The Names, by Don DeLillo

 Great book! This is the fourth book of his that I've read. All weird. Frankly, this one is the most normal. 

Spoilers:

James is a risk analyst, or so we are led to believe. He's separated from his wife Kathryn. They have a precocious son named Tap. He's a writer of non-fiction fiction. The last chapter of The Names is one of Tap's stories. Very strange.

About 2/3 of the way through the book I thought the main character might be a spy. By the end, I'm still not sure. He does save, kinda, one of his many friends. The scene where he's jogging and a Greek guy is following him, running with a gun, was shocking. 

And there's the languages (not to mention the cult). For a language lover like me, the blurb for this book had me immediately.

...a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself...

So many languages listed in the book, it had me going to the Wiki machine. Very intriguing, especially the prof learning Sanskrit to read the 1000+ line poem around that lake (is that even real?!). 

And the cult. No real resolution on that one. Well, kinda, but did the starving, wasting-away woman...did she get killed? Was she the final one? Whoa!

Spoilers? What spoilers?

Two great lines in the novel. "Is hell a lack of awareness? Once you know you're there, is this your escape?" and "To be back again among familiar things and people, alive to the levels of friendship a man enjoys with married women of a certain kind, the wives he is half in love with." Lovely.

I will read more from DeLillo. I think Underworld might be my next one. Want to read a weird one? Zero K. Read that one first.