DeLillo’s Qualms
Don DeLillo’s White Noise came out in 1986. What stayed with me about the novel was “the airborne toxic event,” and the constant, disturbing sense of menace and fragility that pervades the lives of its characters. This was a perspective that matched too well with my own psychology for me to require being taught that lesson, or to be amused by the humor that critics found in DeLillo. So I did not follow his subsequent distinguished literary output, and come to his latest work Zero K practically a novice. In Zero K, instead of the airborne toxic event we have the…