Such parallels are striking, but I suspect I would find just as many in other DeLillo books. In Zero K, is DeLillo is self-consciously playing on his own canon? Photograph: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images It seemed someone else, a recluse who’d wandered into semi-public view, standing here and counting.” 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. 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.ĭeLillo’s new narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart shows a delight in language similar to Jack Gladney’s: “She was my lover. 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. 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.Ī character in White Noise suggests “all plots end in death”.

But it’s also fascinating, because the two books have a lot in common. 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. 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. I suspect there’s much I’ve missed and I know there’s plenty I haven’t yet understood. I reserve the right to change my mind – to let it grow or diminish. I’ve finished it, but I haven’t really come to terms with it. So right now, I’m not going to venture anything like a definite judgment on Zero K.

Zero K by Don DeLillo