By my reckoning Don DeLillo could have won three times, completing the hat trick with Underworld, doing the double with White Noise, but opening his account with The Names. Set in Greece and various parts of the Middle East, its milieu is the international "risk community", a subculture of "business people in transit" where a degree of collusion between corporations and intelligence agencies is inevitable. No one knows exactly what everyone else does, but they share a lot of what they do know: "We told each other where you had to sign a legal document to get a drink, where you couldn't eat meat on Wednesdays or Thursdays, where you had to sidestep a man with a cobra when you left your hotel." They fly a good deal (the book is, along with everything else, a tour de force of travel writing), drink up a storm (echoes, here, of Hemingway's expats in Paris) and talk as no one in fiction has ever talked before. Most of the characters – men, women, kids – sound pretty much the same, are so fluent in the hypnotic cadences of DeLillo-speak that the placement of quotation marks can seem arbitrary: a question of pattern rather than identity. The Names is about language and all this chatter, logically enough, often ends up being about speech. An attempted seduction takes the form of insistent verbal demands: "'Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered … Use names,' I said."

There is a plot of sorts, "a scant narrative line". Rumours circulate about a cult, about human sacrifices. One of the characters wants to infiltrate and film the cult. Suspicions spread about who is or is not with the CIA. One question about anywhere – "Are they killing Americans?" – gets asked with increasing rhetorical anxiety. The Names is a prophetic, pre-9/11 masterpiece: a 21st-century novel published in 1982.