Amazons

Don DeLillo’s pseudonymous comic masterpiece by Cleo Birdwell, “the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League,” is a cult treasure now republished for the first time in nearly half a century. Meet Cleo Birdwell. She is twenty-four, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, and the first ever female recruit to play in the National Hockey League. She is an instant sensation–on and off the ice. “They wrote about my honey blond hair flying in the breeze, my silver skate blades flashing, my plucky work in the corners, my style, my stamina, my milky blue eyes, my taut ass and firm breasts, the nightmarish bruises on my downy white thighs.” Amazons is the story of Cleo’s first full season with the New York Rangers and follows her as she travels with the team to all the snowbound ice hockey towns of North America, proving her mettle on the rink but also finding fun, adventure, and a lot of sex along the way. Cleo’s conquests include many buff hockey players, along with Archie Brewster, an elegant tennis pro suffering from arrested development; Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter who hates most sports and whom Cleo arouses with an elaborate description of Christmas in Badger, Ohio (Murray shows up again in DeLillo’s other comic masterpiece, White Noise); and Sanders Meade, the team’s manager whose mild manner assures his ascent (“If a man’s name sounds right whether you say it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale.”) Amazons is also a glorious snapshot of a moment in recent American history, the late '70s, and Cleo is an astute observer of her time. Laced through this politically incorrect “memoir” are riffs on junk food, the advertising industry, gender roles, and even Sufi masters. Her search for meaning is the same long, hard, dangerous mission that people have been undertaking for centuries. Only funnier.