[With dialogue that gives] homage to the vapid ironies of Beckett and Pinter,… Don DeLillo's remarkable new novel of menace and mystery, Players, [is] a fastidious rejection of the modern age. (p. G1)

The book opens with an allegorical prelude DeLillo calls "The Movie," which collects all the story's principal characters, none of them named yet, on an airplane, watching a movie of a band of terrorists slaughtering several golfers on a fairway, a vicious scence accompanied by tinkly piano music suitable for a Buster Keaton movie. The contrast of blood and piano steeps the scene in "gruesomely humorous ambiguity, a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful things to total fools."

When the scene ends we are thrown into the real story—Lyle's and Pammy's empty lives—and the book threatens to become another witty send-up of hard-core sophistication. But … while Lyle is seducing a secretary from the...