the moments when the author "thinks as keenly as he writes [...] are concentrated in the first of the book’s three principal sections". A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews expressed similar reservations. The reviewer praised the scene in which Axton seduces the corporate wife, stating that "as long as DeLillo stays within [the] class of the edgy and expatriate, bis [sic] novel is fine--gritty and adhesive", and argued that "the larger theme is, as usual with DeLillo, the foulness of modern life--its sullying, cheapening progress." 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 . . . while only a few scenes flare." In his 1987 book-length study of DeLillo's works up to that point, however, Tom LeClair lauded The Names as DeLillo's finest work. David Cowart said the same in 2008. 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." In 2006, Geoff Dyer wrote in The Daily Telegraph that he considered The Names to be the "great leap forward" in DeLillo's career; Dyer later hailed it in The Guardian as "a prophetic, pre-9/11 masterpiece: a 21st-century novel published in 1982", and argued that it should have been one of three novels by the author (along with White Noise and Underworld) to win the Man Booker Prize. In a review of a later book by the same writer, Joshua Ferris mentioned the dialogue of the British security consultant Charles Maitland (such as his complaints about new people's republics emerging and areas' names being changed) as an example of DeLillo's skill with sentences, arguing that the author "artfully reveals Maitland’s Western view of things while guiding the reader to ask: Who’s changing the names, and why? Smile, and the history of colonialism and the civil wars it ignited will be scrubbed out with a quip." Jeff Somers ranked it fourth among