The Names by Don DeLillo

It was as thought the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered. He studied the shapes. What was it about the letter-shapes that struck his soul with the force of a tribal mystery? The looped bands, scything curves, the sense of a sacred architecture. What did he almost understand? The mystery of alphabets, the contact with death and oneself, one's other self, all made stonebound with a mallet and chisel. A geography, a gesture of the prayerful hand. He saw the madness, even, the scriptural rage that was present in the lettering, the madness of priests who ruled that members of the menial caste were to have their ear filled with molten lead if they listened to a recitation of the Vedas. It was in those shapes, the secret aspect, the priestly, the aloof, the cruel.

James Axton is a "risk analyst": he travels from city to city--Beirut, Istanbul, Dhaka--turning the threat of political disorder into data for multinational corporations. For the time being, he is centered in Athens, because his ex-wife Kathryn has developed a sudden penchant for archaeological digs and has taken their son, Tap, to a remote island in the Peloponnese. Like many divorced people, James wavers between an intense desire for his ex-wife and a vicious resentment. In the mountains near the dig, a mysterious murder occurs, an old man chosen seemingly at random, but struck down with a pick into which has been carved his own initials. The murder is traced back to a secretive and foreign cult.

The old man is not the first to be killed in this way, nor the last. These strange murders form the background of DeLillo's The Names, and Axton becomes obsessed with them. He's not the only one--he's outpaced in this obsession by the archaeologist and dig director, and an old filmmaker friend who wants to put the murderous cult on camera--but his job affords him a unique opportunity to travel the world learning more about them. It's Axton who discovers the chilling--and strangely mundane--key to the murders: the victims are chosen because they have the same initials as the place in which they were killed.

It's so stupid, so goofy, that only DeLillo could pull it off, quite frankly. And yet The Names is much less funny, and more ponderous, than White Noise, which would be DeLillo's next novel and big breakthrough. If White Noise is a thoroughly modern novel, about the increasingly fraudulent world of soundbites and advertisements in which we find ourselves, The Names is a pointedly ancient novel. The Americans who congregate in Athens are drawn to it as a doorway to the East, to civilizations and religions that promise older, truer ways of knowing and being. The archaeologist becomes obsessed not with merely digging up ancient objects, but ancient alphabets, under the hope, perhaps, that they might be closer to the reality of things. 

But there are deep similarities between The Names and White Noise, too: in White Noise, DeLillo suggests that the entire edifice of modern culture--the television, the movies, the postcards, the radio, the tabloids--exist to stave off the knowledge and fear of death. In The Names, he suggests that this process is not only a modern one, but much older, stretching back to the invention of words and alphabets which seek to describe, and just control, the nature of the world. The actions of the murderous cult, it turns out, are meant to alert us to the absurdity of attempt. By making the alphabet itself the logic of their murders, make "the system equal to the terror" it is meant to control.

The Names is fairly well-regarded, I think, among those who read DeLillo's books. It's not hard to see why; it's tremendously weird and full of small, strange DeLillian moments. I loved Axton's son Tap, a precocious kid still naive enough to believe that mastering knowledge is the same as mastering the world. (He makes an interesting foil to Jack's son Heinrich in White Noise, who has concluded that there is no such thing as true knowledge.) But having White Noise on the brain while I was reading The Names didn't do it any favors. The story itself struck me as rather motionless, and the murder part was a much smaller part of the novel than I anticipated. What was the rest of it? Some churning combativeness with Kathryn, and a lot of talky dinners with friends and associates under the shadow of the Parthenon. The most interesting and promising section comes toward the middle, when Axton and Tap drive up into the primeval Greek mountains, and in which Axton comes face to face with a member of the cult. But in the end, it's the archaeologist who has the last and final encounter with them, and the story is told, deflatingly, second-hand. There's something very DeLillo about that--maybe things only happen in life second-handedly--but I don't know that it worked for me.