Players is a fascinating little subtracting machine, a precision calculator of spiritual entropy. Like Renata Adler's Speedboat, DeLillo's novel is a New York book—sets by The New Yorker, people by Barthelme, fears by the Daily News….

What makes this familiar material fascinating is DeLillo's dual perspective: he is a sensor inside the characters and a distant scientist converting signals into information. While Lyle and Pammy process (and reduce) a world they're trying to enlarge with adventure, DeLillo decodes both actions. The prose knows how experience turns into abstraction and how people become channels, how plot fades to probabilities and place empties into space, how little becomes less. DeLillo isn't writing sociology or satire, but the equations for what one character calls "the sensual pleasures of banality." His is no easy investigation, yet Players is both original and final, a new formula for the familiar. (p. 32)

Thomas LeClair...