Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America

Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)


Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).

But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.

Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.

And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I  just couldn't get my finger on it.