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  "path": "/don-delillo-funniest-novel-hockey-amazons",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-04T14:03:50.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "Arts And Culture",
    "NHL",
    "Amazons",
    "Books",
    "Cleo Birdwell",
    "Don DeLillo",
    "fl",
    "Hockey Sex Novels",
    "literature",
    "the late Fredric Jameson wrote"
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  "textContent": "The end of the 1970s seemed to be a moment of uncertainty for Don DeLillo, creatively speaking. The previous decade had seen him become a rather important American author, enough so that he had left his job producing advertising copy for Ogilvy & Mather. Writing was his only game now. Beginning with _Americana_ and continuing through _End Zone_ , _Great Jones Street_ , _Ratner’s Star_ , _Players_ , and _Running Dog_ , he had proven himself a shrewd, somber, grimly oracular chronicler of an uneasy period bookended by Nixon and Reagan, with Vietnam, Watergate, and other sundry grime in between. A true historical shit sandwich. DeLillo used things like college football, rock stars, aliens, and rumored Hitler sex movies as points of entry. As befitting a former ad man, DeLillo sold it, or rather sold a picture of the world munching blithely on various shit sandwiches in nice packaging.\n\n\"For many of us, Don DeLillo has been the most interesting and talented of American post-modernist novelists (which is to say finally, I suppose, of current white man novelists…),\" the late Fredric Jameson wrote in a review of _The Names_ , (technically) DeLillo’s first book of the 1980s. A haunting meditation on language dressed up as an international murder mystery, it’s a solemn, ruminative book even by DeLillo’s standards, and the start of a significant shift in tone and scope. By the end of the decade, he would be in the midst of a three-book run— _Libra_ , _Mao II,_ and _Underworld_ —that I and many others would argue is as formidable and ferocious a creative tear as any American writer has ever had. Together they comprise an epitaph for the American Century, and look knowingly at the decline that was already heavy on the horizon. The André Kertész photograph of the World Trade Center on the cover of _Underworld_ , published in 1997, has somehow never seemed fully coincidental. Of course it is, but books this good encourage a certain amount of reverse-engineering in readers; there is the sense that DeLillo was working backward from answers that were available to him alone.\n\nBut let’s back up. There’s still that pivot moment, and that (technically) from earlier. So: The guy from the Bronx has gone to Greece, ostensibly to work on _The Names_. He has documented the hollow anomie of the 1970s. He’s about to square up with some true heavyweights: language and history themselves. Things are starting to feel severe. In such a situation, any writer might find himself feeling constrained. Weighed down. In need of an outlet to be unserious.",
  "title": "Don DeLillo’s Funniest Novel Is A 1980 Hockey Sex Romp He Won’t Acknowledge"
}