Episode 9: Players

In Episode Nine: Players, DDSWTNP follow the bored, hollow lives of Pammy and Lyle Wynant as they pursue “the glamour of revolutionary violence” and the hope for pastoral peace, taking them from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange to a Maine island and a Toronto motel room. While at heart DeLillo’s first major analysis of the mind of terrorism, Players is a surprisingly personal novel that unravels the form of the political thriller and shows him writing about sex and grim seduction in ways he did nowhere else. Our topics include terrorist intrigue and indoctrination, uncanny prophecies of 9/11, a JFK assassination conspiracy, the troubling immateriality of money, the psychology of suicide, and the pervasive power of fear. #mistersofteevoice #themovieandthemotel #terrorispurification #weknownothingelseabouthim

References in this episode:

Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.

“I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness—the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment—a moment in which nothing happened, nothing ostensibly changed, a moment in which I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. But there was a pause in time, and I knew I had to write about a man who comes to a street like this or lives on a street like this. And whatever roads the novel eventually followed, I believe I maintained the idea of that quiet street if only as counterpoint, as lost innocence.”—“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review  128 (1993): 274-306.