For Don DeLillo,…, the most convincing moves into the surreal have seemed to spring from necessity rather than whim. The violent, tainted face of Sixties-and-after America, the lurid emptiness of modern urban life: DeLillo responds to these with such intense loathing and despair that his inventions—from the enigmatic football teams of End Zone to the nude storyteller and Hitler home movies of Running Dog—carry a whiff of danger, of fury kept just barely under control by a shift to metaphor. The resulting imagery can sometimes be off-putting or self-defeatingly private; the cosmic perspective—with every personal dysfunction turned into a sociopolitical disease—can be schematic, even adolescent. But DeLillo's across-the-board revulsion has also drummed up disturbing, shattered-windshield worlds, with virtually every fictional convention infected, twisted askew. Characters who slide between cartoon and clinical report, bad-dream plots, switchblade-carved prose, and disjointed talk: in a novel like Players...