So where to now in DeLillo world? It seems he has seen death, and now he is raising it to the tune of Zero K, in which a clutch of mega-wealthy brainiacs have constructed a secret ‘facility’ deep in the bedrock of remote Central Asia. He is an unusual writer, stripped almost entirely of sentimentality, save for his description of Cotter Martin skipping school to leap the turnstiles to a baseball game that begins the beguiling sprawl of Underworld. ‘All plots tend to move deathwards,’ Jack Gladney says in White Noise, ‘this is the nature of plots.’ In Libra DeLillo imagines Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and inexorable death in an historical literary thriller like no other. There is a fixation with death that rattles through his body of work. His characters speak in DeLillo-speak, challenging ideas in a unique tone that is at once ponderously earnest and hilariously mocking. Don DeLillo has enthralled readers over the years with his distinctive brand of hyper-realism.
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