In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names, a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader’s list of favorites. We discuss The Names as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysis, bank loans, and intelligence covers that narrator James Axton navigates, and we ask why The Names puts this geopolitical tumult (including the 1979 Iranian Revolution) in the context of ancient languages, ritual sacrifice, and a dissolving marriage and family life for James. Language-obsessed Owen Brademas (the archeologist and “epigraphist” who is drawn relentlessly to the fascinating cult) and filmmaker Frank Volterra (perhaps a sly satire of a certain American auteur?) figure in this story of religion, aesthetics, and the enduring appeal of violence, but we turn at the end of this episode to the nine-year-old author Tap, Axton’s son, whose misspelled, highly spirited tale of the spirit to which his tongue might “yeeld” lets DeLillo showcase all the ways to use the alphabet to salutary and generative ends. #getwet #themindslittleinfinite

We also announce the winner of our Amazons raffle and say thanks to all who have supported and continue to support us at buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast.

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 149-168. 

“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

“A Talk with Don DeLillo,” Interview with Robert Harris, in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 16-19.

The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (We have the dates on both films slightly wrong in the episode.)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), dir. George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.