The work, set mostly in Greece, is primarily a series of character studies, interwoven with a plot about a mysterious "language cult" that is behind a number of unexplained murders.

The businessmen await the arrival of a colleague, an obsessively ambitious filmmaker, who lays out an extravagant plan to film the cultists performing their bizarre ritualistic killings.

Politics is where the element of control reveals itself most visibly: as in Empire; in the United States' relations with other countries; in the activities of corporations; in the relationship between men and women; in the behavior of terrorists.

In The New York Times, Michael Wood dubbed DeLillo an author of “extraordinary verve and wit” and described The Names as "a powerful, haunting book, formidably intelligent and agile", but wrote that "it also feels a little blurred, its insights scattered rather than collected."

However, Yardley also wrote that the novel "takes on too many themes and wanders in too many directions to find a coherent shape", describing Axton's observation about language on the Parthenon as appealing but also arrived at "by so circuitous a route that many readers probably will lose patience along the way."

Yardley referred to The Names as "the work of a writer of clear if chilly brilliance", and argued that the moments when the author "thinks as keenly as he writes [...] are concentrated in the first of the book’s three principal sections".

But the reviewer also wrote that "while other DeLillo books (even the weaker ones) have presented that theme with an insistent, disturbing blade of glittering scorn, this time there's more somber meditation .

[12] In 2007, The Names was listed in New York as one of the author's supreme achievements along with White Noise, Libra, and Pafko at the Wall, with a reviewer writing, "Mixing DeLillo’s brilliant gloss on America’s place in the world in the seventies with a comic portrait of a failing marriage and Pynchonesque story of a mysterious, murderous cult, The Names is a summa of everything he’d learned up to that point, his last and greatest seventies novel, and one of his greatest novels, full stop.

"[16] Jeff Somers ranked it fourth among 17 books by DeLillo and wrote, "Challenging and cerebral, the central question of the novel concerns how far context and words go towards shaping perception and, therefore, reality?

"[20] Michael Wood interpreted the language cult as representing "the arbitrary, the meaningless not as chaos and confusion but as heartless, pointless pattern,” noting one character's view that they "mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls."

[21] In July 2018, at the Festival d'Avignon, french theater company Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur created a play based on three novels by Don Delillo : Players, Mao II, The Names.