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.

So right now, I’m not going to venture anything like a definite judgment on Zero K. I’ve finished it, but I haven’t really come to terms with it. I reserve the right to change my mind – to let it grow or diminish. I suspect there’s much I’ve missed and I know there’s plenty I haven’t yet understood. The prose is rich, chewy and best consumed in small mouthfuls, so I had to plod through it haltingly – but I relished it all the more in consequence.

While I’ve been reasonably sure of my feelings about White Noise over the past few weeks of our Reading group, it’s challenging to turn from that book to Zero K. But it’s also fascinating, because the two books have a lot in common. In fact, my initial reaction to Zero K was that it was an ideal companion to White Noise, that the later novel wraps up many of the ideas in the earlier one – and so it makes sense to move direct from one to the other.

A character in White Noise suggests “all plots end in death”. Zero K suspends its characters in a never-ending death, when they are cryonically frozen in a place called the Convergence, somewhere in the former Soviet Union. As in White Noise, the characters are confronted by torrents of information, news, nonsense and media static assailing them in the back of taxis, in their homes, in the otherwise sterile corridors of the Convergence.

DeLillo’s new narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart shows a delight in language similar to Jack Gladney’s: “She was my lover. The idea consoled me, the word itself, lover, the beautiful musical note, the hovering letter v.” There are familiar riffs on simulacra and unreality: “I stood in the booth, counting … It didn’t seem to be me. It seemed someone else, a recluse who’d wandered into semi-public view, standing here and counting.”

In Zero K, is DeLillo is self-consciously playing on his own canon? Photograph: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images

Such parallels are striking, but I suspect I would find just as many in other DeLillo books. Even with my rusty memory I could link a series of violent, murderous and apparently “real” films in the Convergence to the footage of the Texas Highway Killer in Underworld and repeated motifs of flickering images from other novels. It’s also possible to see those details about screens in the back of a taxi rebroadcasting ideas from Cosmopolis. And there are similar reflections in dozens of other ideas about bankers, cults, remote desert underground facilities. In a fine essay in the Vulture, Christian Lorentzen even notes that a passage where Lockhart does squat jumps reminded him of one in End Zone, and that some of Zero K’s comic dialogue will sound to devotees like a “master playing tennis with himself across the decades”.



I’m open to the possibility that these parallels with earlier works are incidental. They relate to ideas that have fascinated and troubled DeLillo throughout his career and his intention may be simply to give them new iterations here, rather than to be self-referential. But if DeLillo is self-consciously playing on his own canon, that would fit neatly with what I’ve come to see as a major theme in the book.

While I originally took Zero K as a reflection on mortality and what it means to die, it now also seems to me to be about the artist’s contest with infinity. “All plots end in death” is developed into the question of what happens to stories once their creator moves on – or, how much of the creator remains in those stories. For instance, the first person we see anaesthetised and frozen is called Artis (genitive of “ars”, if you’re a Latin fan – which is to say, “of art”). We are told that “death is a cultural artifact” and that their frozen clients will be “subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with”. We are even shown frozen bodies arranged around the Convergence building like so many macabre sculptures.

If this version of the afterlife is a metaphor for art, it’s a grim one, even if it’s also amusing: the implication being that striving for immortality in art is as absurd as paying a fortune to have someone freeze your dead body. Entering the bargain with the assumption that you will be given an escape from death, the best you can hope for is to have your cold husk displayed for the amusement of future generations, after everything that actually made your conscious being has long since left the building.

Neatly, this idea has already appeared in DeLillo. In Point Omega, we’re told: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” In White Noise, meanwhile, Jack Gladney already feels like he is the false character following his name around. Set in this context, DeLillo’s references to his earlier works throughout Zero K become another brilliantly deadpan joke. The book also becomes the place where all those wonderful books meet their end, although I hope not. I hope I’ve got it wrong – like most of us do when first reading late period DeLillo. I hope that there will be more books, both to blast apart this thesis and to intrigue us anew.