It’s not just that death is literature’s great subject. It’s that literature itself works as a stand-in for death. Here’s Everett, in Libra, again: “A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it.” As much as stories may be marked by their grandeur and and magnitude, their potential to be about anything and everything, they are just as marked by their finitude, by what Jane Austen called “the tell-tale compression of the pages,” by that harrowing inevitability of an end. Meditation is sometimes described as the practice of death, and the same can be said of writing, and reading, fiction. And especially Don DeLillo’s fiction.
Special to The Globe and Mail