Players

Knopf, $7.95

It is currently fashionable to suppose that the world will end with a bang and a whimper both. Overprivileged and overstimulated to the point of enervation, the theory goes, we shall whine our way through life until some arbitrary act of violence gets us—suicide from boredom, perhaps, or a stray terrorist bomb.

It is disheartening that a writer as flamboyantly original as Don DeLillo should adopt such a sterile vision. Players, his fifth novel, concerns itself with the adventures of the Wynants, Pammy and Lyle, a pair of soulless moderns. They slouch about their Manhattan apartment and their places of business generally loathing life as they know it (“Pammy . . . remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. . . .”) and hoping for a bit of excitement to perk things up.

Lyle, a stockbroker, starts up a casual flirtation with a secretary that leads him into an equally casual flirtation with a gang of double-crossing terrorists. Pammy, meanwhile, takes off on trip to Maine with a couple of doomed homosexual lovers.

The Wynants emerge relatively unscathed as their playmates fall victim to passion and betrayal. Or rather, they appear to emerge unscathed. It is hard to say exactly what happens since the story ends as it proceeds, enveloped in an air of contrived impenetrability.

A reader inclined to do so could draw up quite a catalogue of childhood imagery in Players, from the title on down to the verbless baby talk the characters toss at each other in lieu of conversation. What, if anything, the symbols mean is anyone’s guess.

Chic despair just isn’t DeLillo’s style. He has put his wicked wit and imagination to better use in the past. No doubt he’ll give us as good again in the future.