The Perils of Boredom
BETSKY, CEUA
The Perils of Boredom Players By Don DeLillo Knopf. 223 pp. $7.95 Reviewed by Celia Betsky Contributor, "Nation," "New Republic" Terrorism, one always assumed, springs from perverted...
...She wants to simplify, to rediscover some "tokens of authenticity...
...When they catch planes, cars and buses, they are in transition not from one place to another, but from dream to nightmare and back...
...Still, if he is proclaiming apocalypse now, he does it movingly and well...
...This is the author's nod to self-consciousness and artificiality, his creation of a world that unfolds in a series of images, wrapping its people in the isolation of self-involvement...
...The novelist's characters, moreover, have a kind of X-ray vision that is discomfitingly capable of dissecting moods and relationships, as well as perceiving ordinary objects with abnormal lucidity...
...In DeLillo's slightly skewed presentation, terrorism and revolutionary acts are a matter of perspective: Conspiracy and organized crime exist on both sides of the political fence...
...Fractured images and lives are beautifully controlled by DeLillo's extraordinary use of language...
...Recently, though, a third element has become discernible: Terrorism is now the stuff of diversion, merely another means of experimenting with "the uses of boredom...
...Through a sexual liaison with a colleague's secretary, Lyle gets involved with a terrorist organization bent on blowing up the New York Stock Exchange...
...They are at the mercy of a New York that swirls with as much energy and electric tension as the cosmological science fiction of DeLillo's earlier Rat-ner's Star...
...the "philosophy of destruction" expounded by the terrorists is no more irresponsible than the doctrine of gain practiced on the Stock Exchange...
...One-person dialogues are common here...
...internal and private, they nevertheless add to the visionary drift of the action...
...He memorizes strangers' faces and the license-plates on cars, hoping they will lend some meaning to experience...
...The characters move like people under water—slowly turning and twisting in an element more resistant than our own...
...A crisp, cool, observant writer, he chronicles irresolution and leaves people with their dilemmas open-ended in a way that is a solution in itself, because it is so pitiful and so true...
...His wife Pammy, a staff writer for a company with the unlikely name?and business—of Grief Management Council, tries an alternative solution...
...Involvement and commitment are pointless without something worth committing oneself to, and at present, DeLillo seems to say, there is nothing...
...although terrorism is "calculated madness," the so-called real world is insanity uncontrolled...
...But inside he harbors hostility, dissatisfaction and a crippling ennui...
...Lyle decides to exacerbate complexity by playing the double agent...
...The plot is propelled by performers and performances, DeLillo being a great believer in the deceptiveness of appearances: Identities are disguises...
...Like David Bell, the hero of DeLillo's first novel, Americana, he is moved solely "by the power of the image" and suffers from a numbness of mind and soul that tinges the book with a quality of things that are sighted but not seen...
...The simultaneity of divergent events underscores how Pammy and Lyle start to pass each other by...
...He and Pammy live in a cramped space called an apartment surrounded by buildings and more buildings, and work in the ravines of Wall Street and the anonymous heights of the World Trade Center—American urban architecture at its unfriendliest...
...DeLillo's players act in a movie, a silent film we watch them pantomime at the same time that they watch themselves...
...This escape is typical of De-LiUo's work...
...Sitting alone at night, he watches television for hours, switching channels every few seconds so that only the picture burns into his indifferent brain...
...Her response to boredom is a trip back to nature in Maine with two homosexual friends that ends in an ugly suicide...
...7.95 Reviewed by Celia Betsky Contributor, "Nation," "New Republic" Terrorism, one always assumed, springs from perverted idealism or protest overstepping rational bounds, and explodes under intolerable political pressures or its own heavy rhetoric...
...With no past to define them and little future to speak of, they swim into view and away again, leaving hardly a trace...
...It is the flip side of corporate America...
...In Lyle this becomes an obsessive habit...
...The phenomenon is explored in Don DeLillo's fine new novel, Players...
...it is a journey into self-exile, a need to drop out just to see what it is like, to challenge a self not held in the highest esteem...
...Lyle, apparently the perfect young stockbroker, is competent, smooth, happily married, on top of his part of the New York scene...
...So clever at writing copy for commercialized sorrow, Pammy is miserable at handling her own unhappiness, taking it out on others without ever really considering the consequences or realizing it is discontent that makes her tick...
...In a city where bums haunt the corners of Wall Street, mocking everything it represents, where a "Young East Sider" lifestyle equals fast sex, where bottles thrown by kids on the Lower East Side explode like accusatory bombs in the street, the doomsday message contained in DeLillo's earlier work becomes a fait accompli, not a prophecy...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 1
