Creative Loafing, an arts and news blog from Sarasota, features Don DeLillo’s greatest and most difficult novel, The Names:

… [T]he book’s real center is in the way DeLillo conjures up the life of his protagonist and narrator, James Axton. An expatriate American working for a shadowy risk analysis firm based in Athens, Axton is a perfect conduit for DeLillo’s musings on airline travel, married life, dinner and drinks with friends, the Greek landscape, encounters with foreign cultures. The Names is one of DeLillo’s most intimate novels, and Axton remains one of his most fully formed creations.

People often knock DeLillo for the aphoristic quality of his prose, the simple declarations that twist meaning into pretzels. And, admittedly, this makes for dialogue that is nowhere near naturalistic. Near the novel’s conclusion, a character addresses Axton: “‘I’m not surprised to find myself here. The moment I stepped inside it seemed right, it seemed inevitable, the place I’ve been preparing for. The correct number of objects, the correct proportions. For sixty years I’ve been approaching this room.’” While we can’t picture ever having such a conversation ourselves [Ahem. As La Kid used to say when she was a baby, "I beg to dinner."], strict fealty to How People Really Talk is beside the point for DeLillo. He’s more interested in the flow of language and information than he is obsessed with authenticity.

And the upside to DeLillo’s knack for aphorism is that he is able to dip and dive in his prose, following the whim of the word. Here he is on being aboard a jet taking flight: “Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. … Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.”

Yep, that’s why you read DeLillo. I’m digging my way backwards through the man’s publishing chronology, so expect to hear more in the future.

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No, I’m not done. Why is that passage from the book the reason you read DeLillo? Don’t just scan it! Slow down. Look at what he does when he writes.

And if you want to do it, here’s a hint: Read James Joyce.

Remember to underline.

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Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. … Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.

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1.) First, look at the speed of the sentence. He’s describing the rush of flight, so his sentence presses forward the way our minds and bodies do as we’re propelled through the strange dynamism of flight. The first sentence keeps generating new clauses — there’s this to see, and then suddenly there’s that. The landscape speeds by your eyes. You’re excited.

When you write, you’re like a composer. Think tempo.

2.) Beaten. Sweeping. Sea. We. Leaving. Deep. The long E repeats through the paragraph, giving poetic force and a sense of coherence to the passage, and in this way capturing the coherent specificity of one consciousness – that of the main character, James Axton, from whose mind these impressions come. Maybe this sound also hints at the low-level hum of the plane’s engines.

3.) There’s not only internal repetition of the E sound. There’s also carefully deployed alliteration. Look at how DeLillo keeps using words that either begin with or include the letters S, L, and B.

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night.

4.)

Sweep. Deep.

Lakes. Trace.

Plain. Rain.

Land. Bands.

Light. Night.

Secluded. Beauty.

Get the picture?

5.) beaten slate peneplain rainbands zigzag

Fun, aren’t they. We’re not expecting them. We like verbal novelty. You might call this originality…

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What? You think all this strangeness and fever and rhyme and alliteration and novelty is accidental? You think any fool can do this? Jesus…