York Pam works in the World Trade Center and has premonitions that buildings like this are too tall, fragile, inviting of destruction. Lyle works on Wall Street, where he is present during an office murder and ineffective bombing attempt. So...terrorists. And they invite him into their world, and he is bored and curious enough to accept, though he hedges his bets by loosely informing the CIA what's going on.
Meanwhile Pam goes to Maine with two homosexual friends and has a sexual encounter with one of them, who apparently tips over into self-destructiveness, committing suicide.
And Lyle reencounters the feminine lure that drew him into the idea of getting the bombing right, but for reasons obscure to me, he is left dangling in a motel with her, where she has taunted him with a plastic dildo. Hmmmm.
Having written this, I'm uncertain whether you will want to read Players, but that would be a mistake. Curiously DeLillo wrote somewhat better forty years ago than he does now. The novel has a luscious abstraction to it, a sensuousness, a fine phrasing and coolness that is not so cool as to be frigid and lifeless. DeLillo captures the vagueness of New York's atmosphere, its suggestiveness, the cascades of florescence, the shadows at the back of the bar, the mysteries of touch, sweat, stride, bodies that are beautiful to look at and bodies that are not beautiful but are powerful, wide-hipped and thick-thighed.
As remains the case, DeLillo is persistently and tenaciously skeptical of plot. In some senses, this is a weakness, but I tend to think plot is overrated in fiction. What fiction offers best is an opening onto new vistas, not a set of fixed conclusions. People are that way because they are so complex and ultimately intangible, and characters are that way, too. They think and at the same time don't know what else they are thinking and end up saying something else altogether. They joke and are serious. They strain to master irony because mystery is too hard. DeLillo is effortlessly good at this sort of thing. I spent some time pondering his style and found that its pace came from its punchy short sentences punctuated by verbless sentences. Like this. And that.
Ultimately DeLillo's constant subject has been the conspiracy of modernity that masquerades as harmless entropy but actually is full of intent. Someone knows what's going on. Not the reader, not the characters, not DeLillo. But someone. Out there. Has a clue.
Meanwhile Pam goes to Maine with two homosexual friends and has a sexual encounter with one of them, who apparently tips over into self-destructiveness, committing suicide.
And Lyle reencounters the feminine lure that drew him into the idea of getting the bombing right, but for reasons obscure to me, he is left dangling in a motel with her, where she has taunted him with a plastic dildo. Hmmmm.
Having written this, I'm uncertain whether you will want to read Players, but that would be a mistake. Curiously DeLillo wrote somewhat better forty years ago than he does now. The novel has a luscious abstraction to it, a sensuousness, a fine phrasing and coolness that is not so cool as to be frigid and lifeless. DeLillo captures the vagueness of New York's atmosphere, its suggestiveness, the cascades of florescence, the shadows at the back of the bar, the mysteries of touch, sweat, stride, bodies that are beautiful to look at and bodies that are not beautiful but are powerful, wide-hipped and thick-thighed.
As remains the case, DeLillo is persistently and tenaciously skeptical of plot. In some senses, this is a weakness, but I tend to think plot is overrated in fiction. What fiction offers best is an opening onto new vistas, not a set of fixed conclusions. People are that way because they are so complex and ultimately intangible, and characters are that way, too. They think and at the same time don't know what else they are thinking and end up saying something else altogether. They joke and are serious. They strain to master irony because mystery is too hard. DeLillo is effortlessly good at this sort of thing. I spent some time pondering his style and found that its pace came from its punchy short sentences punctuated by verbless sentences. Like this. And that.
Ultimately DeLillo's constant subject has been the conspiracy of modernity that masquerades as harmless entropy but actually is full of intent. Someone knows what's going on. Not the reader, not the characters, not DeLillo. But someone. Out there. Has a clue.
May 16, 2018
Don DeLillo übt sich als Autor eines Thrillers, demontiert gleichzeitig aber auch alle Konventionen dieses Genres - ja, an "Spieler" ist nichts ganz einfach. Aber was habe ich von einem Buch dieses Autors auch erwartet, sprengt er mit seiner Sprache und seinen Inhalten doch immer wieder die Gewohnheiten. Bei diesem Frühwerk aus dem Jahre 1977 wollte sich für mich aber kein Genuss einstellen. Die Figuren agieren zwar wunderbar entrückt in ihrer kapitalistischen Langeweile, doch das Innenleben und die äusseren Handlungen verbinden sich zu selten zu einem stimmigen Ganzen.
So wird die Geschichte um Terrorhandlungen, emotionale Sinnsuchung und Ausbruch der Langeweile nie ganz durchschaubar und endet abrupt. Ob es hilft, dass man bei der Handlung automatisch an 9/11 denkt, das kann ich nicht beurteilen - wohl aber, dass mich diese Erzählung nie wirklich fesseln konnte.
So wird die Geschichte um Terrorhandlungen, emotionale Sinnsuchung und Ausbruch der Langeweile nie ganz durchschaubar und endet abrupt. Ob es hilft, dass man bei der Handlung automatisch an 9/11 denkt, das kann ich nicht beurteilen - wohl aber, dass mich diese Erzählung nie wirklich fesseln konnte.
January 10, 2021
DeLillo, çevreye, teknolojiye ve toplumsal olaylara duyarsız kalmayan bir yazar. Yaşadığımız çevrenin ve iş hayatının hayatlarımızı nasıl şekillendirdiğine dikkat çekiyor genelde. Oyuncular romanında da New York gibi metropolitan bir şehirde sıkışıp kalmış bir çifte odaklanıyor. Pammy ve Lyle. Hayatlarının bu anlamsız boşluğundan sıkılarak ayrı ayrı maceralara atılacaklardır.
Romanı özetleyen tek cümle: “Hakkında başkaca hiçbir şey bilmiyoruz.” Modern insanın yaşamlarına, tutkularına, isteklerine ve arzularına akıl sır ermez. Pammy ve Lyle çifti de bu boğucu yaşantının kurbanlarından ikisi.
Bayılarak okuduğunu söyleyemem kesinlikle, sıkıldığım yerler oldu ama DeLillo her zamanki gibi dilinin, anlatımının roman yazmaya nasıl elverişli olduğunu kanıtlamış. DeLillo okumaya devam...
Romanı özetleyen tek cümle: “Hakkında başkaca hiçbir şey bilmiyoruz.” Modern insanın yaşamlarına, tutkularına, isteklerine ve arzularına akıl sır ermez. Pammy ve Lyle çifti de bu boğucu yaşantının kurbanlarından ikisi.
Bayılarak okuduğunu söyleyemem kesinlikle, sıkıldığım yerler oldu ama DeLillo her zamanki gibi dilinin, anlatımının roman yazmaya nasıl elverişli olduğunu kanıtlamış. DeLillo okumaya devam...
December 15, 2025
https://youtu.be/hXmjgJ7vfdU?si=Vwhbz...
This book closes out DeLillo’s early period, when his novels were really extended metaphors, and it presages some of the themes that would consume his subsequent novels. Ideas from Libra and Underworld are present here, 10-20 years before he would publish those books. It is probably best read after those stronger novel, a bit like looking at the draft plans for a major sculpture.
This book closes out DeLillo’s early period, when his novels were really extended metaphors, and it presages some of the themes that would consume his subsequent novels. Ideas from Libra and Underworld are present here, 10-20 years before he would publish those books. It is probably best read after those stronger novel, a bit like looking at the draft plans for a major sculpture.
January 2, 2019
A shooting at the New York Stock Exchange offers a young couple a welcome excuse to escape from their boring everyday routines.
A cross between a postmodern version of The Great Gatsby and a Leonard Cohen song, the novel had some dark, satirical, and profound moments but, overall, it felt like I wasn’t supposed to care about any of it, and I didn’t.
A cross between a postmodern version of The Great Gatsby and a Leonard Cohen song, the novel had some dark, satirical, and profound moments but, overall, it felt like I wasn’t supposed to care about any of it, and I didn’t.
July 1, 2018
Dark and depressing, not my cup of tea.
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