Zero K

by Don Delillo

A New York Times Notable Book

A New York Times bestseller, "DeLillo's haunting new novel, Zero K--his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld" (The New York Times), is a meditation on death and an embrace of life.

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.

"We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?" These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth."

Don DeLillo's "daring...provocative...exquisite" (The Washington Post) new novel weighs the darkness of the world--terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague--against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun."

"One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo's long career" (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.

• ISBN10: 1501138073
• ISBN13: 9781501138072
• Publish Date: 16 May 2017 (first published 3 May 2016)
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Scribner Book Company
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

Life, and death, and life after death are at the heart of Don DeLillo's Zero K. I'd never read DeLillo before, but his reputation proceeds him so I was excited to finally do so. The novel focuses on Jeffery Lockhart, who we first meet as he's entering a mysterious facility somewhere in Central Asia called the Convergence. His stepmother Artis is dying, and is choosing to have herself cryogenically frozen so that she can be revived when her body's ills can be cured and her consciousness can be restored. The Convergence is a cult-like space for the super-rich to shuffle off this mortal coil, with art installations, like mannequins in discomfiting poses and banks of TV screens that play footage of disasters on mute, among a maze of smoothly paneled identical rooms. Artis is there thanks to the incredible wealth of Ross Lockhart, Jeffrey's father, with whom he has had a difficult relationship even since Ross walked out on Jeffrey and his mother. Jeffrey is disturbed by his time at the Convergence, and it resonates after he returns to his native New York and tries to resume his normal life, where he's made a practice of detachment: temporary jobs, long-distance girlfriends. We get peeks at Jeffrey's childhood, dominated by memories of his father's departure and the fallout that had on his mother, whose own lonely death also looms large in Jeffrey's psyche. It's left to the reader to try to figure out how much it was his time at Convergence, or his childhood, or a mixture of the two, that plays into Jeffrey's movements towards actually getting closer to his latest girlfriend and her troubled son when he gets back to New York.

I'm a big movie-watching as well as a book-reader (I actually think the latter has supplanted the former these days since I'm reading so much more than I used to), and this book reminded me of a literary version of a mash-up of The Tree of Life and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a dream-like meditation on mortality, without much actual plot or even real character development. It feels like abstract art in a way...it's got a tone and a theme, but making connections and fleshing it out and figuring out how to feel about it are on the person taking it in (in this case, the reader). It's a book to read slowly and contemplate. For me, personally, I found it alienating. Like the end of 2001, it made me think about things and have feelings, but I didn't really feel like I understood it. And not in the way that makes you want to go back and mine deeper in the layers of it to find new gems, but in the way where I felt like it was written specifically to be distant and aloof. If you're in a mood to contemplate the deeper questions of life, this will be a solid read but otherwise the supple prose is about the only selling point.