The Names by Don DeLillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Vaulting into eternity ... well perhaps not that high

Pushing the logic of hippiedom to its extreme, The Names suggests an end point - a nihilistic cult whose reason for being is to murder people whose initials correspond to the names of their locations. Bizarre, senseless, and intentionally without benefit to anyone. Helter Skelter played out in the regions that produced Western civilization, Greece and the Middle East.

This cult fascinates James, a member of the international financial gang whose roles are just about as rational as those of the cultists; and Frank, a film-maker, who wants to exploit as much irrationality as he can; and Owen, an academic who is unaccountably swept into the spiritual maelstrom of the Indian branch of the cult. Who can blame any of them? Their lives are an empty wandering without any conscious intention. Only the bizarre and senseless seems to make any sense. They obsessively move toward the cult but with nothing as directive as desire. The cult is a kind of tar baby, an inert web, that traps the protagonists for no point whatsoever.

Everyone sounds the same in The Names, men, women, children, adults, bankers and archaeologists. Without 'he saids, she saids' it is often difficult to follow conversations. And since DeLillo doesn't do reflective internal dialogue except to confuse, it's also difficult to decipher motivations. Why do couples stay together, or not? Why do the men persist in their questionable businesses and resist returning to America? What attracts his characters to the distributed cult? DeLillo's not saying.

Then there are the literary non-sequiturs. "It never happens until it happens again. Then it never happened." Does this phrase have meaning? "There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravens." I should think artlessness was implied by such a scene, which has no obvious connection to trust or distrust. Or "In this century, the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth century writer that he aspires to madness." This would certainly qualify for the Pseuds Corner section of Private Eye.

My problem is that I think I share much of DeLillo's experience of the world and his gripes about corporate life, American interference in the world and the casual destructiveness of global finance. But I can't place myself anywhere in his writing. I get lost, as if I've become one of his rootless, bored, superficial characters who is "vaulting into eternity." I suppose this is his intention. If so I'm left with the question 'Why?'.

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