The Names

The test is subtractive, and the spine is required. The cult that kills strangers whose initials match the initials of the place where they die must be there, and so must Owen, whose life among alphabets draws him to it, and James, whose trade in political risk makes him a reader of the same world from the other side. The closing section is required: without Tap’s misspelled prose the book has no answer to the cult. What the test finds is the middle. The expatriate dinners recur, and after the second or third they add tone rather than turn; James’s business trips around the region repeat one discovery, that Americans are moving through places they do not see; and some of the Volterra material, the film-maker’s talk of how he would shoot the cult, says again what Owen has already shown. The talk is the medium of the disclosure, so the dinners cannot go wholesale; but perhaps a sixth of the whole is permitted rather than compelled, and that holds the axis second lowest of the twelve.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Americans abroad in the late 1970s live inside a history they do not see: their talk is fluent, their business is the measurement of other nations’ instability, and their names are already targets. James learns that the risk analysis he writes has been flowing to American intelligence, and a shooting near the end turns the measured risk on the measurer. The harder finding is the cult’s: it kills by matching letters, a murder emptied of every motive but system, and the book shows a culture of codes, data and fluent talk sharing a root with it. Held two tenths below the bar because much of the disclosure is spoken in aphorism at dinners rather than found by the action, because the Greeks and the other people of the region are seen dimly and from outside, and because part of the yield is a mood of dread.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The book rises, and its heights are placed at its ends. The Acropolis governs it: the first sentence, “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.”, sets the temple above the city as something James avoids, and when he climbs to it at last, near the end of his narration, among crowds speaking many languages, the scene is the book’s widest opening. Owen’s journey into the desert of Rajasthan in search of the cult, and the cult’s members met in the Mani, carry a cold dread. The closing section rises in another key: a boy at a Pentecostal service who cannot speak in tongues, given in a child’s broken spelling, the warmest height in DeLillo to that date. Held here because the long middle is level by design, the dinners and the walks keeping a cool, ironic surface for long stretches, and the heights are spaced.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Myth is partly built. The governing pattern is language as origin and fall: Babel in the many tongues of the crowd on the Acropolis, and Pentecost in the closing section, where tongues are the sign of the spirit and the boy is left outside them. Between them stands the cult, a priesthood of the letter that sacrifices its victims to the alphabet, and Owen, a scholar of inscriptions raised among Pentecostals, is the hinge who belongs to both. These are load-bearing: the arc runs from the letter that kills to the misspelled word that lives, and the temple, approached last, is built as a pilgrimage. What holds the axis five tenths short of the bar is that the cult’s myth is talked about more than enacted, its members glimpsed and its theology inferred by James, Owen and Volterra in conversation, so that the archetypes are clearer in the design than in the experience of reading.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the novel of Americans abroad, from Henry James to Graham Greene and Paul Bowles, the political thriller of the Cold War, and Pynchon’s quest for a hidden order in V. and The Crying of Lot 49. The turn is in what the thriller is used for: the novel has a cult, killings, an intelligence secret and a shooting, and it spends them on a meditation on language, setting a child’s misspelled fiction as the answer to a murder plot. It is also a turn in DeLillo’s own work, from the compressed, paranoid manner of Players and Running Dog to a slower, more inward prose. The stake was real: a book that refuses its thriller’s payoffs risks losing the reader it has called. Held five tenths below the bar because the instruments are inherited, the expatriate comedy of manners and the quest plot, and the swerve lies in purpose more than in means.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. The retrospective first person makes James a man who reads his own past as he reads a country’s risk, fluent and blind at once. The four landscapes, island, mountain, desert and prairie, carry the movement outward from the expatriate enclave to the sources of the cult and then home to the American interior, and to a child. Above all the close: the book hands its last pages to Tap’s prose, misspellings kept, so that after three parts of adult fluency the language is renewed by error, and the form answers the cult’s perfect matching of letters with a living imperfection. That ending is the book’s knowledge, not its container. Held below the top because the middle could stand in another order, the dinners and the trips largely interchangeable, and because Owen’s long account of the cult is relayed in conversation where the form might have made it happen.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over forty-four years, real but narrower than for DeLillo’s most read books. The novel was treated in the early full-length studies of his work and has kept a place in the criticism. The readings multiply: a novel about language and its violence; a novel of American empire seen by its functionaries; a religious novel, in Owen’s Pentecostal childhood and the tongues of the close; and, after 2001, a novel read as foresight of Americans abroad as targets of terror. The questions stay open: what the cult wants, if anything; why Owen is drawn to it; whether James’s ascent is a conversion or a tourist’s visit; what the misspellings ask of the reader. Held here because forty years of attention is partly the attention given to its author, and because a share of the return is the pleasure of style rather than new meaning.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the American novel of the 1980s. The force is real and bounded: the book made a register, the elliptical, aphoristic, gravely comic prose of DeLillo’s later work, joined it to subjects that would define the decades after, terror, data, global business and the American abroad as target, and showed that the political novel could be written as a novel of language. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it did not reorganise the form: its means were in reach, and the reorganising force arrived fully only with the next book, White Noise, whose reach is not credited here; no school or practice can be shown to have turned on this book in particular, and force stands above reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its standing in the criticism as the hinge of DeLillo’s career, its place in the teaching of his work, and the wide return to its themes after 2001.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over forty-four years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is where it is charged: the book lives among readers of DeLillo and in the criticism, and its standing among them has risen, but it is read far less widely than the most widely read novels of its age, and much of its presence comes through its author’s later reputation. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the expatriate world of Athens in the late 1970s, telex and airport, the political risk of that decade’s regimes; it has worn better than it might, since the matter reads as forecast after 2001. Two charges, presence and a partly dated surface, hold the axis two tenths under the bar, and four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence: exact, cadenced, at once ironic and grave, able to turn a description of light on stone into an argument about attention, as on the first page. The book manages a feat of register at its close, a child’s prose with its misspellings that is neither condescended to nor made precious, and that lands; and it holds a large cast across many places without confusion. Three charges hold it below the top. The dialogue is stylised: the expatriates, the banker, the film-maker and the narrator all speak one clever, oblique idiom, so that persons blur into a manner. The middle is slack in pressure, the dinner talk sometimes going on past its yield. And Owen’s account of the cult, the plot’s centre, is told at a remove.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law: language orders the world and can kill, and naming is power. Take the two most distant elements: the cult’s murder of an old man with a hammer on the island, and the boy in the closing section who cannot speak in tongues at a revival on the American plains. They obey one law: the first is the letter without meaning, the second the utterance without letter, and the book is the space between. The law also governs James’s work, which turns nations into figures of risk, Owen’s epigraphy, the expatriates’ fluent talk and the marriage, a failure of saying. The range is wide, dinner comedy to ritual murder. Charged: the shooting near the end and the intelligence secret belong to a thriller’s physics of cause, and sit a little apart from the law of language, joined to it by argument more than by event.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Many orders, held by one question, what language does. Consciousness, in James’s retrospect. The family: a separated marriage and a father’s love for his son, the book’s warmest bond. Labour: risk analysis, banking, archaeology, film-making, the work of a whole expatriate class. The state and its power: intelligence, multinational capital, the instability of the region in the late 1970s. History, in the ancient inscriptions and the Acropolis set against the present. The sacred: the cult’s ritual, Owen’s Pentecostal childhood, the temple. The natural order, in the four landscapes. They are integrated, not listed: each is a system of signs. Held below the top because the vantage is narrow, one class of Americans and Europeans seen from within and the societies they move through seen from outside, and because the history of the region is atmosphere more than agent.

Score: 8.1 / 10