Novel: The Names

Overview
Don DeLillo's The Names follows an American expatriate, James Axton, who lives in Athens and becomes enmeshed in a web of language, ritual and violence. The narrative moves through urban cafes, corporate offices and fieldwork among expatriates, scholars and secretive circles whose fascination with naming takes on ominous, sometimes deadly, dimensions. The novel is less a linear thriller than a meditation on the ways words, identities and systems of meaning shape human action and political consequence.

Plot and Structure
Axton's everyday life, work, travel and study of names, slowly collides with a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances among Westerners in and around Greece and the Near East. As he follows threads that connect linguistic curiosity to clandestine gatherings, he encounters groups who treat naming as ritual and power, and he watches how these rituals bleed into the modern world of bureaucracies, intelligence operations and insurgent violence. Episodes alternate between detailed scenes of expatriate life and more enigmatic sequences that suggest networks operating beneath conventional social orders.
The book's structure resists tidy resolution. DeLillo layers episodes of investigation with conversations about language, fragments of travelogue and moments of abrupt violence so that the reader experiences both the intellectual puzzle and its unsettling stakes. Closure is deliberately withheld; events accumulate not to explain everything but to reveal patterns of desire, coincidence and miscommunication that underlie political acts and private longings.

Characters
Axton functions as observer and partial participant, less an action hero than a reflective chronicler who tries to map meaning where others prefer secrecy. Around him gather scholars, diplomats, corporate travelers and a cast of expatriates whose small obsessions illuminate larger cultural anxieties. The secretive group attracted to naming rituals remains at once alluring and inscrutable, their ceremonies suggestive of a human appetite for order and transcendence that can easily be turned toward destruction.
DeLillo populates the novel with figures who speak in clipped, precise prose, whose conversations about grammar, translation and cataloguing take on a metaphysical charge. Relationships are often indirect and marked by absence, with characters more haunted by the idea of names and networks than anchored in solid backstories. This deliberate distance amplifies the book's sense of foreignness and estrangement.

Themes and Language
Language is the novel's central engine. Naming becomes a metaphor for the human drive to classify and possess, and DeLillo explores how naming practices intersect with politics, commerce and violence. Ritualized naming is portrayed as both a quest for meaning and a technology of control; the impulse to bind identity to a word can lead to liberation or annihilation. Terrorism and geopolitical tension appear not simply as historical facts but as phenomena that grow from failures of language, misrecognitions and the seductive promise that a single word or label can fix reality.
DeLillo's prose mirrors these concerns: spare, often elliptical sentences create gaps that the reader must fill, mimicking the ambiguous nature of interpretation. The novel interrogates the mechanics of modern life, surveillance, information networks, expatriate bureaucracy, while insisting that beneath those mechanisms lie persistent human longings for order, belonging and myth.

Atmosphere and Legacy
The Names radiates a cool, atmospheric unease. Athens and the surrounding landscapes act as backdrops that are both ancient and eerily contemporary, places where old rituals and new systems intersect. The book's power comes from its ability to turn what might be a geopolitical thriller into a sustained inquiry about how people construct reality through names, stories and gestures.
Often cited as a pivotal work in DeLillo's career, The Names anticipates concerns that recur throughout his later fiction: the interplay of language and power, the cultural consequences of information saturation and the fragile borders between ritual and atrocity. It remains a resonant, unsettling novel about the ways words shape the world and the precarious human need to make sense of it.