Dear readers, The writer Don DeLillo is often called eerily prescient, with novels that seem to have predicted immense cultural and political shifts. The headline from this 2022 essay about his book “White Noise” sums things up better than I ever could. “What a 1985 Novel Can Tell Us About Life in the 2020s: Almost Everything.” I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that he might have anticipated yet another seismic phenomenon. Yes, I am talking about the “Heated Rivalry” craze and the rise of sexy hockey novels. DeLillo published “Amazons,” purportedly a memoir by the first woman to play in the N.H.L., under a pseudonym in 1980. In the book, the author/athlete “Cleo Birdwell” gleefully recounts her exploits on and off the ice; really, its chief athletic interest is in the game of sex. Take this recollection by Cleo of an unsatisfying encounter: “After a while it began to seem he was more or less performing a gall bladder operation for all the personal interest involved.” DeLillo disavowed the novel and even struck it from a list of his published work, but “there were clues for the DeLillo partisans,” said the novelist Jonathan Lethem, an acolyte and fan of the book. My colleague Alexandra Alter looked into the history of the book, which remains little known outside of true DeLillo devotees. And I loved this recollection by Lethem, who also counts “Amazons” among his favorite funny books: “I had the experience of seeing his face when I placed a copy in his hands,” Lethem said of DeLillo. “He said in a characteristically direct, quiet, uninflected voice, ‘I don’t autograph that.’” See you next time.
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