He was thinking about secrets. Why do we need them and what do they mean?
—Libra
I am the false character that follows the name around.
—White Noise
I.
She speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in her eye that’s halfway horny: meet Cleo Birdwell, the first female to lace up for the NHL, circa 1979. The New York Rangers acquired the twenty-three-year-old center in a deal brokered by her agent, Floss Penrose. “All I wanted to do was play hockey,” Cleo said. But the media had a field day, noting with barely concealed lust “my milky blue eyes, my taut ass . . . the nightmare bruises on my downy white thighs.” The public fretted over her “poor, floppy, delicate breasts.”
Shrugging off the sexism, she dodged advances as deftly as she did hip-checks at the blue line—except, of course, when she welcomed them. As a self-confessed “connoisseur of the male form,” Cleo bedded over the course of her maiden New York season someone in upper management, a toggle-coated sportswriter/gourmet chef (“I surround myself with Wüsthofs”) working on an exposé of the snowmobile industry, and a former defenseman with a mystery ailment, among other colorful duderonis. These conquests aside, she was just one of the guys. They all changed in the same locker room, got mauled versus Philly (a game in which the Flyers, out for blood, resembled “woodchoppers in some crazy German operetta”), and endured foul-weather flights to Rust Belt arenas. Perhaps most meaningfully, Cleo and the crew revered the works of Wadi Assad, a mystic in the Kahlil Gibran mode, author of head-scratching lines like “Only childhood is ours. The rest belongs to strangers.” (Perhaps not.)
We’re privy to these racy and random details because Holt published Cleo’s self-consciously baggy autobiography, Amazons, in 1980—the same year Team USA upset the Red Army at the Olympics in Lake Placid, and midway between the Paul Newman movie Slap Shot (1977), a scuzzy paean to the minor-league circuit, and Stanley Cup–winning Ken Dryden’s goodbye-to-all-that memoir The Game (1983), capturing the in-season moment he opted for law school over goaltending. Hockey’s rarely been hot in America; despite decades of expansion into sun-filled states, it’s a distant fourth in terms of team-sport popularity. But 1980 was arguably the sweet spot. Cleo and Floss had perfect timing.
Out of print for decades, Amazons has just been reissued by Scribner to piggyback on the hit homoerotic hockey series Heated Rivalry. (Never mind that Cleo’s liaisons are all hetero, though she and Floss do play a round of Strip Monopoly.) Amazons’s chapter-capping sex scenes are at once frank and endearingly chatty. Her first hookup here (a tennis star) apologizes afterward for his physique:
“My body isn’t very up to date. . . . It’s a forties body. It’s the body of a gawky tail gunner who gets killed while John Hodiak is bringing his crippled B-17 in for a crash landing. You see a close-up of this pilot in his Zero, and he’s grinning as he fires his guns. Then you see me die, with glass flying. Then you see John Hodiak struggling with the controls. Then you see the landing field. You see the tower. You see the faces of men looking into the sky. You see the windswept field. You see the ambulance crews. You see the commanding officers with the binoculars. You see the tower again, you see men looking at the sky, their trousers whipping in the wind. Back home my girl is helping my mom bake a cake, but you don’t see that until after the plane lands.”
Amazons is rich with such bonkers oratory. (Cleo sweetly replies, “I think your body is interesting. It makes me feel tenderness and pity.”) In another scene, she shacks up in a Toronto snowstorm with Sanders Meade, a blue-blooded Madison Square Garden suit, but instead of the expected boinkfest, he suffers performance anxiety. Over nine pages of increasingly daft dialogue, Cleo patiently brings him to life (“We’re painting word pictures, and we’re not even using words”), to the point of exhaustion: “I was like a pastry chef who creates a swirling masterpiece for the president of the republic, but would never think of sitting down and eating a hunk of the leftover stuff.” A later conquest poses a bit too much, pre-foreplay: “He looked as though he had just invented nudity.”
Amazons feels refreshingly out of place in 2026. At times it recalls the ambitious, chonky, libidinous fiction of the era, John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), as it does William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), though Amazons is trauma-free. In Cleo, you can detect traces of Renata Adler’s coolly ironic Jen Fain in Speedboat (1976) and of Joan Didion as herself, circa The White Album (1979). The intervening decades have also made Cleo’s “intimate memoir” read like an antic historical novel itself. It’s an NHL time capsule, a nostalgia hit for old-time hockey buffs, a world in which Guy Lafleur still takes the ice for Montreal, Minnesota’s team remains the North Stars, and everyone (save rookies) could still play sans helmet, locks flowing in the chill air.
The reissue differs subtly from the 1980 edition. Gone is the full-bleed back-cover author portrait: Cleo gussied up in Rangers gear, with a gladiatorial gaze and stick in padded hand. A more crucial tweak waits inside: replacing 1980’s Wadi Assad epigraph is a photo of a business card reading: “I don’t want to talk about it.” The quote is from Don DeLillo. It’s the only place his name appears on the package—the only hint that he was the co-perpetrator of the whole glorious hoax.
II.
DeLillo’s Amazons involvement has been an open secret practically from the start, suspected by some contemporary reviewers. Still, the Bronx-born novelist, who turns ninety this year, has never included Amazons on the “Also by” pages of his twenty-odd legitimate books. (Gerald Howard, a former book editor, wrote in these pages eighteen years ago that he failed to coax DeLillo to let Cleo back into print back in the late ’80s.) Many writers exclude pseudonymous titles, particularly early hackwork, from such general listings. But when Amazons came out in 1980, DeLillo was already six books deep into a critically acclaimed career. During this first, defining period, from his debut, Americana (1971), to the crowning achievement of Underworld (1997), his tense and enigmatic books explored what he called “American magic and dread” to its limits. (His sparser post-Underworld run comprises six novels, most extremely short, from 2001’s The Body Artist to The Silence in 2020.)
Sports are important in DeLillo’s fiction, so you’d think Amazons would slot right in. His underrated End Zone (1972), which mapped gridiron tactics to the military-industrial complex, vividly described the team at Logos College as “a thing of ninety legs.” “Pafko at the Wall,” his mind-bending excavation of a single historic baseball game, first surfaced in Harper’s in 1992; five years later, retitled “The Triumph of Death” and with a new first line, it served as prologue to his magnum opus, Underworld. (It’s getting a reissue this year, too, as a separate novella, to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning homer.) His screenplay for the barely seen 2006 movie Game Six (that’s me on Rotten Tomatoes, calling it “a gratifying playground of high-wire language”) culminates in the Mets topping the Red Sox in the ’86 World Series.
Maybe hockey itself is the problem. Even though Cleo Birdwell hails from Ohio rather than Ontario, the sport might be too foreign. Back in 1980, over 80 percent of the league’s players were Canadian, and today well over half still hail from outside the United States. Or perhaps the physics of the game itself prevents it from catching fire on the page. Football and baseball rotate offense and defense, with time between plays to ratchet the drama, whereas hockey is free-flowing, and “so fast it’s practically nonlinear,” as Cleo puts it. (No less a Great American Novelist than William Faulkner, assigned to cover a Rangers-Canadiens game in 1955, was stumped by the contest. In a five-paragraph, third-person curiosity for Sports Illustrated, he ponders and discards theory after theory about the game’s appeal: “Then he learned to find the puck and follow it.”)
“I’ve been trying not to do this in short, quick bursts because it doesn’t seem very reflective or thematic that way,” Cleo confesses. “But this is how my memories of those events are arranged, in bursts and flashes, in little jumps from city to city.” She conjures her quirky teammates and the grind of travel, but the games themselves fly by quickly, and though the Rangers’s season culminates in a winning streak, the stakes feel laughably low. This is no Shot Heard Around the World, with J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra eating hot dogs in the stands. Nor does the book have the martial overlay of End Zone, whose narrator opts for college ball to avoid being drafted to Vietnam. Hockey’s just the scaffolding for Cleo’s irrepressible charm, her boundless narrative energy.
But here is Amazons, in a slick new package, available once more: the return of the repressed. I propose that, far from being an outlier in DeLillo’s twentieth-century canon, the novel is central to his work. You can take this literally. Amazons emerges two years after Running Dog, and two before The Names; if included in the official bibliography, then, it appears at the midpoint of his first and finest run of novels—number seven of twelve. It’s not just a titillating soufflé amid headier fare, a money grab, a bit of sleaze, though it also is those things. The cover shows a hockey bench strewn with jersey, skates, lingerie, and heels; old paperback editions leave even less to the imagination. It’s fitting that DeLillo—bard of cults and conspiracies, scarcity and aura—would conceal his finest work in such trashy garb.
Finest? (Really, Ed?) To paraphrase one of DeLillo’s later narrators: Is it true? Why did I say it? What do I mean?
III.
I first read DeLillo in 1992 for work. I was in my last weeks as an intern at Harper’s, and “Pafko at the Wall” was set to be the magazine’s first Folio section that fall—a long, stand-alone, ad-free piece, printed on different paper. Each page of the galley contained a single strip of text running down the middle. Despite zero interest in baseball, I was entranced by it all: the public spectacle and private yearnings, the voices high and low, the sudden arcane power that gathers within the snatched cowhide orb. Sentences stopped me in my tracks: the description of Jackie Gleason getting sick (“He seems to be vomiting someone’s taupe pajamas”) remains my first association whenever I see the word “taupe.” When I finished, I mailed it to a friend straightaway: I think you’ll dig this. (Just as the baseball from that game spikes in price, I wonder how much that galley would go for—David, I hope you still have it.) Next up was White Noise, which I took with me to Seoul that fall, where I was to live for a while. I would read aloud chapter 6, the scene where Jack Gladney and his son Heinrich argue over whether or not it was raining outside. The exacting stylist was also funny? DeLillo could do it all: historical tableaux, domestic comedy, looming social breakdown. I wondered why everyone wasn’t reading him, constantly.
DeLillo’s catalogue was dreamily extensive. The ambition excited me; with each book, he tackled another topic, honed his vocabulary, changed the sort of author I thought he was. Each seemed to invert genre while inventing its own—Ratner’s Star, for example, was Wodehousean science fiction; I enjoyed it at twenty-three the way I adored The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at thirteen. I lent The Names to one friend, Running Dog to another. In 1996, a new coworker lent me her copies of Americana (1971) and Mao II (1991)—what were then the alpha and omega of DeLillo’s output. (Note to Jane: I still have them.) I fell for the chiseled, performative prose, which achieved a kind of hang time in the mind. The atmosphere of almost religious silence that was at odds with the droll dialogue. The fevered minds reaching for solutions, such as the scholar of “latent history” in Great Jones Street who posits that there was a sect of Sans-Culottes in revolutionary France who gathered in secret “for the sole purpose of wearing culottes.” Jane has lived in England for over twenty-five years now—we barely see each other—but to paraphrase Floss Penrose on Wadi Assad, Don DeLillo “writes the kind of books that, when you meet someone who’s read them, you know you’ve found a friend for life. How many writers can you say that about?”
I discovered Amazons in grad school while searching for DeLillo on the library database. “Birdwell, Cleo”? “An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League”? Who—what? From the mid ’70s to mid ’80s, I had grown up with hockey: playing it, watching my hometown Sabres, collecting trading cards, amassing trivia; I would have heard of “Cleo Birdwell.” And why was the copy only available in the rare book room, rather than in the stacks with the other DeLillo books? This would have been right around 1994; Birdwell’s title was more associated with the women warriors of Greek mythology than an upstart online bookseller. (Adding to the sense that this was all hallucination, the library database was called “CLIO.”) Eventually I learned about DeLillo’s involvement through a website dedicated to his work. Pre-eBay, I found the book on Alibris. Within a week I had another great DeLillo novel, which had the distinction of being shamelessly entertaining.
IV.
For decades, DeLillo has had a reputation as a high priest of postmodernism, a systems novelist on par with Pynchon and Gaddis. His books are “powerfully disturbing” (Great Jones Street), “harrowing” (Players), “gritty” (Running Dog), “frightening” (The Names), full of “savage indignation” (White Noise), “precise, stark, gorgeous” (Underworld). I’m being selective (“witty” and “entertaining” also pop up), but the overall public image of DeLillo is of a serious writer exploring the weighty themes of our times.
His characters’ pronouncements have read, retroactively, like predictions. “I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness,” says reclusive novelist Bill Gray in Mao II. “All plots tend to move deathward,” a professor tells his students in White Noise. The phrase “Capital burns the nuance off of culture” (Underworld) comes to mind with demonic regularity.
When we last see the aforementioned toggle-coated sports journalist in Amazons—the one who cooks Cleo a miraculous gourmet meal—he’s having trouble getting his massive snowmobile exposé published.
I’m going through a period of agonizing reappraisal. . . . First my editor gets fired for stealing office supplies. Then the editorial board refuses to comment on the manuscript because they can’t read my handwriting. It costs me a fortune to get the thing typed. Okay, the thing is typed. They read it. They tell me it doesn’t work as fiction the way it’s presently put together. I tell them it’s not supposed to work as fiction. It’s nonfiction. They say, “Oh really?”
This fruitless fictioneer’s name is Murray Jay Siskind. A few years later, Murray will make a cameo as a “visiting lecturer on living icons” in White Noise, DeLillo’s breakthrough novel. He’s the one who visits (with narrator Jack Gladney, founder of Hitler Studies) the Most Photographed Barn in America. “No one sees the barn,” he tells Jack. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. . . . We see only what the others see. . . . We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”
Murray is a standout among White Noise’s eccentrics, so it’s pleasantly jarring to spend even more time with him in Amazons, during a more unmoored—but comically rewarding—time in his life. Populated by academics, White Noise is about meaning-making; its nervous humor is matched at every turn by the deathward spiral of contemporary life: “Transient pleasures, drastic measures.” By contrast, Amazons welcomes the reader into a world of no consequences, where what passes for wisdom is the insipid, Orientalized lore of Wadi Assad. (From The Heart-Shaped Moment: “And the cat replied, ‘Why would a wise man and teacher want to prowl in dark places.’”)
But in fact, his (fake) books become the novel’s through line. In an interlude that takes Cleo to Georgia, her formidable host Randall (a woman who has played “gin rummy with Dietrich and Mah-Jongg with Garbo”) declares that “one great figure of this century I’ve always regretted not meeting is Wadi Assad.” Her son thinks he’s “pseudo profound,” but Randall rebuts:
Isn’t pseudo profundity exactly what we need in these terrible times? Don’t all our problems arise from true profundity? Isn’t the failure of our age a failure of profound men with profounds ideas? What was Marx if not profound? Or Freud or Gandhi or Bertie Russell? Yet all we have to do is look around us to discover the fruits of his deep, true, genuine profundity.
The magic of Amazons is that this defense of pseudo-profundity itself feels profound.
V.
I’ve been avoiding calling Amazons “hilarious.” Plenty of supposedly foolproof comic novels fall flat for me: Lucky Jim, The Ginger Man, A Confederacy of Dunces. I wonder: if I hadn’t gone in expecting wall-to-wall yuks, might I have liked them better? Much of what’s funny relies on the element of surprise; if the experience feels predetermined, it risks losing the audience. (As a character in Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders says, “Let’s not theorize about humour . . . it’s utterly fruitless and makes the very dullest kind of conversation.”) Years ago, teaching a graduate seminar on the comic novel, I asked students to note the point where an assigned text first made them laugh. A tactical mistake. Telling them to clock their laughs made them not laugh at all.
Revisiting Amazons this summer, I told myself not to register my first laugh—to simply read critically, as I would with any book under review, leaving x’s beside strong passages. But on page 9, apparently, I couldn’t help myself: a “HA” materializes in the margin (as a Garden exec roars to an underling, “You’re so fugging refreshing I may stop shaving with menthol”—then laughs at his own quip.) This is followed by a bolder “HA!” on page 10, and soon enough, HA!s cluttered the gutters, across all sixteen delicious chapters. It was only after I finished that I realized I could count them. This tally took longer than I expected. When I was done, I discovered I’d laughed 194 times, roughly once every two pages. The above findings are not meant to be scientific—but make of that ratio what you will.
Cleo’s wit resides in epigrammatic declarations (“There is a short, gnarled man in every athlete’s life,” “If a man’s name sounds right whether you read it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale”); in names such as Washington Post, Cleo’s doorman (who I think of every time I read The Washington Post); in madcap scenes sprouting from a single small thing. When Cleo jokes to Sanders Meade that someone might break into their room like the Watergate burglars, the name of that political scandal renders him impotent. He then proceeds to unpack the woes of the male American psyche, whose other trigger words include “Vietnam” and “Iran.”
In an even loopier scene, Cleo’s ailing friend Shaver Stevens fixates on a kitchen utensil attached to a doggedly modern painting at his doctor’s home. “What is it doing there?” he demands. “Explain it.” “The canvas is canvas,” the doctor’s wife replies. “The paint is paint. We respond to it as paint. And we respond to the spoon as a spoon. It is a spoon.” The debate keeps going, past where other writers would have let such a trivial matter rest—indeed, keeps going until you wonder if this might be the point after all.
Cleo also wonders about language. She might not fight a war against cliché, but she’s hyperaware of the gulf between word and reality. Why is a big apartment always described as “sprawling,” a large house as “rambling”? She parses (as have we all) the exact number meant by “several” versus just a “couple.” After describing a creepy color commentator as “raven-haired,” the phrase immediately causes her to ponder:
If you read that in a magazine, you’d think the person was some kind of dashing figure, a Grand Prix racer or millionaire playboy, maybe the heir to a fortune in soft plastics, who produces his own big budget movie, which is shot in six or eight mouth-watering European locales and loses a lot of money but was just a lark anyway with an international cast flying in and out mainly for tax-shelter reasons and none of the stars worrying about damaged prestige because it’s the kind of movie that everyone knows in advance is going to be flashy, empty, and dead, and they know we know it, and it’s one of the little indulgences we allow each other. . . . That’s the romantic motor in my skull, running amuck. The image-making machine.
We can read this rather amazing non sequitur, about a preposterous lark that does not risk hurting one’s reputation, as DeLillo being self-aware about Amazons as a project. (The lore is that he submitted it to his then-editor, Knopf’s Robert Gottlieb, who turned it down but allowed him to publish elsewhere under a pseudonym.) But what caught my attention this time around was Cleo’s mention of the “romantic motor in my skull,” the “image-making machine” we all (as children of Godard and Coca-Cola, as DeLillo once wrote, or maybe TikTok and Monster Energy) carry inside us.
Ad agencies have traditionally been the primary movers of image making, and it’s worth noting that DeLillo worked for a major outfit, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (now just Ogilvy), for five years after graduating Fordham. It was 1959, the same year the Clio Awards were founded “to celebrate creative excellence in the advertising world.” He made friends with fellow copywriter Sue Buck, a Penn State grad who was two years older. He left in 1964, “just as I was getting good.”
Buck stayed on for what would become a thirty-two-year career. DeLillo and Buck kept in touch, and at some point hatched the idea of Amazons. Cleo Birdwell—pure invented image, worthy of a Clio—was born.
Though articles and reviews always acknowledge Buck as the book’s coauthor, the text is treated as basically DeLillo’s. In this telling, Buck provided insights into small-town life that DeLillo would be unfamiliar with—there are a couple rapturous passages about Christmas and Midwestern life (less laugh-out-loud, more gauzy, but still evocative). She was a product of Beaver, Pennsylvania, less than two hours east of Cleo’s hometown of Badger, Ohio. DeLillo later dedicated White Noise to her (and to his agent, Lois Wallace).
Buck, a longtime Manhattanite, eventually moved to Delaware, where she died in 2020. Her obituary online mentions a long career at Ogilvy, and her love for her husband, Ralph, who died in 2006 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. (An obituary in the Times says he was a World War II vet who worked as associate general counsel for Caltex Petroleum.) It says she was a “creative writer.” It makes no mention of her hand in the exploits of Cleo Birdwell.
Still, Sue Buck is essential to Amazons. Her own career makes its outrageous premise realistic. Early in the novel, an awed and grateful Sanders Meade moans to Cleo that it’s hard being a man. Women on the whole are on the upswing in the culture. “Take yourself, for example,” he says. “You’re tall, vigorous, attractive, a brilliant athlete, and smart, too. How do we adjust to that?”
“I don’t want to sound high and mighty,” Cleo replies, “but I happen to be one of a kind, at least as far as my athletic ability is concerned. I’m the first. That means I have my own set of problems and adjustments.”
Cleo Birdwell, first (fictitious) woman player in the NHL, surely doesn’t exist without Sue Buck’s experience navigating the advertising world—think Peggy in Mad Men. There’s a hilarious (fine, I said it) but sobering blip near the end, when Cleo and Floss are maneuvering a wheelchair (don’t ask) through the city, and they see a woman (fifty, ruddy faced, clad in rags, with a supermarket cart “full of junk”) sawing away on a violin in front of a midtown church. Floss realizes she knows her. “She used to be with the William Morris Agency. She represented a lot of Watergate authors. She was always telling me she wanted to develop deeper skills, become truly self-sufficient. One day she walked out on her husband, her boss, her home, her job, and her children.” (“A true story of women’s liberation,” Cleo deadpans.)
DeLillo’s best novels mix humor and profundity; even darker work such as Players have moments of giddiness, but his post-Underworld books can feel overly portentous. In 1980, DeLillo and Buck happily threw all profundity out the window (just pseudo profundity, please), intent only on rolling out one goofy set piece and convoluted sex scene after another, poking fun along the way at not just the sports memoir but pornography, science fiction, the Southern Gothic, conspiracy theories, and various other literary and subliterary forms.
The freedom is thrilling, indeed out of control. Scenes go on too long, to our delight. Cleo, bless her, can’t stop. DeLillo has written his share of sturdy female characters, but never in the first person, and never so willingly. We can see him turning cartwheels, as if eager to impress his friend. DeLillo has been married since 1975; neither he and his wife nor Buck and her husband (as far as I can tell) had children, but the heroine of Amazons is like their daughter—the brainchild of an advertising vet and career novelist. Cleo is a successful woman, a complete fiction. Her parents are in love with her, and thus we are, too.
Ed Park latest books are The Repairer of Reputations (Hell’s Hundred) and Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties (Random House, both 2026).