The author's latest – which, it should be said, is handily his best book since 1997's magnum opus Underworld, which is about as close as American fiction has come to producing a novel that is truly about anything and everything – feels very much like a companion piece to White Noise, a novel similarly preoccupied with death and dying. In Zero K, DeLillo's deathward plotting would seem to find its plainest expression. Meditation is sometimes described as the practice of death, and the same can be said of writing, and reading, fiction.
Here's Everett, in Libra, again: "A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it." As much as stories may be marked by their grandeur and and magnitude, their potential to be about anything and everything, they are just as marked by their finitude, by what Jane Austen called "the tell-tale compression of the pages," by that harrowing inevitability of an end. It's that literature itself works as a stand-in for death. It's not just that death is literature's great subject. There, ex-CIA spook Win Everett is of the same mind as Gladney, believing that "the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot." Like Gladney and Everett, Don DeLillo seems to believe that all stories, like all lives, taper inevitably toward death. It's an idea DeLillo revisited in his follow-up, 1988's Libra. "All plots tend to move deathward," Jack Gladney says in White Noise, Don DeLillo's 1985 breakout novel, and his first stone-cold masterpiece.
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