Immortality is the goal in Don DeLillo's new novel which concludes with a different kind of “climate event” to the floods and tornadoes projected on the Convergence screens: the rare alignment of the setting sun with the Manhattan street grid. Rendered in lyrical prose it carries with it an old consolation: that beauty is by necessity transitory. It might just be that DeLillo the black ironist and lacerating sceptic is, in his own way, going soft in his old age.

Immortality is the goal in Don DeLillo's new novel which concludes with a different kind of “climate event” to the floods and tornadoes projected on the Convergence screens: the rare alignment of the setting sun with the Manhattan street grid. Rendered in lyrical prose it carries with it an old consolation: that beauty is by necessity transitory. It might just be that DeLillo the black ironist and lacerating sceptic is, in his own way, going soft in his old age. 

 

 

• Duncan White writes"

22 May 2016 •  

 

Don DeLillo has always been something more than a novelist. ......
So it is not surprising to find that in Zero K, his 16th novel written in his 80th year, DeLillo has chosen a subject that became a convention of science fiction in the Twenties and Thirties......

 The novel concludes with a different kind of “climate event” to the floods and tornadoes projected on the Convergence screens: the rare alignment of the setting sun with the Manhattan street grid. Rendered in lyrical prose it carries with it an old consolation: that beauty is by necessity transitory. It might just be that DeLillo the black ironist and lacerating sceptic is, in his own way, going soft in his old age.
 

Zero K by Don DeLillo is published by Picador (£16.99). To order your copy for £14.99 plus £1.99 p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk