Players [Paperback]

During my rabid consumption of DeLillo's work two years ago, "Players" was the one bump on the road. It was the only one of his books that I could take or leave. It reads like a dry run for "Mao II," another book that lacks the soul and wit that drive DeLillo's best work, "White Noise," "Libra" and "Underworld" and his most underrated book, "End Zone." "Players" was perfectly fine, but leaves an empty feeling. My purpose isn't to condemn this book, only to urge new DeLillo readers not to start with it.

This is Delillo's first masterpiece.Pammy and Lyle Wynant are archetypal late twentieth century Americans. They are successful,good looking,bored,self-obsessed,and alienated from each other and nearly everyone else. So they play. Their games,which turn ominous and deadly, give both of them a look at the heart of darkness in the American dream.

As usual,Delillo's prose cuts like a knife:

"Pammy had to put down the bag of fruit before she could get the door opened. She remembered what had been bothering her,the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing,though,a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind,she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse. She pushed into the apartment."

This description is both mundane and horrifying; hatred of your life as something as common as that thing on your grocery list you forgot to pick up. The novel has many such passages.

Like WHITE NOISE,MAO II,and UNDERWORLD, PLAYERS portrays the devasted spiritual and emotional landscape we live in and helps us recognize ourselves before it's too late.

Either the print was really large in this book or I caught a second wind at some point over the weekend because I literally finished this book in a few hours. Generally Delillo books take me longer than that, since I have to slow down to make sure I absorb anything. In this case, it didn't seem as crucial. This time out, this early novel depicts a married couple (Pammy and Lyle) who are jaded by this crazy, post-modern world and just kind of float through it, doing whatever they want. Their narratives split off early on, with Lyle getting the more interesting plot of becoming tied up with a terrorist organization after seeing a man shot on the Stock Exchange floor . . . he seems to do it mostly out of boredom or vague interest and what strikes me as funny during it is how he seems to be playing triple agent, informing on the organization while telling the organization that he's talking to the authorities, and nobody seems to care either way. I don't know if it was meant to be funny but I found it hilarious. Meanwhile, Pammy gets relegated to the "B" plot, going up to Maine with a gay couple that she works with and basically exploring the nature of relationships, however Delillo seems to know that nobody really cares about this plot, as he devotes short chapters to it, while Lyle gets comparitively sprawling ones. Lyle seems to be the more compelling character, much like Updike's Rabbit, he gets a lot of mileage out of being a clueless jerk but a consistent and generally well-meaning one, even his dialogue where he sort of narrates himself ("What's going on, the guy said" is a paraphrased example) is used sparingly enough that's quirky, although when he and Pammy do it to each other it seems overtly cute. Otherwise, the scenes between the couple are well done, you get the sense that they do like each other, but it's all buried under the crushing ennui of the age. Delillo's ultimate point seems to be about how soul numbing modern life has become, that people like Pammy and Lyle can just do whatever they want and move through life without consequences because they just don't care (and while they seem oblivious to their own actions sometimes, they don't strike me as sociopaths) . . . Delillo gives us plenty of examples and his separation of the two of them is meant to juxtapose their situations and have us draw deeper meaning from said situations, but either he didn't give us reasons to connect them or I'm just dense. That goes for the whole book, I know there's a point in there somewhere but for the life of me, it's just out of my grasp. So can I recommend it? Sure, Delillo's writing is sharp as ever and generally most pages either have a scene or a line or two worth reading simply for the craft involved in putting the words together. To borrow a cliche, the man could novelize the phone book and at least make it interesting reading. And as I mentioned before, it's short. By the time you start to tire of it, it's over. Wouldn't it be better if everything was like that?