In his well-known essay on William Dean Howells, Lionel Trilling remarked that for us today the nineteenth-century family seems an elaborate hoax; to the contemporary sensibility, he said, family life is part of “inadequate bourgeois reality.” By the evidence of the current literary season, bourgeois reality, in several of its manifestations, is still a source of dissatisfaction among the literary intelligentsia. Several novelists, however, are offering corrective measures. Don DeLillo’s latest novel, The Names,[1] is perhaps the most ambitious in this regard, rendering the whole idea of reality moot.

In a review of his fifth novel, Players, Diane Johnson, a great admirer of DeLillo’s, speaks of his use of terrorists as “moral agents.” Terrorist action, she explains, “is not so much an example of lawlessness as a comment on the rules, an aspect of the culture itself.” Terrorists are still very much on DeLillo’s mind in The Names, though the focus of their attack, or “comment” as Johnson would have it, has shifted from the bourgeoisie to the structure of language, which has perhaps come to be seen as a bourgeois institution.

The narrator of The Names, James Axton, is a cross between an existentialist and corporate man. A former free-lance writer, he has separated from his wife and now does risk analysis for a company that insures multi-national corporations against the hazards of their trade: assassinations, military coups, religious fanaticism, etc. In the end he’s terribly disillusioned to find that his company has been