Observing all of this is the narrator, Jeffrey, Lockhart’s disgruntled now 34-year- old son. Those words are uttered by a billionaire who reinvented himself, abandoning a wife and son along the way, and marrying a second wife, archaeologist to whom he is so devoted that her impending death has crushed him. “Everybody wants to own the end of the world,” it announces as early as the opening sentence. True to DeLillo’s art, it resounds with rhetoric. It is too easy to offer this random and ambivalent book as a profound work, which it is and it isn’t. Zero K, DeLillo's speculative new novel, which is less 'new' and more of a summation of an artistic vision, considers the ultimate terror – mortality – and how to face it. Paranoid characters, cult murders, conspiracy theories, entropy and giant TV screens wild with the latest atrocity have sustained him, although his abiding concern is death – the big unanswerable. The equally laconic DeLillo is more earnest, less fully subversive.

If there is a unifying tone, it is that of bewildered fascination.ĭeLillo’s fellow maverick, the great JG Ballard, shared his preoccupations, but operated at a level of discernible if suppressed glee.

Resignedly, through a major body of work that includes some of the most defining novels of the postmodernist era, DeLillo has kept watch on America through a cerebral intelligence kept at bay by irony and humanity. Paranoia is the theme that quiet, intense Don DeLillo has made his own.

Zero k review