Players

by Don DeLillo

Book Overview

In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their ideal life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory satisfaction than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679722939
• ISBN13: 9780679722939
• Release Date: July 1989
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A breathtaking novel about utter boredom...

Of all his earlier novels, *Players* is the one that best anticipates the mature style of DeLillo's later masterworks. All the major themes and preoccupations are here, including foreshadowing of the topics that will become central to novels like *Libra,* *White Noise,* and *Mao II.* This makes *Players* an ideal place to start your discovery of this remarkable writer. On the surface *Players* is a spare and simple story. Lyle and Pammy, an upwardly mobile New York City couple who've reached an interminable plateau in virtually every aspect of their lives, are bored. But this is no ordinary boredom. They are culturally, existentially, epically, mythologically, terminally bored. They're not sure how they got this way, they aren't even angry about it or with each other. There's no one or anything to really blame. They're still in love with each other, in fact. It's just that everything is so...well, empty somehow, so boring. What's even worse is that together, and separately, they don't know what to do about it. How do you go about *not* being bored in this day and age? Pammy decides to take a vacation with a co-worker and his lover to Maine. Lyle, in the meantime, remains in Manhattan and becomes involved in a terrorist plot to plant a bomb in the New York Stock Exchange. These separate "vacations" from each other both end in violence and unexpected consequences, and yet, both Pammy and Lyle remain essentially unchanged, essentially still bored. If anything, they begin, especially in Lyle's case, to vanish altogether. For as Lyle becomes a "player" in the world of international terrorism and counter-terrorism he indiscriminately "plays" both sides, or, perhaps more accurately, all three, four, five, ten sides of the game and thereby loses himself in a state of complexity where he and you ((the reader)) begin to wonder if the most harrowing truth of all is that *no one* really understands the game they're playing, who's winning, or even who's side anyone is on. What elevates *Players,* however, from a thought-provoking thriller to the level of a small masterpiece is the effect of DeLillo's precise and poetic prose--a laser-like instrument of an intellect you can't help to observe with awe as it cuts, exposes, and illuminates even ordinary experience to reveal malignant truths one may have felt or suspected, but never seen or been able to articulate before. Don DeLillo is the rare writer who makes other writers, me included, take up woodworking or suicide in despair. He's that good, * & #@ him!

Delillo by the book

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

Dust it off, then.

It's interesting to turn to early DeLillo and find that in more than a quarter of a century, the themes that drive his work are more contemporary than ever; as Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 1977, "This elegant, highly finished novel does not shrink from suggesting the complicity of Americans with the terrorists they deplore". The complicity is not direct, even though one of the main characters does become directly enmeshed in a terrorist conspiracy the extent of which he is (and we, the readers, are) not fully cognizant. Rather, the complicity is systemic, terrorism the shadow of the bright waves of electronic capitalism, the anti-thesis, lying only as far away as the reverse side of a thin paper page. In this, as in the sparkling quality of his prose, he resembles Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher-provocateur; both quip and incant their way towards revealing alleged secret truths about the real sources of terror and violence, secrets of systems and alienation. This sort of language I think becomes tiring once you've read more than a few of DeLillo's novels -- he is forever talking about inner meanings, hidden truths, darkly wound secrets, et cetera. It isn't the ideas that are misplaced (contemporary novels are rightfully full of conspiracy), but the language; these are the only passages where DeLillo becomes literal rather than figurative, the only places where it seems DeLillo himself comes out from beneath the narrative guise. And to say he doesn't need to is to credit the complete remainder of the text -- it races, clean and honed, from page to page, reading as quickly as ads flashing past on a subway. And as Players unwinds, it nails modern malaise and restlessness, diagnosing the moral disengagement that hasn't stemmed since it was written, and is caustically funny in a way which no-one else I have read can match. I found myself, on finishing, talking to people in the same obscure one-liners used by his characters (of course, he doesn't do character, really; that is part of the diagnosis). The whole thing is pitch-perfect and prescient; he should be compulsory.

DeLillo's terrorism profesy

You can read the tea leaves of any DeLillo novel and see shadows of the WTC disaster, but they are more striking in this novel than any other. One of the main characters works for a grief counseling company in the WTC, her husband works on Wall Street and is casually drawn into a terrorist plot."Players" is heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and Dostoyevsky's "Demons", but its unmistakably DeLillo. The terrorists in this book are not drawn by religious or political zealotry, they are almost offhand about their deadly work. As he will do later in "White Noise", DeLillo places a disaster in the foreground but finds the real drama in domestic interaction, in characters so caught up in lifestyle that the world around them is dull, unimportant.In my opinion, "Players" is the transitional book in DeLillo's body of work. It is his first book to touch on his obsessive themes in a serious, sustained manner. However, it does not match the virtuosity of his later works. Not until "The Names" did DeLillo hit his stride, so don't expect as polished a book as those written in the 80s and 90s. But for DeLillo fans who have overlooked this work through the years, "Players" is a gruesome treat.

Don Delillo dismantles the yuppie ethic.

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.