Don DeLillo is a mystery of a writer, one of the most critically acclaimed but narrowly known of all contemporary American novelists.

It is hard to say why. He is fearlessly original and uncompromising, but he is not an avant-gardist as I understand the term, trying to see just how private language can be, or how ambiguous.

DeLillo is immediate, intense and, in a word that critics may like too well, accessible. He also creates glorious prose that in its freshness, precision and eloquence is continuously exciting to read.

His newest novel, "The Names,"… may revise sharply upward the size of his readership. It stands above and out from any novel I've read in months: exotic, atmospheric, curiously suspenseful, full of characters at once unusual and fully realized.

But "The Names" is principally engrossing because it explores the American abroad and the American in this time, a citizen...