DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s
By Don DeLillo
Edited by Mark Osteen
Library of America, 2022

Fortunate you, reading a notice here of a book that probably won’t be reviewed elsewhere and that you wouldn’t run across browsing in a bookstore. Actually, a review of three books by the author I consider the greatest living American novelist now being honored, at age 85, by inclusion in the prestigious Library of America, a non-profit publisher whose authoritatively edited collections are most often found in libraries. The three novels here are The Names, White Noise (which won the National Book Award) and Libra (which received the Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize).

The last two are widely known and easily available. I’m pleased that the Library of America decided to republish The Names because this reader of all DeLillo novels thinks it is his best book (after the masterwork Underworld) and thinks, furthermore, that the international experiences the author drew upon in The Names are partly responsible for the achievements of the novels that followed in the 1980s. The narrator of White Noise says, “The American mystery deepens.” While living for three years in Greece and traveling in the Mideast, DeLillo discovered mysteries both deeper (in history) and wider (in culture) than he had registered while living in America. “One of the mysteries of the Aegean,” says the narrator of The Names, “is that things seem more significant than they do elsewhere, deeper, more complete in themselves.” Returned to his native land, DeLillo had new penetrating perspectives on the everyday mysteries of American family life in White Noise and the unsolved mysteries of the Kennedy assassination in Libra.

Mystery became an insistent subject and a fictional purpose. When I interviewed DeLillo in Athens in 1979, while he was working on The Names, he told me a novel should be “a mystery, in part.” That is abundantly true of The Names as it investigates with sometimes perplexing materials nothing less than the cryptic origins of language and its influences on human behavior. If one can call White Noise sociological and Libra political, The Names is anthropological, an inquiry into cross-cultural human fundamentals, a search that begins in the bright-light Aegean and ends in an Indian desert.

Two primary characters in The Names are archaeologists. Here I’ll dig backward and downward into DeLillo’s eighties works. Libra you probably know focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and presents a theory of multiple shooters at the Kennedy assassination. Obsessively researched in the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report, Libra was controversial, the work, the columnist George Will said, of a “bad citizen.” Read now, the novel seems a prescient forecast of our current conspiracy-theory and violence-mongering politics. The violence in Libra is home-grown, made in the USA, but the novel’s ideological complications and conflicts are similar to the complexities of Mideastern politics that DeLillo observed first hand in his travels. Highly informed and constantly inventive, Libra is also a deeply humane book that attempts to understand Oswald who, for a time, resided near DeLillo in the Bronx. If you didn’t live through the murderous American sixties, this Library of America edition is definitely the way to read Libra, for the editor, Mark Osteen, provides excellent notes on crucial details now sixty years historical.

When DeLillo returned from Greece to New York in 1982, he was shocked by the scale of consumption represented again and again by the supermarket in White Noise. If you haven’t read it in a while, it’s good to have it around to compare with the Baumbach-directed film to be released soon. If you missed White Noise in 1983, it is, like Libra, predictive—in this case of America’s glut of information and misinformation, the nation’s media noise. A blended family of six lives in a small Midwestern town where the father, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler studies and the mother teaches posture and eating. Both educators fear early death and resist new dangerous knowledge, particularly of science and media, their older children wield. When an “Airborne Toxic Event” requires evacuation of the family’s home and town, the smug and snug adults are slow to respond, and one of them is exposed to the cancer-causing cloud, exposure that sets in motion a desperate plot to find a medication that supposedly cures the fear of death, now possibly imminent. That drug, if found in the supermarket, would be the epitome of consumerism.

DeLillo’s most humorous novel, White Noise is itself a glut, a clown car of noise-making sub-genres: the suburban family story, the academic novel, the narrative of environmental catastrophe, a murder mystery, all presented both seriously and ironically as if the author were as desperate as the family to find some secure order and stable form. Fittingly, the novel has a series of “conclusions” appropriate to comedy—a moral recovery, a miraculous escape, glorious (but unnatural) sunsets--and one realistic, downbeat ending: shoppers’ confusion in the no-longer saving supermarket. Before White Noise, DeLillo and his novels were often criticized as detached and “chilly.” In White Noise, mystery “deepens” because DeLillo brings to his characters an empathy often lacking in his work before The Names.

The protagonists of DeLillo’s six novels preceding The Names were loners, characters without children. In The Names, the protagonist/narrator, James Axton, has an estranged wife, who has moved from the U.S. to Greece with their son Tap. To be near the boy, Axton follows and gets a job as a risk analyst that sends him through the Mideast, Africa, and Asia. Earlier DeLillo characters were often motivated to escape family and the public world. Axton goes on a quest, inspired by an archaeologist and epigrapher named Owen Brademas, to find a roving cult that seems to be committing murders based on the initials of the victim and their location.

The pattern-matching murders lead Axton and Brademas to ask “how do minds work?” And to probe the deepest mystery: how did the invention of language, of names, affect minds and behavior? A mentee of Brademas tells Axton the purpose of language was always to “subdue” the world. As the cult extends that conceptual violence to arbitrary and extreme ends, the novel wonders if the kind of personal miscommunication found in White Noise and the political propaganda of Libra, as well as the religio-cultural conflicts that pervade The Names, are not deeply rooted—or to change the metaphor: hard-wired—in human minds and their languages. “Subdue and codify,” Axton’s wife tells him.

“Not text, but texture,” Nabokov says in his collection of different texts in Pale Fire. The Names also collects texts—Axton’s list of his character flaws, ancient edicts scratched in stone, Axton’s son’s writing about glossolalia—but it’s DeLillo’s texture in Axton’s acute perceptions and profound speculatons that both advances upon brain-deep mystery and creates a novel that is a “mystery, in part.” White Noise can be read as a postmodern novel, and Libra as a non-fiction novel, two innovative forms in the 1980s. The Names more resembles a Jamesian international novel such as The Ambassadors that relies on leisurely pace, long dialogues, and, paradoxically, linguistic texture to imply what language cannot express.

Compared to the painterly surfaces of The Names, White Noise and Libra are like long-playing recordings of American speech, scrupulous aural artifacts but not the richly composed art of their predecessor. Very early in the novel, when Axton, the employee of a multinational corporation, first arrives in Greece, he says, “Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business.” During Axton’s quest, he meets an informant named Vosdanik, a model for the changing Axton and the author: “Vosdanik was involved in the textures of place, in histories, rituals, dialects, eye and skin color, bearing and stance, endless sets of identifying traits.”

If I have interested you in The Names, you can, of course, just buy a copy, but this Library of America edition has fine-grained notes to all three novels (useful for the geography of The Names), a very detailed timeline of DeLillo’s life and work, his recently written prefaces to each of the novels, and two hard-to-find essays particularly relevant to Libra and DeLillo’s analysis of American violence. The pages of the 1121-page volume are thin and the book is heavy, but—as a person who frequently moves from country to country—I will be thankful to have this compact essential DeLillo in one of my suitcases.

Tom LeClair is the author of "Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist's Essays," published by Mediacs and available at Amazon.