Zero K: A Novel

DeLillo is drawn to philosophical themes, and this is definitely that sort of book.The plot itself has a surreal quality. Jeffrey Lockhart’s father and stepmother are immersed in something called the Convergence. His stepmother, Artis, is dying, and, through his father, Ross’s, wealth, she is going to be preserved in cryonic suspension to be awakened at some future time to resume her life when her health can be restored. The Convergence is not some tech lab in Pasadena — it’s located a thousand miles south of Chelyabinsk, the site of a 2013 meteor explosion. Its design and Jeffrey’s experience of it are enigmatic and a little unreal.Everything in the novel is at this slight remove from reality. All of the characters acquire a questionable relationship to their own lives. As Artis says, “I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.” All of the characters are people who are supposed to be themselves, but are never quite simply themselves. Who are they are and what their relationships are to other people are always at question, unmoored, floating near the dock but untethered.Jeffrey’s entire life is unmoored. He has no coherence in his career, his family or other relationships. He has an ambiguous relationship with a woman, Emma, whose son, Stak, is himself at odds for who or what to be. Jeffrey’s father, Ross, has even changed his name, has lost his relationship with Jeffrey’s mother, and he is on the brink of losing Artis. Artis herself is destined for a death that isn’t quite a death.Jeffrey habitually tries to define words and find the right word for situations, to find a “secure placement” for his conscious life in relation to the world itself. It’s as if he is making a desperate attempt to pin the world down with words, to somehow attach that conscious awareness that narrates life to the world itself through the right words. But there is always a kind of buffer zone between Jeffrey and the world, a zone in which things can be transformed — names changed, pasts invented, facts rejected. Awareness swims in motion above reality.A “convergence” would be nice, solving all of this. But that’s not going to happen.If I had to compare this to another DeLillo novel, it might be Point Omega. It shares the same surreal, sparse feel, the same place that isn’t really a place where abstractions can be fully entertained.If you wanted a neat story with an ending that wraps everything up, you’re not going to be happy. I liked the book, though. Its enigmatic quality fits what I think DeLillo is conveying, that, no, lives and identities are not solid and fixed — they are fluid and unclear, always at question, always requiring us to fix them to something if they are ever to become fixed and solid.

Zero K returns to many of DeLillo's themes and preoccupations, particularly how human beings process mortality and our relationship with the planet. I feel that certain aspects of DeLillo's writing have improved with time, in particular the pensive, meditative voice of the text, in which he manages to articulate deep abstract concepts in a lyrical manner. For example, "This was the aesthetic of seclusion and concealment, all the elements that I found so eerie and disembodying. The empty halls, the color patterns, the office doors that did or did not open into an office. The mazelike moments, time suspended, content blunted, the lack of explanation." Passages like these provide a unique, estranged sense of interiority, which works particularly well for exploring how human beings mentally process mortality.One issue I have noticed in DeLillo's most recent texts, however, is that its subject matter goes so deeply cerebral and abstract I find myself searching for characters and a sense of a living community in the text. It's like when you see a Sims game and immediately realize the people in that fictional community are just sort of there, present, but no sense of real life being lived between them. People in his texts feel more like generic propositions of people than they do relatable individuals. That balance between the inner voice of the narrator, and the lives of other characters in the text, often feels neglected, more so than it did in earlier novels like White Noise, which also had mortality as one of the central preoccupations in the book.Overall I found Zero K an enjoyable read because of its refined style, voice, and linguistic craftsmanship. I would recommend it as a good concept-based novel, rich with poetic and philosophical appeal – BUT if that's really not your cup of tea this might not hold your attention.

I’d identify myself with the many who rank Don DeLillo among the roughly half-dozen best novelists currently writing in America. His Zero K is a novel with much to like about it, but on balance the book strikes me as uneven. Encounters between protagonist Jeffrey Lockhart and his father, and scenes with Jeffrey, his lover Emma and her foster son give us DeLillo at his best. Their immersion in contemporary New York—often surreal, but also capturing much of the city’s essence—is convincing, sometimes funny, sometimes spooky, always haunting and memorable. But it seems to me that the novel sometimes falters when its characters move on to a secret cryogenic complex ostensibly located in central Asia. Even here, we have memorable passages, but they are juxtaposed against others that are weighted down with unconvincing science fiction gadgetry. Lateral “elevators,” long successions of closed doors along endless narrow passageways, and other such embellishments suggest to me clunky scenes from Star Trek, with Captain Kirk and his gang visiting some distant planet. Readers familiar with DeLillo won’t be surprised by Zero K’s grim, ominous view of today’s world. This novel’s overriding subject is death, and the hapless, sometimes bizarrely humorous efforts to defeat death by a group of medical scientists and ersatz seers who are engaged in life extension through cryogenics. These men and women hope to escape the ugliness of today’s world, ultimately to return to life in a utopian future. No question, much of today’s world is every bit as menacing and violent, and perhaps even as hopeless as DeLillo represents it. But for balance, I’d suggest that after finishing this novel, readers ought to play Woody Allen’s DVD, Sleeper—a lighter, slapstick alternate look at cryogenics.

In an interview with Ed Caesar in The Times in 2010, DeLillo suggested that "reading a novel is potentially a significant act" because of its exploration of human experience. In comparison with DeLillo's other novels, Zero K demands readers' attention. Most words, like "purely atmospheric" have a double, sometimes triple meaning. In spite of the austere writing style in part one, the play between words and images produces such emotive effects all throughout the narration that you do not realize what has hit you at the end. If you pay attention to the algebra homework - sine cosine tangent- Jeff mentions in part one, you may enjoy the sun set at the end of the novel in awe. All you need is an angle to choose from many artistically created perspectives to remind yourself what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Thought provoking but there wasn't much of a plot and I was left with more questions when I just wanted answers

don de'lillo writes likes no other, faultless prose, highly readable and absorbing story about the modern age desire for some sort of immortality and the implications thereof. highly recommended read for the more discerning reader.

You can skim/speed read Don Delillo’s new book ‘Zero K’ without tripping over any content. It’s vacuous. Like Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’, it’s a postmodern marketing event based on the author’s name recognition, not a literary achievement. The characters are totally flat and boring, there’s no storyline, no engagement, no telling moments, no captivating writing. As a study of euthanasia or cryogenics, it’s scary, and suggests this futuristic scenario needs urgent debate. The sub-story of displaced persons goes nowhere. That’s all.

The arrival of a new Don DeLillo novel is always going to create a ripple of excitement. He occupies a place at the top of the pecking order in American literature and after Roth’s retirement some would argue he sits at the pinnacle. His books are seldom what might be called perfect however.  Underworld  may consistently appear on those lists of great American novels but it’s as bloated as some of those other greats meaning it sits unfinished on many a bookshelf and, personally, I’ve always felt that the opening section describing ‘the shot heard around the world’ is by far the best part of the book.The excitement from readers and writers comes from the fact that he remains a writer who has consistently been able to see so clearly something about the times he writes in. He has been described by some as a seer for his ability to tell us not only where we are but where we might be heading. Zero K exemplifies this before you even start reading. That futuristic cover, the blurb mentioning cryogenics; this is all about man’s wish to extend life into the future, perhaps to avoid death at all. But this is far from a foray into science fiction. It is a book rooted in the now, in the world in which we live and in fact it articulates something about our anxiety so incisively that you realise he might just be the first to say it and how strange that the man to engage so brilliantly with the contemporary is an 84 year-old who doesn’t use email and still writes his novels on a type-writer.Jeffrey Lockhart narrates the novel (the first-person narration is key to making this a more accessible book than some) as he visits the Convergence, a remote facility in which his billionaire father, Ross, has invested heavily. This facility allows the wealthy to enter a cryonic suspension until such time as technology and medicine have advanced sufficiently to awaken them again. Jeffrey is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, whose terminal illness has led her to this facility. The father/son relationship is brilliantly drawn, Ross has not been there for much of Jeffrey’s life and there is an awkwardness about their every exchange intensified by the strangeness of the surroundings.Scenes of conflict, climate change and disaster are played on screens, the facility seems to be made up of long corridors of identical rooms, there is something dreamlike about everything that happens here, as if limbo were a place on Earth. I wouldn’t want to give too much plot away – this is a novel of ideas rather than plot anyway – but Jeffrey is a character far more interested in living the life he has been allotted rather than one that might be gifted now or promised for the future. DeLillo writes some stonking dialogue to go along with the rather more portentous stuff and I loved the brain-fizz that comes from reading something that makes you think ‘Yes! That is so true.’This novel might appear to be ice-cold on the exterior but it manages to include an ending of such warmth that I couldn’t help but look back on what I had just read and think about the human heart that was beating throughout. It made me want to read it again, to examine those moments which hadn’t quite landed on the first read. Always a good indication of a novel that might last. If you’ve ever watched the news or looked around you and worried about the way the world is heading, wishing that you could transport yourself to some utopian future - DeLillo has expressed your anxiety in a piece of art. Underworld