Don DeLillo’s work has zigzagged through the rigor of both critical praise and emphatic rejection. Perhaps his most popular novel, Underworld put a final seal on his 20th century work, giving way to what has been a murkier and more poorly generalized conception of his 21st century writing. This project will examine Zero K, DeLillo’s most recent novel, in conversation with Underworld as a means of defining the 21st century shift which DeLillo has taken. Thematically, structurally, and aesthetically, Underworld is a novel of total and fastidious cultural accumulation. Zero K functions as a purging of this accumulation, and ultimately defines DeLillo’s post-9/11 minimalism. Through the incorporation and acknowledgment of Cold War-era history as well as particles of information teased out from DeLillo’s own 21st century experience, an inverse narrative is woven that reflects both the writer and the cultural space he occupies.
