The Names
Books | Fiction / Family Life / General
3.5
Don DeLillo
Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works. "The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Don DeLillo
Pages
352
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published Date
2012-04-11
ISBN
0307817180 9780307817181
Community ReviewsSee all
"It takes some time to get going, but it's worth the read. The prose is beautiful, the theme of language, the adventurous plot and settings, and the odd characters make this novel engaging, fascinating, and a bit mysterious. I feel it will benefit from a second, and even third reading. It's not as accessible as some of his later, all-time great works (White Noise, for example), but its flashes (as well as substantial moments) of brilliance set us up for DeLillo at the height of his powers in the coming years.
To that last point, there is something about DeLillo's earlier works, ending right around this novel, that feel a bit less focused than his masterworks of the later 80s and 90s, but they're richer than the more sparse novels and novellas of the 2000s and 2010s. This particular novel sits at an interesting moment in his career, right at the cusp of the greatness that has made him the author we know him to be. For that reason, this book may be one of his more overlooked works. "
Chris Legee