Zero K - Don DeLillo

[TheFifthElement]

So Don DeLillo is publishing a new novel next year called Zero K http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/17/don-delillo-will-publish-new-novel-zero-k-in-2016

I've been reading DeLillo a lot recently and am more and more convinced that he is one of the finest living writers (Elena Ferrante & Ali Smith aside, perhaps) and I was very happy to hear that he was still publishing. I wonder if this is a possible contender for the newly opened-up Booker? Any other DeLillo lovers out there? What are your favourites?

[Tyrion Cheddar]

Hell, yeah. I went through a DeLillo binge many years ago after reading White Noise. I remember reading Great Jones Street, although that was an early one and undoubtedly not considered one of his greats. I started Underworld but never completed it. His style I can best describe as jazz meditation. I dig it. I hadn't heard about the new book.

[TheFifthElement]

I've started Underworld twice and never finished it, but those opening pages are sublime.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
I love your description of his work as 'jazz meditation' because, yes, that's exactly how it feels. I've always found his writing to have such a viceral rhythm to it, like a mantra, to the point where I only half notice what he's written because I'm so transfixed by the words. There are moments of abject perfection. When I'm home, near my library, I'll dig some out.
Haven't read Great Jones Street yet, though I have read White Noise and it's an amazing book. The Names and Mao II are my favourites so far I think. Very much looking forward to Zero K though.

[chrisvia]

I've read a handful of his books (Americana,Mao II,White Noise,Underworld, and Point Omega) and several of his short stories in The New Yorker. For some reason, Point Omega is the one that stands out to me, with White Noise being a strong contender. DeLillo's meditations on stasis and mass-(re)production are striking, if cold.

[The Comedian]

I've not read any Delillo -- but I should. He just never leaps up on my que. But I have a close friend and colleague who concurs with your assessment of him -- that he is one of the finest living writers. His favorite is White Noise, which is the book I really should read by him.

-- The C

[TheFifthElement]

Chrisvia - yes, Point Omega is a very good book. There is one paragraph, where the protagonist watches a woman leaning over a sink washing or brushing her teeth which stuck in my mind. Strangely erotic and yet, as you mention, cold.

Comedian - really good to see you around. I hope you're well :) White Noise is indeed very good, well worth a read. I have to say, my first encounter with DeLillo was distinctly underwhelmed - that was The Body Artist which I hated - and I had no intention of reading any more. Then I read Cosmopolis and it blew me away and I recently re-read The Body Artist and have absolutely no idea why I hated it the first time. It is lyrical and smart, gorgeously written. Proof, again, that perhaps there is a right and wrong time to read a book. But White Noise is a very good place to start, and somehow The Names has really resonated with me, perhaps because it is so much about language and meaning. I'd love to hear what you think, whenever you get chance to get around to reading DeLillo.

Anyway, I'd said I would pick out some scenes when I had chance and this is a quiet hour so here goes.

From Mao II

They speak a half language, a set of ready made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. He keeps the glasses trained, feeling a slight desperation now, a need to find her and remind himself who she is. Healthy, intelligent, twenty-one, serious-sided, possessed of a selfness, a teeming soul, nuance and shadow, grids of pinpoint singularities they will never drill out of her. Or so he hopes and prays, wondering about the power of their own massed prayer. When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops. The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought. See how happy they look.

From The Body Artist

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

From Cosmopolis

He looked past Chin toward the stream of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play.=, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compressions of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realised in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.