the perfect young stockbroker, is competent, smooth, happily married, on top of his part of the New York scene. But inside he harbors hostility, dissatisfaction and a cripplingennui. Sitting alone at night, he watches television for hours, switching channels every few seconds so that only the picture burns into his indifferent brain. 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.

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. This escape is typical of DeLillo's work; 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 decides to exacerbate complexity by playing the double agent.

His wife Pammy, a staff writer for a company with the unlikely name—and business—of Grief Management Council, tries an alternative solution. She wants to simplify, to rediscover some "tokens of authenticity." Her response to boredom is a trip back to nature in Maine with two homosexual friends that ends in an ugly suicide. (pp. 22-3)

The plot is propelled by performers and performances, DeLillo being a great believer in the deceptiveness of appearances: Identities are disguises; although terrorism is "calculated madness," the so-called real world is insanity uncontrolled. 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; the "philosophy of destruction" expounded by the terrorists is no more irresponsible than the doctrine of gain practiced on the Stock Exchange. It is the flip side of corporate America.

DeLillo's players act in a movie, a silent film we watch them pantomime at the same time that they watch themselves….

The characters move like people under water—slowly turning and twisting in an element more resistant than our own. With no past to define them and little future to speak of, they swim into view and away again, leaving hardly a trace. When they catch planes, cars and buses, they are in transition not from one place to another, but from dream to nightmare and back.

One-person dialogues are common here; internal and private, they nevertheless add to the visionary drift of the action. Fractured images and lives are beautifully controlled by DeLillo's extraordinary use of language. The simultaneity of divergent events underscores how Pammy and Lyle start to pass each other by….

[The] doomsday message contained in DeLillo's earlier work becomes a fait accompli, not a prophecy. Still, if he is proclaiming apocalypse now, he does it movingly and well. 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. Involvement and commitment are pointless without something worth committing oneself to, and at present, DeLillo seems to say, there is nothing. (p. 23)

Celia Betsky, "The Perils of Boredom," in The New Leader (© 1978 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc.), January 2, 1978, pp. 22-3.

Don DeLillo seems determined to nail modern America down, and he may yet. His previous novels have tackled football ("End Zone"), pop music ("Great Jones Street"), and science ("Ratner's Star"), and in "Players" … he takes on terrorism. Terrorism of an attenuated, urbane sort; the book is really about sophistication, or at least nothing is as clear about it as the sophistication of the author, who combines a wearily thorough awareness of how people pass their bored-silly lives in New York City with a (in this novel) lean, slit-eyed prose and a pseudo-scientific descriptive manner….

[The] drastic unlovableness of Lyle and the very tepid appeal of Pammy discourage the considerable suspension of disbelief necessary to follow them into their adventures as they break loose from connubial anti-bliss. (p. 127)

Don DeLillo has, as they used to say of athletes, class. He is original, versatile, and, in his disdain of last year's emotional guarantees, fastidious. He brings to human phenomena the dispassionate mathematics and spatial subtleties of particle physics. Into our technology-riddled daily lives he reads the sinister ambiguities, the floating ugliness of America's recent history…. But the very intensity of Mr. DeLillo's wish, in this novel, to say something new about the matter has evaporated the matter, leaving behind an exquisite ash-skeleton of elliptic dialogue and spindly motivation. (p. 128)

John Updike, in The New Yorker (© 1978 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), March 27, 1978.