Interview with Don DeLillo:
You left America with Carter and you came back with Reagan—came back to a different country probably.
Yeah, and while we were there that was the Iranian revolution and the Lebanese war and Athens was full of Lebanese who were fleeing Beirut. So there was this constant sense of turmoil. Of course while I was working on the novel I was aware of all this. In The Names, this cult appears and one could think of them as mystical. They’re a murderous cult but they have mystical leanings. I was drawn from politics to a higher level of violence.
So The Names would be the first book of the new period?
Exactly. I was much more conscious of writing. I discovered a new method of writing, which was one paragraph a page, so that I could look more closely at what I was doing. Rather than rereading a page full of print. I would reread a page that had seven lines on it so I could focus more.