“In recent years,” James Wolcott wrote in his memoir Lucking Out, “DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, ‘Why go on?,’ his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he’s done before, beating him up with his own achievements ( Libra, Underworld) instead.” And while War and Peace and Anna Karenina cycle through screen adaptations, how many readers reach for a major minor work - a work of beauty but of limited scope - like The Kreutzer Sonata? The same question already applies to Zero K, DeLillo’s new novel. Tolstoy wrote two, but most mortals - Melville, George Eliot, Joyce - only get one. Have we held Don DeLillo’s Underworld against him? Masterpieces of an epic scale are a tricky business, not least for the distorting effect they can have on the rest of a writer’s works.
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