Via the indispensable website (indispensable for DeLillo fans like UD), Don DeLillo’s America, the first advertising for the next DeLillo novel, due out February 2010. Here’s Simon and Schuster’s page about it, and Scribner’s catalogue entry (scroll down).

The book’s plot has many elements familiar to DeLillo veterans:

In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create “Bulk and swagger,” he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – “Just a man against a wall.”

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an “otherworldly” woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

Bucky Wunderlick of Great Jones Street, Bill Gray from Mao II, and now Richard Elster — all are brilliant artistically, or brilliant intellectually, and all run aground, retreat to the desert (as do, for that matter, various characters in Underworld) or to the countryside or to shabby apartments in New York City — anywhere they can leave the fallen world and contemplate their implication in it.