Early in his career, Don DeLillo secretly published a raunchy satire about a female professional hockey player.
The novel, “Amazons,” follows the groundbreaking athletic career and erotic exploits of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League. Published as a purported memoir under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, “Amazons” briefly caused a stir when it came out in 1980. But it soon fell out of print and was largely forgotten. In the years since its release, DeLillo disowned “Amazons,” omitting the novel from his official bibliography.
Now, he is finally ready to claim it — sort of.
More than 40 years after “Amazons” came and went, DeLillo has agreed to reprint the novel. The new edition is scheduled to come out on Nov. 17, three days before his 90th birthday.
DeLillo’s publisher, Scribner, persuaded him to reissue the novel after The New York Times published an article about how “Amazons” was an unlikely precursor to contemporary hockey erotica, which went mainstream last year with HBO’s “Heated Rivalry.” After the article ran, prices for used copies of the novel soared.
“Doubt this will nudge DeLillo towards a reprint but there is less distance now between him and this book so maybe there is a chance?” a reader commented in The Times.
The new edition will keep its cheeky original conceit: the name on the cover is still Cleo Birdwell, and “Amazons” is still presented as a memoir by a professional female hockey player.
But there’s a sly nod to its author in the opening pages. The epigraph page of the new edition has an image of a business card that DeLillo has carried with him for years and distributes as an evasive maneuver. It’s the only place his name appears in the book.
DeLillo declined through his editor and agent to comment for this article — but his publisher did send The Times one of DeLillo’s cards:
Few members of DeLillo’s inner circle expected that he might ever agree to reprint the novel. For decades, he seemed content for “Amazons” to languish in obscurity, rebuffing repeated offers to resurrect it.
“He was so against republishing,” said Robin Straus, DeLillo’s literary agent. “Lots of people have asked, and he would always say no.”
Then, this February, a few days after the Times article ran, DeLillo and his wife had lunch at their home with DeLillo’s longtime editor, Nan Graham, and the novelist Dana Spiotta, and “Amazons” came up. DeLillo’s wife had stayed up until midnight the night before, reading it and laughing, Graham said.
“It’s comic DeLillo with no restraints whatsoever, running jokes, ridiculous set pieces, insane riffs one after another,” Spiotta, who is a friend of DeLillo’s, said in an interview. “He can’t help but be a great writer even when he’s messing around.”
Shortly after the lunch, Graham and Straus called DeLillo and urged him to consider reprinting the book.
“He said, what the hell, why not,” said Graham, who called “Amazons” a “comic masterpiece.”
“It’s got all of Don DeLillo’s prescience, beyond being a racy hockey novel,” Graham added.
Straus tracked down a letter reverting the publication rights to DeLillo. A Scribner employee scanned the novel’s pages by hand to create a digital file.
When DeLillo wrote “Amazons,” he had published several well regarded novels, but none had been huge sellers. It began as a collaboration with Sue Buck, a former colleague in the advertising business who helped provide details about hockey and growing up in Birdwell’s home state of Ohio, but DeLillo ended up writing it himself.
After his editor at Knopf rejected “Amazons,” he sold the novel to Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which packaged it like a real memoir. The “author photo” on its back cover featured a blond woman wearing a hockey uniform.
Though he was almost immediately outed as the author, DeLillo never formally acknowledged writing the book until he was asked about it in a 2020 interview with The New York Times Magazine, and was seemingly caught off guard. “Oh god. How do you remember that?” he said.
Despite DeLillo’s ambivalence about the novel, “Amazons” retained a cult readership over the years. Its fans include the novelists Rachel Kushner, who called it “one of his funniest if not his funniest novel,” and Jonathan Lethem.
“It might rewire our awareness of what a comic genius he is,” Lethem said of “Amazons.”
It may surprise some readers to see such unhinged comedy from DeLillo, who is typically celebrated for his spare, sober and haunting prose and has been crowned “our laureate of paranoia and dread.” In groundbreaking novels like “White Noise,” “Mao II” and “Underworld,” DeLillo tackles heavy subjects like mortality, terrorism, social isolation and cultural homogenization.
But there’s also a comic strain in DeLillo’s writing. Close readers can see in the witty dialogue, satirical slant and sharp observations about American culture in “Amazons” a particularly riotous precursor to DeLillo’s later work.
In full-blown comedy mode, DeLillo seems to revel in absurdity and ribald humor. In one of many erotic scenes, Birdwell’s partner, the sportswriter Murray Jay Siskind — who later turns up in DeLillo’s breakout novel, “White Noise” — is strangely aroused by Birdwell’s elaborate descriptions of Christmas traditions in her small hometown in Ohio.
There is also a plot twist that sees Birdwell’s hockey team, the New York Rangers, sold to a Saudi owner who insists that Birdwell wear a veil while she plays. She objects, arguing that it would interfere with her slap shot.
When DeLillo published “Amazons,” in his mid-40s, he was still building a reputation as a major literary voice. Now, he has produced a celebrated body of work spanning more than five decades and 18 novels, including “Amazons.” His legacy is secure. Adding his wild comedy sex romp to the canon is only gravy.
“He was on his path to becoming the great American novelist,” Graham said, “and now he is the great American novelist.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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