Rewarding fortitude

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 27

Rewarding fortitude

The Names. By Don DeLlllo. Picador, 1987. pp 339. $15.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Sharon Hunter). Don DeLlllo is an American author, born and bred iri' New York — the writer of seven novels and the reciever of several prestigious American literary awards. “The Names” was first published in 1983 and has appeared in paperback after a resurgence in DeLino’s popularity. “The Names” has a mirage-like quality. Characters appear and reappear in a haze of exotic settings.— Essentially, DeLlllo looks at the American abroad. Not the safarisuited, gum-chewing, camera-totting, “back-home” tourist, but the working American, living for the moment in mystical, magical and terrifying places — Beirut, Tripoli, Baghdad, Islamabad, Karachi, Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and Dubai. These American men, trailing their women with them, are responsible for bank loans, arms credits and goods technology. They are recyclers of petrodollars, builders of refineries, and analysers of risk. They work in countries which one character describes as "terrorist playpens ... viciously anti-American and ... huge tracts of economic, social and political wreckage.” They are men and women displaced for the moment from their place of origin and DeLlllo examines his characters’ capacity for coping in

such hostile environments. James Axton, a risk analyser, plays the central character, based in Athens, estranged from his wife and son who live on an outer Greek island' digging for clues to an ancient civilisation. Axton fears turning 40 and longs for the sanctuary of his previous relationship with his wife and son. Interspersed with Axton mid-llfe crisis a gruesome murder is committed, on the island on which his sonandwife reside, in which an old man is smashed to death with an axe bearing his own initials. And so the mystery begins as other similar murders are discovered, and the Americans, in their Mediterranean theatre, wonder who will be next and why. This is no whodunnit, murder-mystery in the Agatha Christie mode. Rather, It is a sickeningly detailed examination of the minds and motives of those who kill. DeLlllo’s novel, with its symbolic chapter headings and divisions, is one which cries out for painstaking Stage Three English analysis. Not a book to be picked up for a light bedtime read before drifting off into an easy sleep, DeLillo’s work requires an intellectual commitment and fortitude. Those who persevere must conclude that the finest literary craftsmen and women take as much pleasure in the symmetry, rhythm and pace of their words as In the content and message of their texts, and that DeLlllo is such a one.