Don DeLillo’s Latest Novel Is Difficult, and That’s a Good Thing

Last year, the two biggest publishing success stories were Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a challenging and honest assessment of racial identity in America, and adult colouring books, which are proudly billed as an antidote for complex thought. We’re a fragmented culture. But that doesn’t mean authors should necessarily acquiesce to their more populist instincts. “Writing is an intense form of thought,” DeLillo has said. We have enough excuses to not indulge in energetic thinking. Literature shouldn’t offer one more way out.

One of the unwritten rules of writing about Don DeLillo is that, somewhere, you must mention that the 79-year-old author is media shy. He seems as interested in giving interviews as he is about explaining the meaning of his work. Naturally, the two go hand in hand. But, you sense that his caginess is well-meaning: ideas that aren’t wrestled with aren’t earned. As potentially condescending as that may seem in our era of quick answers, he’s doing you a favour by being resolutely complex.

“This is the age of consumer fiction. People want fiction that’s easily assimilable,” he said in one of his rare interviews. “Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture.”

Since publishing his first novel in 1971, DeLillo has become a pillar of American fiction, revered by literary fanboys, writers and academics. And while a handful of his 17 novels have been bestsellers, he has never had much interest in creating popular fiction. Zero K won’t change that.

There is no way to avoid thinking about Zero K. It’s challenging, in form and content. The story is secondary to the themes it engages with. It’s about technology, and terrorism, and the banalities that make life unique. And, naturally, the novel is about death. To anyone familiar with DeLillo’s work, this isn’t surprising.

“All plots tend to lead deathward,” he wrote in White Noise (which won the National Book Award in 1985), but it could be a tagline for Zero K. The plot here is a son joining his semi-estranged, incredibly wealthy father at a compound that houses a kind of technological cult called The Convergence. Through technology that extends beyond cryogenics, they promise patients near-immortality by freezing them until a future time when they can be reborn without ailments or disease. It’s a simple premise, but DeLillo has his characters spin questions from it that tease at the nature of identity, language, and life.

“Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”

“What good are we if we live forever?”

“When do we stop being who we are?”

Ultimately, the characters asking these questions are less interested in answers than they are in the opportunity to explore. As is often the case with him, it can be difficult to parse whether DeLillo agrees with his characters, or is simply interested in playing with their ideas — he doesn’t really answer these questions, either.

In that way, Zero K takes on the tone of secular scripture: there are prophetic passages (which isn’t new for DeLillo), but also counter-intuitive affirmations. The way a Bible story can seem brutal and dark, but is meant to invoke faith. (For the most popular book in the world, the Bible is mighty complex.) Or, to use a metaphor from the book, the way banalities, remembered, studied and appreciated, make up a life.

Likewise, Zero K is a book that is more enjoyable in re-reading, visiting pages out of context or order, chewing on the sentences for sustenance. DeLillo apparently wrote each paragraph of Zero K on a separate piece of paper. Better to perfect each on its own. And while that isn’t how scriptures were written, it is how people so often use them: in verses and chunks. And it’s why and how Zero K works, too. Each paragraph a challenge, ultimately rewarding and beautiful.