The Names

As I had mentioned somewhere a few weeks back, I had taken up Don Delillo's 1982 The Names a month or two back for a rereading. I had read it sometime in the early aughts, clearly before the inception of the blog because there's no review of it here. It had made a strong impression, primarily the tension between the seeming meaningless and interchangeability of the globetrotting group that form's the core of the protagonist's social set in Athens and the raw elementality of the murder cult that becomes his fixation. Given that I must have been reading this around 2002-2003, when I was first getting on airplanes a lot to earn money myself, I must have identified with the first part of the guy's condition, though the places I was traveling (St Louis, Charlotte, etc) were much less adventurous than his (Karachi, Amman...).

But somehow I totally missed that there was also a plot back in Athens, that he was employed by the subcontractor to the CIA and there was another spy that tried to kill him but instead shot somebody else. It's not hard to miss this thread, given the many pages of dialog in clubs and bars where the quotes are never attributed back to speakers, a high modernist trick (think Bely, Woolf, Doblin, Dos Passos, Gaddis probably Joyce too though I never read any of his fat ones). I'm sure I also did it because I was reading a few pages at a time before passing out at night because I was still in the early stages of figuring out how to earn a living in the private sector and was also a parent of a toddler so I was exhausted at the end of each day. 

The novel also features an awesome scene of seduction mixed in where the protagonist (whose name we barely learn by the end of the book) completely talks this married woman into going out in the street and having sex with him. Rare elementality.

I rarely go back and re-read books. There's always so much to read that I haven't read before. But it is good to go back and revisit ones that make a major impression on you at a particular time. Often it's hard to recapture the magic. But sometimes you can track down hints of what it was.

BTW, the Wikipedia summary of The Names is just awful and bears the hallmarks of having been written by a college freshperson. This blog post, at least, is written at the level of a junior or senior.