The Names

By 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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307817181

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

Reviews for The Names

[hoppmaep · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A series of deep observations on various aspects of the human experience...a difficult but rewarding read.

[nog_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one got a little bit too self-consciously artistic for me.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Amazingly prescient novel which almost seems to predict the madness known as 9/11. DeLillo's characters talk about how the world uses the United States as a whipping post. Also touches on the issue of terrorism.

[nohablo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like looking into the face of God. What can you possibly say? How the hell do you describe the pieces? Describe the fit? It's a weird alchemy. Delillo's prose is (as always) weirdly flat-footed and purposefully awkward, but somehow, he cuts it in a way that's searing and prophetic and Old Testament and just gorgeous in its steady, matter-of-fact pacing. Reading THE NAMES is like reading the original template for the world. It's the Rosetta Stone for, y'know, civilization as we know it, NBD. Delillo has this insane, skull-pounding virtuoso talent for distilling into a single, effortless throw-away parenthetical observation a topic that's amassed an electron cloud of buzzing contradictory arguments and thoughts and pages and articles and column inches. And that talent is humbling and catastrophic and you turn the last page and it feels like a privilege. A grand unearned privilege to sit and bask in the interrogation-lamp brilliance of this book and watch Delillo just peel away skein after skein of, well, what DOESN'T this book cover? Of every layer of human interaction: love, affairs, children, terrorism, tourism, money, murder, marriage, death. All of it. Just atomized and scrutinized then blown away. For you. Jesus Christ, this was good good good.

[torbenjohnsen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It has been a long time since I read this book so perhaps I shouldn't review it, but the negative review posted gave me pause and I felt like including a bit of a counterbalance. A very uncomfortable, foreboding, experience which I can still relive some 15 or so years later. An exploration into magical thinking which is at the core of all religions and most pathologies. Like going through survival training. Glad I did it but wouldn't necessarily want to repeat it. I would suggest trying "White Noise" for an equally profound but less difficult read.