![]() ![]() DeLillo’s haunting new novel, “Zero K” - his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, “ Underworld” - is a kind of bookend to “White Noise” (1985): somber and coolly futuristic, where that earlier book was satirical and darkly comic. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. “All plots tend to move deathward,” the narrator of “White Noise” says. Death stalks Don DeLillo’s characters - be it in the form of terrorism, the atomic bomb, assassination, suicide, war, earthquakes, murderous cults or “an airborne toxic event” passing over the landscape “like some death ship in a Norse legend.” To try to stave off their fear of death, his people compulsively reach for belief systems, drugs, hobbies, organizing principles (from football to mathematical equations to stories), housekeeping rituals - anything that might hold the inevitable fact of mortality at bay. ![]()
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