Zero K and making sense of 'late period' Don DeLillo

In White Noise, one character says ‘all plots end in death’. Here, many of the author’s preoccupations recur, but death is just the beginning of the story

Many of the reviews I’ve read of DeLillo’s latest book, Zero K, talk about “late period” DeLillo, suggesting that since Underworld, he’s been prone to writing similar books – marked by slender plotting, elusive meanings and dense, elliptical prose. What most reviewers don’t say is that another characteristic of these late novels is that they generally need to be read more than once to be understood, and that they sometimes take years to mature in the reader’s mind.

Most famously, the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani derided Cosmopolis as “a major dud” when it came out in 2003 – but it now seems like a near-magical (and hilarious) pre-imagining of the 2008 financial crash. Personally, I misunderstood and didn’t enjoy DeLillo’s The Body Artist the first time I read it – but have been haunted by its evocation of loss ever since.

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