![]() ![]() Underworld was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer and the National Book Award (which DeLillo had collected for White Noise in 1985 his acceptance speech then: “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming”). “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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