Zero K: A Novel

I looked forward to how DeLillo would combine futurism with a character study and was disappointed. The science fiction is already yesterday's news (Ted Williams) and the characters are one dimensional, less than believable and even if believable, not very compelling.

Human isolation in a complex and digital world is the theme of this masterpiece. How do we face @the isolation of losing the few family or friends that we truly have. Reduce ourselves to eternal digital waveforms?

Is life anything more than the absence of death? The question is at the heart of Zero K, a novel about life and death. What else would a Don DeLillo novel be about?

DeLillo tells us that death is coming. It may claim an individual (cancer, heart failure) or a large population (terrorism, pandemic, global warming). The odds are good an extinction event will eventually wipe out humanity. “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.” Yet even as life becomes more fragile, humans find the possibility of death increasingly unacceptable.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s wealthy father has taken Artis, his current wife, to an underground facility in a remote part of the world where she will be placed into cryogenic suspension, followed by emergence “in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.” The facility’s approach to death avoidance, unlike Jeffrey, is deeply philosophical, blending science with a variety of new age perspectives, some of which DeLillo presents with tongue-in-cheek.

The first section of the novel takes place at the facility, to which Jeffrey has traveled at his father’s request so he can be present when Artis dies. Jeffrey engages with his father and with Artis as she prepares for death, preservation, or transition (whatever that fate might turn out to be)). He also engages with contemplative individuals who serve ambiguous purposes within the facility. While Jeffrey’s engagement is more an act of observation than interaction (he prefers to invent names for people rather than learning their actual names), one of the monks me meets is even less interactive. Perhaps being surrounded by death has that effect.

DeLillo may have intended Jeffrey to represent what life has become in the 21st century, as acts of atrocity and terror bombard us from screens that isolate us from the horror those scenes should inspire while impairing the ability to form true connections with others. Jeffrey sees a fair share of horror on screens (horror as art) during the novel, including one particularly jarring incident to which he should have a personal connection, but it isn’t clear that he processes what he sees on a human level, not in the way he experienced his own mother’s lingering death when he was a child. Perhaps the point is that 24-hour news coverage has inured us to death, has made death impersonal even when it should be very personal.

In the novel’s second part, the emphasis shifts from death to life. Jeffrey’s life involves a woman named Emma and her adopted Ukranian son. According to his father, Jeffrey has drifted through his life without having lived it. Later in the novel, Jeffrey acknowledges that he has made wasting time a life pursuit. Yet he inspects every minute in his life, counts his strides as he walks. He lives in the moment, as self-help gurus urge us to do, but is that enough? Jeffrey observes the homeless but he cannot image their lives. He interviews for jobs he will never accept. The reader is prompted to wonder whether, in Jeffrey’s case, the difference between life and death is significant. In the grand scheme of things, will Jeffrey’s life (or anyone’s) matter?

Depressing thoughts, yes, but DeLillo always adds humor to his darkness. Zero K is in part a playful novel about the power of language. Jeffrey sees the world in relationship to the words that define it. As a child, he was obsessed with precise definitions, often concocting his own, giving substance not just to the word but to the thing the word symbolizes. Like inventing his own names for people, concocting his own definitions is a habit he never lost.

The themes of language and death come together as a character suggests that “we have language to guide us out of dire times.” Perhaps we can defeat death by talking about it. Or perhaps we can assure that our consciousness will persist after our bodies die if we “follow our words bodily into the future tense.” As a novelist, it may be DeLillo’s hope that words live on even after the body dies.

The new universe that Artis will enter (Jeffrey is told) will have its own language, the language of truth, free from metaphor and ambiguity, something akin to the language of mathematics. Yet as she approaches or enters death, Artis is a being “made of words.” She does not know what the words mean but she feels they are important. What is time? What is now? What is place? “What does it mean to be who I am?” That is life’s fundamental question and, if it is unanswerable, DeLillo at least has fun exploring it.

Zero K doesn’t cohere as well as I might have liked, but neither does life. I have admired other DeLillo novels more than this one, but I suspect that this is a novel that improves with a second reading. Maybe I'll give it one if I live long enough. If I could, I would give Zero K 4 1/2 stars.

I think (?) this book was about the worst parts of our world--war, terror, climate change-- but unsure what Delillo's point was. The acceptability of escaping to the future by freezing yourself to an unknown future that could be even worse? I found all of the symbolism too stark and confusing. About the only thing I knew for sure was that the son didn't approve of his father's choice.

There's a strange video screen in the sorrowful underground of the main setting for Zero K; it plays non sequitur videos that seem unlikely, if not impossible, to capture. Like a Bill Viola exhibit injected with personal reality, narratives unfold on them silently in dreamy, terrible landscapes. Like Robert Capa or Sean Flynn war photos, they seem too true to be real.

This is Delillo territory now, and has been in pieces for his career. Scenes are dead weird; characters experience crippling or overwhelming anomie, inhabiting extremes -- of wealth, of arid desert, of grief and of intense desire. Each book itself turns over like the next flipper of a steel sea serpent undulating through modernity. They're different, but the skin is the same, the shape familiar, the propulsion outsized and extraordinary.

What you need to know about the book: It muses, as always, on the riddle of living when death is certain, in a world where its inevitability robs joy and hope. Its characters display ample wit, self-knowledge, and care, but find themselves trapped in a centrifugal vortex that forces them to alienate themselves in a grief of contemplation.

The language, as always, is precise, and evokes Mamet. There is an absurdist core, but Delillo shows great kindness and compassion for the human inability to release itself from a rage for sorrow. The plot satisfies, but not conventionally.

In truth, the book is in the same territory as the videos it depicts: Clear as distance in a world without atmosphere, life in it unlikely but uncommonly precious -- indeed, more so, because of the absolute certainty of its doom.

Zero K Judging from the plot description (and from a recent NYTimes review), I was hoping for some challenging science fiction. But what I got was, in the words of another reader here, "pretentious slog." I'd strongly recommend instead Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora," or Cory Doctorow's "Homeland."

Hugely disappointing compared with DeLillo's excellent previous novels. Unbearably slow and plodding with a lot of characters wandering around. The dialog is often choppy and the protagonists are flat unsympathetic. Overly detailed descriptions of door colors, lint rollers, etc. but nothing about the central focus of the novel-- the cryogenic process itself-- although there is a lot of talk about it. There are many repetitive conversations, ideas, images, and death metaphors: cracked skulls, burning men, tsunami destruction, nuclear war, burning lava etc. But not really leading anywhere except to justify the cryo-pods. Most of this talk about death and the future is presented as lecturing and preaching rather than by character development. The really big interesting issues on mortality are presented as a list of unanswered questions dumped before the reader such as "what does it mean to die?" If you are going to bring up the big questions, at least you should have something important to say about them. The thoughts of the people in the capsules: dreaming of lovers, and Bach, and mathematics is ridiculous. Their brains have been removed and are cryogenically frozen elsewhere. After all this heavy discussion of technology destroying the earth and the pod-people resurrecting the world, the novel just sort of dribbles to an end-- in the words of DeLillo-- "like water dripping down a shower curtain".
A far superior novel is Levine's Mortality, a gripping scientific thriller where sympathetic characters struggle with cryogenic reanimation, life, death, aging, and rebirth.

Don DeLillo has written for more than half a century, producing 17 novels. He often captures and anticipates events on the pages of his books that reflect American culture in ways few writers can equal. I first read DeLillo years ago, drawn to his second novel, END ZONE, which still perfectly captures the evils of college football and the metaphor of football as war despite having been written 30 years ago. Jennifer Egan, in her presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to DeLillo, observed, “His work is astounding, made of stealthy blessings… It proves to my generation of writers that fiction can still do anything it wants.”

ZERO K takes place in the Convergence, a cryogenics compound somewhere in Kyrgyzstan. In its opening paragraphs, Jeffrey Lockhart, the son of billionaire Ross Lockhart, is driven to the compound in an armored vehicle accompanied by security personnel. Ross’ younger wife, Artis, has a terminal disease. He is a significant investor in the secretive compound where death is delayed and bodies are preserved until medical advances can return individuals to improved lives. This is the plan Ross has for his wife. “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?” This is the question DeLillo asks here, the question that Ross has answered in his mind but Jeff will ponder throughout these pages.

Having traveled across the globe to be with his father and stepmother in her last days, Jeff has substantial time to explore the facility that his father has bankrolled. The building, its inhabitants and their reluctance to provide him with any information only add to his skepticism of what is happening here. As he explores, he knocks on one door and a man answers in a turban and tie. Apologizing, Jeff says, “I must have the wrong door.” “They’re all the wrong door,” the man replies. Jeff discovers that the Convergence is more than cryogenics --- it is proactive technology designed to heal and improve the body. Artis is prepared for cryopreservation as Jeff and Ross observe. What constitutes the end? When does the person become the body? DeLillo reminds us that these questions have been debated by doctors, lawyers, theologians and philosophers for centuries with no answers in sight.

In the second part of ZERO K, two years have passed since Artis’ “death.” Jeff has returned to New York and has found a romantic interest. DeLillo brings readers back to the modern world and its difficulties. The real-life aspects of this portion of the book serve as a reminder of what is actually lost when death occurs. The novel moves towards its surprising ending with consequences for Jeff, Emma and her adopted son. In the end, readers must face the cruel fact that it doesn’t really matter how death occurs. Obviously, there is little we can do other than accept its inevitability.

Don DeLillo is approaching 80. His novels have been some of the finest of the past 50 years. He writes without manipulating his readers with literary gimmicks. But every sentence he places on the page, just as every brush stroke in a masterpiece painting has meaning and impact. One hopes that he has at least one more novel to present, but if ZERO K should be his final book, it will be one of consequence and style.

Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

The idea was great. Unfortunately everything else left me wondering why I was wasting my time reading this book. The beginning started off well but after 10per cent I could not wait for the book to end. Perhaps it was just me. But the author lost me

Initially, I was disappointed that normal sci-fi avenues were not followed. We weren't launched into a narrative in which one of the possible futures was revealed. The cryonics vision/fantasy? was not validated or repudiated in any way. No too-easy plot twists were employed. (I had expected the narrator to face his own cryonic future; his father Ross to be robbed of the one he had striven so passionately for.)

The language was fascinating; sometimes creative in unexpected ways that somehow work: "...watching a dancer splice the air..." ; "...I began to notice a glow, a tide of light." Sometimes the language is elliptical and ambiguous in a way that makes me feel dim-witted: "I told myself that I could see it in her face, a kind of transnational bearing, an adaptation."

The world is disintegrating in violence, chaos, catastrophe, almost everywhere, except where Jeffrey lives in NYC and in the remote Convergence facility hidden somewhere in the wastes of central Asia. Ross has confronted reality, and decided that escape is the only option. The cryonics mausoleum he has helped create is a lifeboat for the species. Its devotees imagine it as an ark, a path to transcendence. Jeffrey is a symbol of humanity's denial of its problems. Intelligent, distracted by irrelevancies, deliberately eschewing any action that assumes responsibility. He watches. He waits. He will never do anything else. He gives to beggars, and worries about what it all means.

Jeffrey is "the son", "the heir apparent". He is tacitly called upon to become more -- a savior, a leader, an expiator. He demurs. He finds a job in safe, insulated Connecticut as an officer of Ethics and Compliance at a mediocre college. He has retreated to a relic of a nearly vanished world, irrelevant, in complete denial. The normalcy that the school is preparing students for is a delusion.

He ends the book with, "I didn't need heaven's light. I had the boy's cries of wonder." An idiot child, owning the end of the world. Like Jeffrey himself, and therefore, like humanity as a whole, doomed to never be more than he is.

On closing the book I noticed the cover art: an ideal woman, carved in white marble. It is Artis, an archaeologist who has become the archaeology of the future.

What is the significance of Stak? He started like Jefffrey, lost, but unlike Jeffrey he is driven to find and define himself. But his decision to assume an identity, to accept along with it the need to fight for something, proves fatal. He represents a third choice for humanity, besides fatalism, and flight.

"Artis". The name sounds Greek. And it sounds like "Artist". What is the significance of her contemplation of drops on the shower curtain?

What did it mean that Ross, still vital and hale, was unable to follow Artis into storage, but then quickly diminished into uselessness? And that when he finally followed her, he was drained of purpose and hope? Did he see beyond another delusion? Did he lose his belief in transcendence?

What does it mean that Ross changed his name and abandoned his family? Does our best chance of transcendence or mere survival require that we shed our past, our nature, and our connection to any possible impediment or distraction?

As the book begins, the narrator, Jeff Lockhart, is travelling to an isolated region of the world, somewhere in or near Kazakhstan, where there is a secret facility, largely financed by his billionaire father, Ross. The facility specialises in cryogenics, freezing people at the point of death so that, at some time in the future when medical science has found the way to cure their ills, they can be brought back to life. Ross has asked Jeff to come now to say goodbye to his step-mother Artis, who is about to undergo the procedure. But, as Jeff is to discover, the facility offers more than a simple medical treatment – it has a whole staff of scientists, philosophers and others working on what this second life, which they call the Convergence, will be like.

This is a strange book that takes one of the clichés of science fiction and turns it into something that is either incomprehensible or profoundly thought-provoking, depending on how willing the reader is to play along. For a good proportion of the beginning of the book, my cynical sneer was getting a great workout. The writing is excellent, with moments of brilliance, but the dialogue is entirely unnatural – these people speak in constant profundities. However, behind the cliché, a distinctly unsettling atmosphere of unease soon begins to seep out of the pages, as Jeff wanders alone through the silence of the facility, down long corridors full of doors with nothing to indicate what is behind them. At the end of some of the corridors are viewscreens, showing increasingly horrific images of disaster, destruction and death. And soon my cynicism turned into a fascinated absorption in the imagery and in trying to work out the meanings behind it.

The thing is, I reckon there are a few things the book is definitely 'about', but many others that individual readers will create for themselves in the spaces DeLillo leaves deliberately unfilled. It is primarily a reflection on the importance of death in shaping the way we live our lives. Is death not essential if we are to define life? Would we still race to achieve if we were eternal? Is it the aloneness of dying that makes us fear it? And, if so, is there something almost comforting in the thought of dying with hundreds or thousands of others in some catastrophic event?

It's an exploration of identity – is there a distinct, immutable 'I' within us or are we purely a construct of our experiences and those things we adopt or have pushed on us – our names, our nationalities, being born into wealth or poverty, even our bodies? If all these things are taken away from us, what is left? If we find our way to immortality through becoming some kind of cyberhumans, will that fundamentally change the 'I' that we were as fully human mortals? If we are alone, unheard and unseen by any other, do we exist at all, or do we need the reflection of ourselves that comes back to us from other people to really be?

All questions that have been asked before, of course, but DeLillo gives them fresh urgency by tying them in with some of our most worrying contemporary concerns. The images on the screens are sometimes of environmental disasters, sometimes of terror, and sometimes of war at its most brutal. The time is now or the very near future, but somehow the world in the book seems to have shifted a few degrees closer to catastrophe. He hints at religious fundamentalism, at the evils of globalisation with its huge disparities between rich and poor, at the wilful continuance of environmental destruction. We see child soldiers, and we see them die.

There is also a mystical element to the new life being designed at the facility. It seems almost as if they are trying to find a way to create a new religion – an atheistic religion, with its own rituals and code; their attempt to produce physical immortality some kind of compensation for their lack of belief in a spiritual afterlife. But there are chilling aspects to this – will their attempts to reprogram the people with a new language and ethical code before they are reborn leave anything of the original 'I'? Or will they in fact be forming a kind of extreme totalitarianism where cyberhumans are literally 'made' to obey?

DeLillo raises all these questions, and more, subtly, so that they arise out of Jeff's attempts to make sense of what he's seeing, rather than the reader feeling bludgeoned. Jeff is fascinated by trying to define the meanings of words and as the book goes on the words he focuses on become progressively harder to define, like the ideas behind them. The facility is also home to some weird and unsettling art with lifelike mannequins appearing in increasingly disturbing tableaux. The idea of a new language being created reminded me of the real case of Turkey changing its alphabet from Arabic to Latin just after WW1, with the result that later generations have apparently largely lost touch with writings from before then, and therefore with their literary history; and I wondered if in the new world of the Convergence, all that would be left of art would be these chilling visual images.

I'm guessing you realise by now that I found this book fascinating and deeply thought-provoking, though in truth I found it frustratingly obscure too. Surprisingly for such a nebulous read, it has an ending that I found both beautiful and satisfying, not providing answers exactly but perhaps suggesting that in the end the answers exist within us. I suspect this is a book that will be hated by some and loved by others. From a shaky beginning, I grew to love it, for the writing, the imagery and the intelligence of it, and am greatly looking forward to reading some of DeLillo's earlier books. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Scribner.

Well, yes. A little bleak. However, if you are interested in ideas about the nature of consciousness and where our ever expanding mind is taking us, you will be fascinated. This is an amazing rendering of the whole multi-faceted issue. I believe our narrator does survive his descent into the inferno, and reconnects with the miracle of existence in the present. Although that is open to interpretation.

This almost seems a new form. Not a prose poem, but a novel that opens out the way poetry does. What is it about? Death, consciousness, love, religion as a metaphor for these things. I was impressed how real, how believable, the first part was. While at the same time seeming like something out of science fiction. There is no mistake about the narrator’s attitude about the delusions embraced by his father and step mother. Yet, he is compelled to respect the fiction that comforts them. That they will rise again, reborn, perfect, young. The narrator expresses a wry sense of the absurdity of Ross’s dream. At one point, he muses:

“When he joins her, in three years or thirteen, will the nano-technologists steer their ages downward? And on being revived, whenever that is, the first moment of their earthly afterlife, will Artis be twenty-five years old, twenty-seven, Ross thirty or thirty-one? Think of the soulful reunion. Let’s have a baby. And where will I be, how old and begrudging and piss-stained, how spooked to be embracing my spirited young father and newborn half-brother, who has my withered finger gripped in his tiny trembling hand. (146)

At one level this is a gentle daydream, but upon reflection, the absolute horror of it! You cannot mistake the growing menace of the Convergence. The visual fictions of catastrophes. The mannequins mangled in a convoluted mass, “naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an entanglement of tumbled forms ...” (134) No ambiguity there. Abandon all hope, this is the entrance to hell.

As he is escaping from the nightmare of the Convergence the narrator has a vision of Artis’ disembodied consciousness thinking. It is truly frightening: an astonishing rendering of the interdependence of consciousness and embodiment and what it means to violate that law of being.

We are approaching in the present day a responsibility to understand the edges revealed here. I see the Convergence as a kind of metaphor for spiritual deceptions. If religion is just a metaphor, what is going on? Do we have a responsibility to take on death, understand it, conquer it? There are so many reflections on this. Just read it. Slowly.

A reflective piece on death, and possibility of life after that. For a topic that is so sombre, DeLillo injects a whimsical tone into the novel, told entirely from the perspective of his narrator-focaliser, Jeffrey Lockhart, safe for a short middle section in the novel.

Lockhart has been invited by his billionaire father to The Convergence, a top-secret facility hidden in a remote location, to witness the cryogenic death of his terminally ill stepmother, Artis. As bizarre as the whole proceedings are, Lockhart finds himself increasingly immersed in the strangely clinical yet cult-like spiritual environs. Cue existential conversations with a cloaked figure Lockhart christens the Monk in the mass food hall, symbolic sculptures and art pieces made out of frozen bodies in the midst of long empty corridors, movie screens that descend suddenly to project dystopian images of war, terror attacks and various catastrophes, as if to broadcast the end of the world and justify the need for those still alive to hasten to the other side.

Then all of a sudden, the narrative plunges into Lockhart’s life back in contemporary Manhattan, as his otherworldly experience at the Convergence casts an irreversible shadow on his own urban life. He becomes involved with a divorcée and her son, Stak, whom she had adopted from an orphanage in Ukraine.

There is a kind of disconnect from the SF leanings of the first half of the novel and perhaps the fragmenting of the narrative acts as a kind of commentary on the estranging effect of our postmodern culture, where this is arguably replicated in the reader’s experience at deconstructing the text. All well and good, except that the meditations on mortality and identity (the latter seen in Lockhart’s anxiety in giving people imaginary names to identify and define their characters throughout the novel) are never really sustained enough for any kind of meaningful evaluation. This is most apparent in the final section where the narrative breaks down into short isolated paragraphs, each dissociated from the other, as if the narrative was breaking apart. Though not his best work, DeLillo’s pithy prose is engaging enough to hold my attention till the end.

When death animates the narrative of ZERO K, DeLillo is principally examining the beliefs and actions of Ross Lockhart, a mid-sixties billionaire with a terminally-ill second wife, who is questing for immortality. In supporting this quest, Lockhart—not his real name—has become a generous contributor to a cult-like cryogenics facility that will repair and reanimate its frozen and encapsulated “dormants” when cures are found for their diseases.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Lockhart, Ross’s 34 year-old son, is DeLillo’s narrator and his spokesman for angst. Angry Jeffery never got over Ross’s decision to walk out of his first-marriage, which occurred when he was thirteen. And as an adult, Jeffrey deals with his insecurity and anxieties, as well as his eidetic memories of his mother’s death, with an obsessive awareness of the texture and detail in life and the performance of small reassuring rituals—check the keys, check the wallet, check the burners on the stove. At the same time, Jeffrey copes with his anger through a strange non-career; Ross arranges job interviews, usually for corporate positions with vague but jargonish titles, for which Jeffrey receives offers that he declines.

Both men are crazy. At the same time, both men are excellent vehicles for the great Don to do his thing.

Here, for example, is what Ross hears and accepts as a visionary woman in the tech and immortality cult describes cyber-resurrection. “Your situation, those few of you on the verge of the journey toward rebirth. You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here…”

In contrast, here’s Don explaining Jeffrey. “Know the moment, feel the gliding hand, gather all the forgettable fragments, fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed, her bed, our blue sheets. This was all I needed to take me day to day and I tried to think of these days and nights as the hushed countermand, ours, to the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s, will be worse than the past.”

And, as a bonus, here’s a leader of the metempsychosis cult, who Jeffrey names Stenmark. In his vision, the cult’s technology not only enables infinite rebirth; in addition, it enables survival despite inevitable calamity. “Apocalypse is inherent in the structure of time and long-range climate and cosmic upheaval. But are we seeing the signs of a self-willed inferno? Are we counting the days…”

ZERO K is not a perfect book. In this case, I don’t want to overshare; but the fate of the character Stak did seem a bit contrived. Regardless, DeLillo more than compensates with his eerie cyber-facility video screens, which appear randomly and show familiar scenes of agony and mayhem. And his imagining of the survival of Ross’s wife Artis—a “nightmare of self drawn so tight that she is trapped forever”—is cruel, ironic, and fantastic.

Rounded up and recommended.

The most annoying feature of this disappointing book was all the pompous, incomprehensible blather that was intended to pass as profound thought. For example, "This is the first split second of the first cosmic year. We are becoming citizens of the universe." "I'm someone who's supposed to be me." "Time is multiple, time is simultaneous. This moments happens, has happened, will happen." "Catastrophe is our bedtime story." And on and on. This is mumbo jumbo, Zen master bulls*** of the first order. If you find this mush illuminating, without the assistance of drugs, this book's for you.
The story line is ridiculous. I know this book is speculative fiction, but the best works in this category have a plot that is at least borderline plausible. This one doesn't pass. The story revisits the old idea of achieving immortality via cryogenics. In this variation, volunteers (who are sometimes both healthy and wealthy) agree to the equivalent of assisted suicide. The individual's internal organs and sometimes the head are removed from the body prior to placement in the freezer. The details of the procedure are sketchy, but nanotechnology and quantum variations, of course, are involved.
The characters are not very likable. The narrator is a 34 year old self-absorbed, aimless, underachieving only son of a billionaire.
The pace of the book is very slow.
So, what's to like here? Nothing much, unless you're a hard-core Don DeLillo fan who wants to know what he's up to now.

This is a weird book. Bizarre characters, awkward dialogue, a barely present plot, and an overall pretentiousness make this a book you should skip.

The book is about a son and his father going to a facility somewhere in asia where they freeze bodies. In the future hopefully the bodies can be reanimated. The father's girlfriend is ill and chooses to be frozen. While at the facility our protagonist, Jeff, encounters a monk who engages him in awkward dialogue that goes nowhere. He also sees the creators of the facility give a rambling nonsense speech about the future. While walking the halls screens will occasionally drop down and play videos of random things. Sometimes monks burning themselves, sometimes people running, all of it nonsense. Dad's girlfriend gets frozen and they leave the facility.

For a brief period of time Jeff interacts with his girlfriend and her adopted son. It seemingly has nothing to do with the rest of book. Shortly after this his girlfriend's adopted son runs away. It's now been about two years since dad's girlfriend got frozen and dad decides he wants to get frozen as well. Back to the facility they go. While there, the video screen shows Jeff his girlfriend's adopted son getting killed in a battle. We learn about the new language they've developed. The founder of the facility gives another rambling speech that goes nowhere and serves no purpose. Dad gets frozen, the book ends.

Example terrible dialogue from page 113.
"Your father yes. And you're my son."
"No, no. I'm not ready for that. You're getting ahead of me. I'm doing my best to recognize the fact that you're my father. I'm not ready to be your son."

Not dialogue, but this line from page 231 gives you a good idea of what this entire book is like.
"One man, headless -- he had no head."

Reading this book was a chore. I'm not entirely sure why I finished it. If I had it to do over again I'd give up after about 50 pages. I thought it was just weird and would get better. It stayed weird and got worse. The ending does nothing to redeem it. It sounds like DeLillo has better books, but it will be a long time before I'm willing to give them a shot.

"Rocks are, but they do not exist," the quotation from Heidegger may well encapsulate the theme of this entire novel. Then again, maybe not. Heidegger's point, I think, is that existence implies consciousness and a knowledge of the alternatives, which is something that only human beings can achieve. DeLillo's novel, which is set in a cryogenic facility buried in a desert in one of the former Soviet -Stans, approaches this knowledge by focusing on death, and the conscious decision to end one's life, at least for the immediate duration.

I can summarize the book without spoilers, though that will not say very much. The narrator, Jeremy Lockhart, thirty-something son of the billionaire financier Ross Lockhart, accompanies his father to the facility, known as the Convergence, to be present at the last days of his stepmother Artis. Most of the first half of the book is spent by him walking through empty halls—from the ceilings of which screens descend from time to time showing video collages of natural processes, deaths, and disasters—listening in on occasional lectures, and meeting a few individuals such as a monklike figure who spends his time talking to the dying. Halfway through the book, Jeremy will return to New York and a more normal life, but the Convergence and whatever else it may stand for will not be forgotten.

DeLillo seems to have made a recent specialty of novels with eschatological themes; you just need to look at the titles. FALLING MAN, which I rather liked, started in the aftermath of 9/11, but morphed into stranger directions. POINT OMEGA, whose title speaks even more clearly of the last things, was just about as curious a book as this one, also set in a desert location and involving the interplay of philosophy and film; although I now remember it as being inscrutable and well-nigh impenetrable, I see that I originally gave it five stars, mesmerized by DeLillo's ability to hold me in thrall to a book in which next to nothing actually happened. ZERO K (0° Kelvin, or absolute zero) has much in common with its predecessor, but this time the mesmerism did not work—perhaps because I was distracted by a new puppy and insane temperatures. However, I did notice numerous sayings and recurrent images that—if I had the slightest idea of where I was heading with them—I could link into a profound-sounding thesis. Perhaps genuinely profound. But it would have required reading in cooler circumstances and with unbroken time on my hands.

Don DeLillo I’ve found, is one of those authors that splits readers down the middle. For myself, I definitely and whole-heartedly fall into the fan camp, with White Noise and Underworld being two of my favorite all-time novels, and Mao II and Libra not far behind. His newest, Zero K, doesn’t rise to their level (most novels don’t), but it is still classic DeLillo, filled with great sentences, dialog that sounds less like real people talking and more like a pair of students work-shopping their dissertations (one of the reasons he tends to split readers), cool musings on the intersection of technology and modern culture, and explorations of wealth, violent (almost apocalyptic) events, the modern senses of dislocation and isolation, the impact of media, and (a true DeLillo staple) the imminence of death.

Or perhaps, not-so-imminent death. Because it turns out that the central technology in this novel is an attempt to out-maneuver death via a combination of cryonics, nanotechnology, cellular regeneration, and consciousness shifting. All of this takes place at The Convergence, a secretive enclave for the super-wealthy in the rough vicinity of the “stans” of Central Europe. One of the prime donors to The Convergence is Ross Lockhart, a billionaire financier whose second wife, Artis, is dying and is therefore about to be frozen and then, as the plan goes, eventually awakened hale and hearty. The novel spends its first half in the futuristic Convergence as Ross and Jeff, Ross’ son by his first marriage, wait for Artis to be artificially “induced” onto the next stage of her existence. The relationship between the two men is as chilly and spartan as the space-habitat like corridors and rooms of the Convergence. Ross left Jeff’s mother years ago as he rose up the ranks of capitalism, and even at one point as they talk pretends (or perhaps not) that he doesn’t even remember Jeff’s mother’s name. When Jeff’s father decides he wants to follow Artis into the procedure, Jeff tries to understand that decision as well as the complexities of the relationship he has with this man. He also tries to come to terms with the Convergence itself, as he wonders its halls filled with strange art installations, including huge projection screen showing video of mass deaths via natural and man-made disasters such as floods and terrorism. The second half shifts forward a few years and moves to Manhattan, offering up a different setting, plot, and tone.

To be honest, the first half (actually somewhat more than half the novel) is more likely to inspire admiration and wryly intellectual stimulation than the typical readerly enjoyment and engagement in terms of plot and character. As to the former, there really isn’t any; it’s a lot of waiting and wandering and talking. As for the characters, they’re more than a little removed, not only from each other but also from the reader, though it would seem to me that this is the point, or at least one of them. One character after all is waiting to die (Ross) while the other (Jeff) is adrift in life, moving from job to job, girl to girl. What’s to admire though are the sentences themselves (beginning with the opening line of the novel “Everyone wants to own the end of the world.”), the back and forth on death and life extension, and the surreal imagery of the setting, which has layers upon layers of meaning and sort of a wonderful cross between Kafka, an infomercial, Alice in Wonderland, Scientology, Bonfire of the Vanities, and the space station in Kubrick’s 2001. There’s also a nice tension between the salesmanship of the Convergence and Ross and Artis’ belief in it and Jeff’s skepticism, made even more deliciously complex by the way in which the context of the salesmanship — which evokes the dislocating impact of modern technology, the many forms of violence in the world perpetrated by humans — makes it far less easy to simply dismiss The Convergence in its entirety. Sure, it’s a refuge for the uber-rich, and most likely there’s nothing to it, but it’s hard to argue against their criticisms of modern life. Tell me a line like, “Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving,” isn’t a kick to the gut. But perhaps my favorite aspect of this first segment though is the focus on language, as Jeff is constantly trying to call words up, to define things, to name people in ways that allow him to somehow define them as well. In a novel about perhaps the most incomprehensible things of all — mortality — it’s a brilliant choice of a character quirk.

Despite how much I liked (if not enjoyed) this first segment, it’s so cold and claustrophobic and removed that it’s a relief to enter into the Manhattan scenes, which are diametrically opposed in so many ways, making for a wonderful sense of structure to the novel. We move from the empty desert, barren technology, and the top .1% to the bustling crowds and polyglot society that is New York City, from the static to the active, from death to life (though this being DeLillo death is not gone, merely more balanced against). All of this wonderfully encapsulated in a simple taxi ride through the city. The world intrudes in lots of ways in this section as we meet Jeff’s new girlfriend and her son by her now separated husband (a parent-relationship to parallel the one in segment one, complete with step-parents and absences). I won’t say more about where the novel goes save to say it closes with a beautiful set scene.

If Zero K doesn’t rank in DeLillo’s top four or five novels, that’s hardly an embarrassment or even a surprise. While I wholly get he’s not to everyone’s taste, from my standpoint, a second-tier DeLillo stands well above the top rank of most novelists thanks to those beautifully crafted sentences and thoughtful explorations of big, important questions. It may not pull me in and along like a well-plotted book, or one in which I’m deeply invested in the characters, but few other authors make me linger over so many sentences for both their construction and their weight of meaning, or have me returning in my head to those lines or those questions long after I’ve put the book down.
strong 4 (4.5)

Don DeLillo I’ve found, is one of those authors that splits readers down the middle. For myself, I definitely and whole-heartedly fall into the fan camp, with White Noise and Underworld being two of my favorite all-time novels, and Mao II and Libra not far behind. His newest, Zero K, doesn’t rise to their level (most novels don’t), but it is still classic DeLillo, filled with great sentences, dialog that sounds less like real people talking and more like a pair of students work-shopping their dissertations (one of the reasons he tends to split readers), cool musings on the intersection of technology and modern culture, and explorations of wealth, violent (almost apocalyptic) events, the modern senses of dislocation and isolation, the impact of media, and (a true DeLillo staple) the imminence of death.

Or perhaps, not-so-imminent death. Because it turns out that the central technology in this novel is an attempt to out-maneuver death via a combination of cryonics, nanotechnology, cellular regeneration, and consciousness shifting. All of this takes place at The Convergence, a secretive enclave for the super-wealthy in the rough vicinity of the “stans” of Central Europe. One of the prime donors to The Convergence is Ross Lockhart, a billionaire financier whose second wife, Artis, is dying and is therefore about to be frozen and then, as the plan goes, eventually awakened hale and hearty. The novel spends its first half in the futuristic Convergence as Ross and Jeff, Ross’ son by his first marriage, wait for Artis to be artificially “induced” onto the next stage of her existence. The relationship between the two men is as chilly and spartan as the space-habitat like corridors and rooms of the Convergence. Ross left Jeff’s mother years ago as he rose up the ranks of capitalism, and even at one point as they talk pretends (or perhaps not) that he doesn’t even remember Jeff’s mother’s name. When Jeff’s father decides he wants to follow Artis into the procedure, Jeff tries to understand that decision as well as the complexities of the relationship he has with this man. He also tries to come to terms with the Convergence itself, as he wonders its halls filled with strange art installations, including huge projection screen showing video of mass deaths via natural and man-made disasters such as floods and terrorism. The second half shifts forward a few years and moves to Manhattan, offering up a different setting, plot, and tone.

To be honest, the first half (actually somewhat more than half the novel) is more likely to inspire admiration and wryly intellectual stimulation than the typical readerly enjoyment and engagement in terms of plot and character. As to the former, there really isn’t any; it’s a lot of waiting and wandering and talking. As for the characters, they’re more than a little removed, not only from each other but also from the reader, though it would seem to me that this is the point, or at least one of them. One character after all is waiting to die (Ross) while the other (Jeff) is adrift in life, moving from job to job, girl to girl. What’s to admire though are the sentences themselves (beginning with the opening line of the novel “Everyone wants to own the end of the world.”), the back and forth on death and life extension, and the surreal imagery of the setting, which has layers upon layers of meaning and sort of a wonderful cross between Kafka, an infomercial, Alice in Wonderland, Scientology, Bonfire of the Vanities, and the space station in Kubrick’s 2001. There’s also a nice tension between the salesmanship of the Convergence and Ross and Artis’ belief in it and Jeff’s skepticism, made even more deliciously complex by the way in which the context of the salesmanship — which evokes the dislocating impact of modern technology, the many forms of violence in the world perpetrated by humans — makes it far less easy to simply dismiss The Convergence in its entirety. Sure, it’s a refuge for the uber-rich, and most likely there’s nothing to it, but it’s hard to argue against their criticisms of modern life. Tell me a line like, “Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving,” isn’t a kick to the gut. But perhaps my favorite aspect of this first segment though is the focus on language, as Jeff is constantly trying to call words up, to define things, to name people in ways that allow him to somehow define them as well. In a novel about perhaps the most incomprehensible things of all — mortality — it’s a brilliant choice of a character quirk.

Despite how much I liked (if not enjoyed) this first segment, it’s so cold and claustrophobic and removed that it’s a relief to enter into the Manhattan scenes, which are diametrically opposed in so many ways, making for a wonderful sense of structure to the novel. We move from the empty desert, barren technology, and the top .1% to the bustling crowds and polyglot society that is New York City, from the static to the active, from death to life (though this being DeLillo death is not gone, merely more balanced against). All of this wonderfully encapsulated in a simple taxi ride through the city. The world intrudes in lots of ways in this section as we meet Jeff’s new girlfriend and her son by her now separated husband (a parent-relationship to parallel the one in segment one, complete with step-parents and absences). I won’t say more about where the novel goes save to say it closes with a beautiful set scene.

If Zero K doesn’t rank in DeLillo’s top four or five novels, that’s hardly an embarrassment or even a surprise. While I wholly get he’s not to everyone’s taste, from my standpoint, a second-tier DeLillo stands well above the top rank of most novelists thanks to those beautifully crafted sentences and thoughtful explorations of big, important questions. It may not pull me in and along like a well-plotted book, or one in which I’m deeply invested in the characters, but few other authors make me linger over so many sentences for both their construction and their weight of meaning, or have me returning in my head to those lines or those questions long after I’ve put the book down.
strong 4 (4.5)

"Do we see ourselves living outside time, outside history?”

Cerebral, pensive and deeply philosophical Zero K examines our struggle with time and mortality. We meet three characters- Ross, the father, Artis the second wife and Jeffery, the son. Ross and Artis have joined the Convergence- a group of people attempted to break the chains of mortality and challange death. Jeffery joins as a witness. The setting for this experience is within a bunker in a remote area deep in the barren desert of Eastern Europe. Isolated from the world and with limited interaction with other beings, Jeffery employs various ways of relating to this new world. Through his experiences we begin to see deeper into the conciousness of Jeffery particularly his repeated urgeto define words and to name objects and people. These actions resonate with the use of hermeneutics in Heideggerian philosophy, the essence of which is that to be means to exist, in time, between birth and death and to understand our true nature as humans we must accept death as an ever-present end.

“She spoke, with pauses, about the nature of time. What happens to the idea of continuum- past, present, future- in the cryonic chamber? Will you understand days, years and minute? Will this faculty diminish and die? How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?”

The group, The Convergence- elusive and vague, believe that death is superfluous and conquerable. Better to wait out an unknown period of time in a frozen crypt than succumb to death.

“Death is a cutural artifact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable.”

Jeffery joins Ross and Artis in the final prepitory stages before her journey. Here we begin to see the philosophy emerge further as Jeffery listens to an explaination of the methods and goals of the Convergence.

“Solidtude, yes. Think of being alone, frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All One. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes you in the truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

Artis accepts the solitude of the capsule abandoning Ross. He quickly learns that he is nothing without others, mainly her, and chooses to join her despite leaving his son behind. Ross and Jeffery have a troubled relationship that is made no better by this decision. Jeffery chooses to accompany his father on his journey again as a witness. Watching two people he knows, and one could say loves, chose to die, Jeffery is forever changed. The story finishs with him attempting to return to normal life though this proves difficult. Unlike anything I have read, Zero K is a treatise on Heideggerian philosophy and what happens when the obstinate forces of time and mortality are tested.

“It is only human to want to know more, and then more, and then more,” I said. “But it’s also true that what we don’tknow is what makes us human. And there’s no end to no knowing” “Go on.” “And no end to not living forever.” “Go on,” he said. “If someone or something has no beginning, then I can believe that he, she or it has no end. But if you’re born or hatched or sprouted, then your days are already numbered."

Zero K
By Don DeLillo

The big idea in this novel focusing on cryogenics, life, death, and rebirth is certainly sufficient to draw many readers to at least sample the first few pages. Some will find DeLillo’s prose styling arresting, others will forbear the stultifying language (in a novel partly about language defining life) in pursuit of this cryogenic hook, and many others, probably the majority, will take a pass.

The story line is pretty simple. You have a super rich father, Ross Lockhart , whose young wife, his second, is dying. Turns out he is the major investor in a cryogenic project, Convergence, preserving people in a special facility located in a desolate area of the Asian continent. Not just a freezing center, it’s an entirely new culture in which participants commit themselves to returning cured and healthy to build a new, better world, one eschewing the many horrors of current civilization and expressing their new ideas and approach in a unique language. While preparation of his wife for freezing takes place, he, though a healthy 60, contemplates joining her, becoming something of an advance guard of believers who take the leap, leap death, leap into the future. Sounds like a cult, in this case a cult of aesthetes, the idea further reinforced by the appearance of frozen bodies as art. Is Ross merely trying to escape his mortality, or are he and his compadres on to something? Go figure for yourself.

His son Jeffery, mid-thirties guy ambling through life, is a fellow of the here and now (indicated by his detailed descriptions of minutiae) and due to the terrible way Ross treated his first wife, Jeff’s mother, he’s none too fond of his dad. Nor does he appreciate his father’s meddling in hooking him up with super wealthy jobs. Jeff has a girlfriend, Emma, divorced from her husband, who lives in Denver with their son Stak. Stak is something of a wild child, a young teen who wants to and seems to run his own life. You get the impression that the Emma/Jeff relationship lacks passion, but then it might just be the overall tone of the novel, a bunch of words and idea lumped together and devoid of any real passion, like the Convergence dugout in the desert, another sterile place.

Some reviewers call this DeLillo’s best novel, an achievement of sorts. There are many, especially fans of his earlier work, to wit White Noise, who will disagree. Of interest to some, but a trial for most.

Zero K follows Jeffrey, a privileged young man coasting through life on a series of white-collar jobs, largely due to his rich father's connections. At the start of the novel, Jeffrey's father, Ross, tells him he is taking his terminally ill wife (Jeffrey's stepmother) to The Convergence, a secretive, secure facility that freezes people to preserve them for the future.
The first half of the novel is an excellent and perceptive summary of Jeffrey's experiences with the technology, philosophy, and quirky characters of The Convergence, from lecturers to spiritual advisors. Death of body and spirit are reflected everywhere, from the institutional, homogenous quarters to the disorienting nonlinear "veer" elevators, lack of natures, screens depicting catastrophes, and other morbidity.
Jeffrey in the real world is not as revealing or insightful, but his time at the Convergence is a compelling meditation on life, survival, and the ethics of technology. Cory Doctorow's The Walkaway comes at these issues from another very creative angle.
If civilization does break down, who will have the wherewithal or interest in reviving or at least preserving these frozen heads?

Don DeLillo is one of America’s most pre-eminent novelists and the author of such works as White Noise and Underworld. In Zero K he takes on the subject of cryonics, the freezing of people in the hope that a cure will be found for a disease they have. The story is told by Jeffrey Lockhart, whose father, Ross, is a billionaire businessman and married to Artis, his second wife and Jeffrey’s stepmother. Artis is ill and the decision is made to freeze her body. Ross sets up a center in a mysterious location for this purpose and Jeffrey comes to say goodbye. The center is called the “Convergence” where life and death come together. Much of the novel is then spent in discussions between Jeffrey and his father and in his feelings about being in this place and situation. Jeffrey is also trying to reconcile his feelings about his father with whom he has not had a good relationship. The first part of the book covers this period. Then there is a short section on the thoughts of Artis after she has been frozen and finally there is another part on events that happen after Jeffrey returns. DeLillo seems to be trying to say something about life and death and family relationships, but it just does not come across very well. Moreover the characters are not very likeable. Jeffrey can’t seem to find a purpose in life, Ross is a weakling dependent on Arits who is admirable, but fated to die. The characters in part two, Ellen and Stak, seem to have no relation to the main story. Also this section reads like a stream-of consciousness flow with no real plot or ending.

It is interesting that of the 131 reviews so far they are almost evenly divided among all five star ratings. Clearly there is a lot of disagreement on this book. My own rating is a two, because I really did not like the book very much. My advice is that you read reviews from all from ratings before deciding if it is a book you really want to buy and read.

Don DeLillo's Zero K begins on a truly captivating premise. Jeff Lockhart and his estranged, billionaire, utopian father Ross are reunited at a remote facility called The Convergence, where Ross' younger second wife Artis will be cryogenically preserved before her imminent death due to illness. At face value, the relationships are intriguing. Ross especially is painted as a very complicated man. The same man who would abandon his first wife (Jeff's birth mother) Madeline to die, would also pour billions of dollars into The Convergence in hopes of preserving Artis. The same man who would spend the first half of the book trying to convince Jeff to join himself and Artis in cryopreservation, would also back out and choose to join Jeff back in New York. Even Jeff, serving as the book's narrator seems to have his own quirks. Some combination of depressed and manically OCD, Jeff obsesses with giving names to people and objects as he sees them; desperately trying to find some kind of meaning to tie himself down, as he's swept into the unsettling reality of Artis' impending death, the implications of immortality, and his growing distrust of The Convergence's escalatingly cult-like methods and doctrines. Is The Convergence an opportunity for futurists and visionaries to plot a bold new way of life? Or is it all just a futile attempt to escape the harsh realities of being human?

Where another writer would focus on developing these themes and the unique relationships between their characters, DeLillo decidedly keeps his characters thinly drawn, choosing instead to use them as drones to expound upon pages and pages of arbitrary insights and situational ponderings, which make up about 90% of the book. Thus, without the presence of any kind of driving plot, the reading pace slows to a literal crawl for the majority of the text. Which is a shame. Whenever any plot elements eventually appear, we don't care enough about the characters for the events to hold any kind of real meaning. And even if the reader has succeeded in trying to care about the characters, DeLillo beats it back out, with chapter long rants and observations which hug the line between quotidian and outright pretentious. This heavy handed delivery unfortunately smothers a majority of the book's more compelling themes, as the reader often finds themselves suffering through fourteen pages of ramblings about mannequins and stock footage of wars that may or may not be real, when all the reader really wants is to connect to the characters in a human way.

Perhaps this is Zero K's greatest failure. In trying to reinforce his themes of isolation and loss of identity by incessant description, DeLillo leaves his characters bereft of the one thing they're trying to preserve, cryogenically or otherwise: their humanity. DeLillo is a smart man, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. His ideas are certainly worth printing, but unfortunately, truly appreciating everything that he's trying to express with Zero K probably demands that the reader already have read it.

• ISBN-10: 1501135392
• ISBN-13: 978-1501135392
• Don Delillo Zero K
•
Don Delillo has made his career of delving into the absurdity of American dalliance with annihilation, a masterful set of works. Only he could write Underworld, a tale of our “divine powers” and fascination of self-destruction. Now in Zero K, he examines the new person, wealthy beyond measure and interested in the preservation of the unique self before death occurs. The technology is there and the money is available for those who can afford the millions for the care of the dying and the cryonics to preserve them until the new dawn of medical advance. For, in the next life, the diseased person will be revived and become whole. The technology also is there for the loved one to “die” “be preserved” with the incurably diseased. Here, death is no longer a certainty. Youth may be unhappy with the decision of the older-ones, but who cares? The decision is not theirs to make. However, the son loses his father and his step-mother. He suffers. New, he is now alone in the world, albeit with his “undead” parents.
This is not an easy read. You might try his Underworld first

Before the Man Booker long list came out, there was a lot of talk that this book could make the list. I'm sort of surprised it didn't.

I loved it but I think part of what I loved so much about it was the audio I was listening to this book saying to myself, holy $^@# this narrator is amazing. Well, it turns out the narrator was Tom Sadowski who was on Newsroom and is currently on Life in Pieces, so no wonder he was so good. And dreamy.

DeLillo's writing is so good, I want to read more of his books. This book was about death and it was sort of a meandering philosophical data dump and had I been reading vs. listening I might not have loved it so much. For whatever reason, I was completely fascinated and got through the book very quickly.

This was my favorite line, and possibly one of the best lines I've read in a book in a book ever:

"Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving."

This book is ostensibly a relatively plotless tone poem about the shapeshifting of life and death through "cryonic" preservation, as numerous reviewers have noted.

however, these aspects of the book could equally - and arguably more rewardingly - be viewed as a template for the exploration of personal identity, with death as the ultimate metaphor for transformation. i would argue this may have been DeLillo's ultimate point in writing this book.

in the first section of the book we are introduced to jeff lockhart, a young man who is transported to an isolated desert "cryonics" compound by his billionaire, eccentric father (Ross) to witness the impending cryopreservation of Jeff's terminally ill step-mother (Artis). This section of the book is related in Jeff's voice. Since both his father and stepmother have accepted the concept of cryonics, Jeff's perspective as a skeptic serves as a device to explore the philosophical and practical aspects of death and dying, and of cryonics which the book does largely in a series of (seemingly endless) conversations between Jeff and his father and stepmother. This section, in particular, is a creepy combination of utopianism, religious cultism, and other new-agey spiritual perspectives.

The subsequent sections of the book occur in the future and are told in the voices of the cryoresuscitated Artis, and Jeff.

All three of the main characters struggle with defining their identities. Artis is resuscitated, as noted, at some unspecified time in the future and her thoughts deal largely with her time-warped identity at that time. Is she the same person she was prior to cryopreservation? To the extent that a person's identity is defined by exogenous factors such as interpersonal relationships, careers, and social contexts, what is its meaning in a future time in which no contemporaneous moorings to other people, culture and so on exist?

Jeff's father, Ross, struggles with his identity in the past and present. He has become among the wealthiest individuals on the planet, but finds his life to be devoid of meaning. He has explicitly rejected his previous identity by changing both his first and last names, and chosen a pretentious, anglicized new name which is symbolic of the identity he wishes to assume (and which also serve his ego and his attempts to climb socially). Because in his business dealings he has harmed the lives of many, he shifts his spiritual anchors from money to life preservation in the form of cryonics for the chosen few, as well as to ecological salvation - again wrapped in a simplistic and cultish utopian vision - which he hopes will redefine his identity and assuage his guilt.

Jeff, himself, is nearly seduced by his father to effectively assume his father's (old) life and identity when his father attempts to recruit him to assume control of his businesses, to which Jeff has no prior connection or career aspirations. He rejects this opportunity and mindfully chooses his own identity by ironically accepting a meaningless, bureaucratic job as an ethics compliance officer at a university. This job feels alien to him, but lies in stark contrast to his father's career

This is a highly philosophical book and I agree that the plot drags. Those who enjoy DeLillo's unparalleled prose can luxuriate in it despite the plodding plot. The voices of the main characters are indistinct from one another which contributes to a monotonal feel to the book. DeLillo also makes the occasional scientific faux pas, such as misusing the term genotype for phenotype. Overall, however, an extraordinarily creative and innovative novel by one of America's greatest writers.

I am fascinated by time. I love thinking about it, I love talking about it and I love reading about it. Zero K is a profound novel about many things, one of them being time, and so, I must disclose my bias up front. It is also a novel that on its surface appears to be an easy read. Just 274 pages, double spaced. Make no mistake though, this is deep reading and I found myself having to stop, go back and re-read at several points during each reading session. The best books don’t fully reveal themselves with one read and Zero K is no exception. I will do my best to review it after this, my first read, but I’m certain there is much I’ve missed.

The novel’s first sentence sets the tone: “everybody wants to own the end of the world.” Jeffrey Lockhart, who narrates most of the book, remembers these words spoken by his father, the uber wealthy Ross Lockhart who has summoned him to a facility almost literally in the middle of nowhere called The Convergence. Through just the process of arriving there, Jeffrey realizes that there is big money and a high level of secrecy surrounding the place and the project and he learns why as soon as he’s reunited with his father and stepmother, Artis. The Convergence is a high tech facility staffed with bright and forwards thinkers from around the world, all with a common belief, that death can be thwarted by science. Already, those believing in their work are arriving to die and be cryogenically prepared and stored until the technology is perfected that can bring them back to this life.

While cryogenics certainly isn’t a new concept, what is different about Zero K is that they aren’t just freezing and hoping. These people have made serious technological advances and in fact, are making bold statements about what they can already do: keep the “deceased’s” mind alive, in a sort of low level state of awareness while they wait in their pods.

Jeffrey learns that his dying stepmother is there to be prepared and begin this process, and that his father has summoned him for his support and perhaps also to give Jeffrey an explanation. Ross and Artis are true believers in the process and the project and have donated a significant portion of their wealth to the furthering of The Convergence’s work. DeLillo uses discussions between Ross the believer and Jeffrey the skeptic to convince the reader that this project may actually be on the verge of accomplishing victory over death giving teeth to their discussions as opposed to it being just some random, philosophical talk. In addition, during moments when Jeffrey finds himself alone, he roams the complex, and further probes the philosophy with others that he meets, the most interesting of which is a monk there to comfort the dying but who does not believe in the project.

Though Jeffrey learns the process may have validity, he does not lose his skepticism as the facility and its owners, two dynamic men Jeffrey names the Stenmark Twins have a cult-like feel. This notion is only strengthened when on the day Artis is to be “prepared”, Ross announces to Jeffrey that he’s going to join her. Yes, the Convergence will allow those not dying to go through the process early, calling them “Heralds”, those who choose to go and wait before they have to go.

The strength of this novel is the discussions between Jeffrey and anyone who believes in the project, usually his father. I was reminded at times of the discussions between John and Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s Brave New World and though John had only Shakespeare with which to make his arguments, Jeffrey has his life experience and a love for language through which to defend death and to investigate the possible drawbacks of eternal life. “After all” he say, “isn’t it by death that life receives its value?”

Zero K is a novel about ideas and its characters are simply a vehicle to espouse them. Yes, there’s a plot, but the development of characters and scenery here is not what’s important though when it is done, it is done beautifully. Mostly though, the characters and the facility seem sparse and I believe this is intended. The ideas stand or do not stand on their merit and not because we prefer one character over another. This is also a novel that celebrates language, and DeLillo’s choice to use an obsessive compulsive narrator whose obsessions center on language was brilliant. Ideas and things are defined by the words we choose for them and Jeffrey chooses them very carefully, deliberately, at times like Adam naming creatures in the garden. Readers of David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System will recognize some of these themes as will those who have studied Wittgenstein (I have not) from whom I believe Wallace drew many of the ideas for that novel.

While Ross and the Stenmark twins deliver a polished and apt presentation of their ideas, Jeffrey proves to be an able advocate for his positions, and he gives to Zero K an optimism that counters the fear of the future that seems to drive their thinking. Jeffrey seems to value life no matter its harshness, even with death as the eventual crown life will wear, and even (perhaps especially) life’s seemingly insignificant moments, its daily tedium. It’s up to the reader to decide who makes the better arguments, but I saw Zero K as a hopeful look toward an often frightening future as well as an inspiring ode to language.

I was blown away by "Underworld," which is simply one of the best books I've ever read. Well, "Zero K" is no "Underworld." The first half is a horrible slog - overwritten, overwrought, pretentious, dull, nebulous, pointlessly coy. For instance: "I was beginning to understand that every act I engaged in had to be articulated at some level, had to be performed with the words intact. I could not chew and swallow without thinking of "chew" and "swallow."" p. 89. Or maybe this a few pages earlier - on finding out when he was NINETEEN that his father's name was a pseudonym: "....I chewed my food and counted the letters. Twenty letters in the full name, twelve in the surname. These numbers told me nothing - what could they tell me? But I needed to get inside the name, work it, wedge myself into it." Good grief. What drivel. And this goes on for pages.

But despite this tedious prose, Delillo is imaginative, creative, observant, and there's a decent story trying to get out. It sort of does by the end. The second half is a far better read than the first, and I appreciated the larger themes of life and love and death, of catastrophe and eternity. But, the payoff is not worth the time and effort to get there. One last point, the the store blurb up top says this is the "funniest" - whoa! Humorless, more like it.

Bleak. Bleak. Bleakness, beautifully expressed, spare and disturbing language, but ultimately so remote I felt untouched. I received an early ARC copy in return for an honest review.

Ostensibly this book is about life and death and how they converge. Therefore it's not a surprise that much of it takes place at place known as the Convergence, a futuristic cryogenic facility that people enter to die and be somehow preserved, to eventually re-emerge when their aging and death can be … what, cured? A cyber resurrection is promised, after enduring through inanimate, undetermined time.

Ross the father is a wealthy benefactor of this facility, Jeffrey, his drifting son, is the narrator. He barely exists in his life, searching for meaning and identity, as his stepmother and eventually his father will float dormant, in a kind of limbo, in pods, devoid of consciousness of the world outside or of the passing of time. There are philosophical musings, oddball "guides", images of war and destruction, broken relationships…

A blurb I read for this book before starting it mentioned that it was funny. Really? That must have gone straight over my head. This is the kind of grim book that stimulates thought as you admire the prose, but can put one off reading. It was my first DeLillo and probably my last.

Zero K is not my favorite DeLillo novel. I admire his writing, but the premise of submitting to a theoretical technology (theoretical until proven it is going to work) such as Cryonics in order to avoid utter devastation from an imagined future apocalypse, does not appeal to me. The characters were lifeless, much like the poor subjects who lie in tubes at The Convergence.

Cryonics is the process of attempting to preserve the body and the brain by several methods (including freezing) for a future in which (hopefully) technology will be able to resuscitate them, as, according to Cryonics speculatists, the subject is not really dead, he/she is merely comatose.

Mr. DeLillo’s writing has always concerned paranoia -- fear of death -- fathers and sons, failed marriages and irrepressible children. This novel emphasizes the paranoia with a few desperately needed moments of comedic relief.

Nevertheless, the idea that the future of the human race is so nightmarish, that some of us are drawn to a dark and sinister and almost comic book ghoulish process to survive it all, is, in my view, sad, a view that I think is well expressed in Mr. DeLillo’s novel.

DeLillo is always great at disemboweling the looming, that is sensed, not quite see or defined and so the topic of that great lurking death, for each and all, is just perfect. The book, however, is average. It's more Solaris than 2001 A Space Odyssey. It's more tone poem and at times stream of consciousness than White Noise. It's like, amazing to say, a sort of Charles Stross Accelerando light. Well, we know that DeLillo has often bounced back and forth between the more subdued and the more action packed, so it fits his range. Vacant corridors of what could be a space station, here the desert death station, allow for empty wandering that in turn prompt mind-ramblings. Visions, on screen or in the main character's head appear and disappear. He, who narrates, seems to have a form of Asperger's Syndrome, as does his lover's son. (Here it is worth pointing out the book is more like two novellas loosely connected than a strong coherent single work). Each focuses mildly or unduly on names, numbers, weather, and so forth throughout the book. Ross, the main character is hinted at but never really developed, which may fit DeLillo's idea that death strips one of an identity (which I feel is a stretch here on my part to say that he developed this theme). Frequently scenes are devised that allow someone to go on a didactic descant and frankly these get tedious because they express nothing particularly new or exciting. Much of such expositions are generalities, and surface philosophy, such as the anonymity caused by an overabundance of technology. It's surface observation. And this is the real thing about the book for me: It feels very 1990's early 2000-ish. Back then everyone was considering the questions of technology taking over our lives. A rediscovery of words like philtrum were in all sorts of discussions. But we moved on, we've become meta about it all, we have vaoprwave and ISIS. The younger generation gets it, they live it, there are some really interesting ideas around all of this, now that we've lived it for quite a few years. However, I felt as though DeLillo remained stuck back in the turn of the millenium in his viewpoints although the book seems to strive to be set in the present time. He never seemed to get beyond; I hoped he would. When the philosophical questions started getting tautological or too sticky, instead of thinking through it to some sort of strong position, DeLillo seems to have taken the poetic broken line/paragraph stream of consciousness solution. The choice just doesn't answer the question very well in my opinion. What we see is that as one nears death one is asked to meditate and look for deep meaning in shallow aphorisms, articulations, and affirmations, which sound nice but well... they sound nice, at first. After a while there's only so much one can take when being talked to. I was looking forward to the book more answering Bergman's line in The Seventh Seal that says, "We must make an idol of our fear, and call it god," but the book never quite reached such lofty heights. To place it in DeLillo's oeuvre, it's most like Cosmopolis, with a similar tone, some good writing, but ultimately with an shoulder shrug at the end.