Players [Paperback]

It's interesting to turn to early DeLillo and find that in more than a quarter of a century, the themes that drive his work are more contemporary than ever; as Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 1977, "This elegant, highly finished novel does not shrink from suggesting the complicity of Americans with the terrorists they deplore". The complicity is not direct, even though one of the main characters does become directly enmeshed in a terrorist conspiracy the extent of which he is (and we, the readers, are) not fully cognizant. Rather, the complicity is systemic, terrorism the shadow of the bright waves of electronic capitalism, the anti-thesis, lying only as far away as the reverse side of a thin paper page. In this, as in the sparkling quality of his prose, he resembles Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher-provocateur; both quip and incant their way towards revealing alleged secret truths about the real sources of terror and violence, secrets of systems and alienation. This sort of language I think becomes tiring once you've read more than a few of DeLillo's novels -- he is forever talking about inner meanings, hidden truths, darkly wound secrets, et cetera. It isn't the ideas that are misplaced (contemporary novels are rightfully full of conspiracy), but the language; these are the only passages where DeLillo becomes literal rather than figurative, the only places where it seems DeLillo himself comes out from beneath the narrative guise. And to say he doesn't need to is to credit the complete remainder of the text -- it races, clean and honed, from page to page, reading as quickly as ads flashing past on a subway. And as Players unwinds, it nails modern malaise and restlessness, diagnosing the moral disengagement that hasn't stemmed since it was written, and is caustically funny in a way which no-one else I have read can match. I found myself, on finishing, talking to people in the same obscure one-liners used by his characters (of course, he doesn't do character, really; that is part of the diagnosis). The whole thing is pitch-perfect and prescient; he should be compulsory.

You can read the tea leaves of any DeLillo novel and see shadows of the WTC disaster, but they are more striking in this novel than any other. One of the main characters works for a grief counseling company in the WTC, her husband works on Wall Street and is casually drawn into a terrorist plot.

"Players" is heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and Dostoyevsky's "Demons", but its unmistakably DeLillo. The terrorists in this book are not drawn by religious or political zealotry, they are almost offhand about their deadly work. As he will do later in "White Noise", DeLillo places a disaster in the foreground but finds the real drama in domestic interaction, in characters so caught up in lifestyle that the world around them is dull, unimportant.

In my opinion, "Players" is the transitional book in DeLillo's body of work. It is his first book to touch on his obsessive themes in a serious, sustained manner. However, it does not match the virtuosity of his later works. Not until "The Names" did DeLillo hit his stride, so don't expect as polished a book as those written in the 80s and 90s. But for DeLillo fans who have overlooked this work through the years, "Players" is a gruesome treat.

Basically, this is the story of a couple that takes separate vacations. She goes to Maine with her friends, a gay couple, and we read about their interaction. Meanwhile, he is drawn into the political underground, where he becomes fascinated with some vague group's shadowy and violent tactics. DeLillo fans that have read "Mao II" will recognize this "two-path" structure. But this time, the juxtapositions of different family-member experiences didn't really resonate (at least with me) or seem to add up to much. Is this what he's communicating? "It occurred to her that this was the secret life of their involvement. It had always been there, needing only this period of their extended proximity to reveal itself. Disloyalty, spitefulness, petulance."