I started out really liking this book, but it was around the part where Babette and Jack got into that argument over who was more obsessed with death. It read like a competition between two people making a case for why they deserved to be pitied more than the other. After that I couldn't help from becoming more critical of their characters, and ended up finding myself disliking them more and more. How Babette treated Jack's reaction to her affair comes to mind.

DeLillo very well could have intended these characters to be worthy of contempt, which I guess with this interpretation would make him successful in that regard. Either way it still left me with less to like about the book.

He did offer a lot of interesting views on the role and impact that death holds in our lives, though a lot of it really didn't make sense. Partly it is because it seems like there really is not any clear purpose for death. There are definitely some good cases to be made of course (to make life more meaningful comes to mind), but without any clear defined reason there cannot be any consensus.

Everything else in his commentary on death though that didn't make sense is because it just came off as unintelligible... Like the discussion between Jack and Murray. They floated the idea that people kill because they think it will make them live longer, gaining "life-credit".

Maybe I missed the point on some of this, but it was still decent and surprisingly an easy read. There is a quote in the book that I think was quite apt, "gibberish, but high-quality gibberish".