Petrofiction

By J.D. Reed

THE NAMES by Don DeLillo Knopf; 339 pages; $13.95

Hostages in Iran; mendicants trampled near the Ganges; Hindus and Muslims arguing and imploring in a post-Sanskrit Babel of belief. This is the ominous Oriental setting of Don DeLillo's (End Zone, Ratner's Star) seventh and most accomplished novel. There, in prose as vivid and densely knotted as a prayer rug, his characters find freshly printed petrodollars competing with ancient formality. This, in DeLillo's phrase, is the world of "plastic sandals and public beheadings."

James Axton, American and middleaged, serves this conflicted arena. He is a member of a subculture, "business people in transit, growing old in planes and airports." His job: risk analysis of the executives in multinational corporations. But how does one determine the actuarial odds in the Persian Gulf? What is the revolution quotient in Bahrain, the kidnap potential of Beirut? Like expatriates before him, Axton, recently separated from his wife and son, oscillates between the thrill of exotica and the lost comforts of home. One of the Athens-based corporate transients with whom Axton spends ouzo-drenched evenings finds Americans "eerie people." They are "genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends." Even Axton dispels his fear of violence with irony. "I go everywhere twice," he says. "Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it."

The sarcasm stops when the insurance man learns of a mysterious cult (the "Names" of the title). The ritual murders committed by these ragged, nomadic zealots are as easy as ABC. Their formula, revealed by Owen Brademas, an aged American anthropologist, is based on polyglot alphabets twisted into a system of worship. The killers simply match the initials of elderly or crippled villagers with those of towns. When the sacrificial names collide, their hammers fall. For Brademas, these deaths reveal a new layer of violence: "We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century, feeding Gaines Burgers to a German shepherd . . .Men firing from highway overpasses, attic rooms."

Axton's obsession with the cult leads him to the wilds of the Peloponnese, the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem and the Indian city of Lahore. But he learns less of the cult than of himself and the travelers who accommodate the needs of such a world. "Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies," he concludes. "They bring new kinds of death with them."

DeLillo's salesmen carry more than lethal baggage, however, and they are more than walking editorials against fanaticism on one border and imperialism on the other. The author's main weapon, and his most formidable defense, is the word in description and dialogue. As Axton finally ascends the Acropolis, a pilgrimage he formerly dismissed as touristy, he speaks the author's mind as well as his own: "I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language."

-- By J.D. Reed

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