The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous…. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.įor some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game…. We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. The novel used to feed our search for meaning….
In Mao II his protagonist - a reclusive novelist - gives voice to fear that the medium is going out of fashion: But in the age of social media, it feels like an aunt posting a viral BoredPanda video on Facebook two years too late. At some point in the past 50 years, this might have been in a cool factoid for those not in the know and a nice moment of recognition for New Yorkers. Zero K ends with the protagonist enraptured by the beauty of Manhattanhenge, a biannual phenomenon when the setting sun aligns with the New York City grid. It’s hard to write about the cutting edge of geopolitics, art, and ideology at that kind of interval. The six years he took to write Zero K, his most recent novel, is the longest he’s taken since his 1997 masterpiece Underworld, which weighed in at 800-plus pages. Surpassed by history, will the novelist put down his pen?įOR a writer who has made a career out of understanding the increasing pace of contemporary life, DeLillo has remained steady, putting out a new novel every few years since his hyper-productive 1970s.
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