It follows Lyle and Pammy Wynant, a young and affluent Manhattan couple whose casual boredom is overturned by their willing participation in chaotic detours from the everyday.

Pammy joins her friends Ethan and Jack on a trip to Maine, where they come to the realization that their collective nostalgia for simpler times and rural life is largely invented.

His engagement with the radicals, themselves devoid of any morality or particular ideology, becomes more absurd when he attempts to inform on them to equally ill-defined government agents, and begins having sexual relationships with two other conspirators.

In Players DeLillo precipitates many of the themes wrought by rampant consumerism in late twentieth century America that he would later explore in White Noise and Underworld.

The notion of terrorist as societal actor, the appeal of fringe ideologies, and the utility of conspiracies first explored here would later be given more in-depth treatment in DeLillo's Mao II.