The Names

I wasn’t blown away by The Names.  It’s a shame, really- I so enjoyed the last Don DeLillo book I read (White Noise) and the blurb of this one makes it look like something right up my street.  It promises intrigue and murder and a secret language cult and murder.  I like a good murder.  The blurb also promises a reflection on the nature of language itself- is it all defining, or restricting?  The Names, we are promised, will ask.

 DeLillo’s novel does raise some of these points, there are murders.  But- I found it lacking.  Now, I am more than willing to attribute this to the fact that I worked for more than 40 hours in the week that I read it.  And that I came down with a fairly terrific bout of laryngitis during this week which essentially meant that I wanted to read light hearted crap.  The Names is not light hearted crap.  It was not what I wanted. 

I think the bit that really got to me though was the unoriginality of the language cult.  What they do is commit murders with hammers for funsies, so far so good.  But because they’re really into words it’s not that simple.  They choose the victims who have names which linguistically link them to the place in which they are murdered.  What is this linguistic link, I hear you ask?  The victims’ initials match that of the place in which they are murdered!  While this sounds like the kind of overly simplistic writing you’d expect from a child (or an American TV crime drama) it’s actually a serious plot in the middle of a book about language.  You have to think that any book that features deep conversations about Aramaic wouldn’t have so lazy a murder plot.

I think one of the main reasons that I didn’t get on with the book is just that I completely failed to connect with any of the characters.  I can’t put my finger on why, but I just did not care about Jim Axton and his wife and stupidly named child.  I spent a good deal of this book wondering who the hell would call their child Tap; before it was revealed to be a nickname.  And Kathryn, the wife, she is given this quirk that people like to give her t-shirts.  It’s a shit quirk that depends on others and it doesn’t feel real.  It seems like she needed something to make her less ordinary and it really should not have been that. 

Anyway, there’s The Names.  I am pretty aware that in this blog I have written essentially nothing at all about the actual book but- y’know sorry not sorry.  This wasn’t what I thought it would be- it was a not very intriguing murder cult and one instance of pre-9/11 casual Islamophobia at an airport.  I didn’t get it.  I was disappointed.  So I decided to share my disappointment in truncated blog form.  I am over the 40% line: rejoice!

My next read is The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.