DeLillo has another look

at our lives

PLAYERS, by Don De Lillo; Knopf, 212 pp., $7.95.

By Abe C. Ravitz

Each of Don De Lillo's novels to date has examined part of the malaise of contemporary America, our computerized, sanitized culture and the price one must pay for the quality of life we enjoy in our urban society.

Now, once more he picks up the Thoreau dictum that the mass of men leads lives of quiet desperation, and he guides the reader economically and rapidly inside two such desperate lives that of a young husband who works on the floor of the stock exchange and of his lovely wife whose work is high up in the tower of New York's World Trade Center. Their apartment is well furnished, their refrigerator is full, they have two television sets.

Something vital is missing. Call it excitement. Call it challenge. Call it whatever. In any event, their lives are absurd.

Lyle closets himself with a TV, switching channels abruptly and memorizing banal commercials. Looking for an alteration in routine, Pammy takes tap-dancing lessons. Together they toss one liners at each other, speak in comic dialects and discuss the latest trivia.

Superficially, these two seem to have it all: love, status, success in the Big Apple. Actually, they are bored, miserable, unhappy. But they don't know why. Their facades begin to crack. The jokes are stale. The love is habit and ritual.

Enter terrorism. A broker is murdered on the exchange floor. Looking to disrupt the secret power of the system, the revolutionists have struck. And almost simultaneously Lyle allows himself to be drawn into their conspiracy and intrigue.

Making contact with the bombers through a sexpot in his office, this modern businessman suddenly finds himself in a world of explosives and sawed-off shotguns, flak jackets and riot helmets. Terror, he begins to believe, is purification. Involving himself in disinformation, in nightmarish plots, and in frenzied travels for the bored, Lyle, now part of another universe, eerily unfamiliar, detects a new exhilaration in his life.

Pammy is not about to sit home and wait for the Mister Softee truck. Off she goes to rural Maine woods with Ethan and Jack, a homosexual pair. There they will drive life into a corner, simplify and endeavor to reach a physical and spiritual fulfillment.

The behavior of all soon becomes obsessive. Everyone's inner-relationship with anyone else is filled with secrets and suspicions. Tragedy lurks soberly in the wings waiting to occupy center stage.

Abe C. Ravitz teaches at California State College, Dominguez Hills.