ZERO K (2016)
By Don DeLillo
Charles Scribner's
Sons, 281 pages
★★★
New York Times critic
Joshua Ferris nailed it when he said that we don't read Don DeLillo for
"plot, character, setting" or other conventional novelistic devices.
His characters face dilemmas, but these are often more zeitgeist-related than
personal or moral. Few writers are as skilled at presenting existential angst
as DeLillo, but his postmodern sensibilities and sense of emotional detachment
often leave readers feeling empty. For me, Zero
K fell into that ambiguous category of an impressive novel that I didn't
like very much.
It would be bad wordplay to say that Zero K left me cold, as it is a book about coldness. Its title
derives from theoretical absolute zero on the Kelvin scale (-459.67 degrees
Fahrenheit), the temperature at which atoms would no longer move. It's a clever
title for a book about cryogenics. Is cryogenics, like absolute zero, a concept
that exists as yet-unrealized theory? Or is cryogenics the ultimate realization
of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
(1957), a way to play chess against Death and win? What is the mind? What is
the body? Is there a soul? One can't even begin to formulate an opinion about
cryogenics without first wrestling with such ancient philosophical conundrums.
And, if there is an independent mind and soul, where do they go when their
hosts are flash frozen?
DeLillo isn't writing science fiction. There is a facility
in Scottsdale, Arizona, where (at last count) 144 frosty bodies lie in
state–including the head of baseball legend Ted Williams. Tech guru Ray
Kurzweil is among those wishing to check in when his hourglass drains its last
grain of sand–that is, assuming his technological fix for death is not yet
possible. Kurzweil believes that at some point, we will be able to do brain and
memory dumps onto computer hard drives. Add new twists to the ancient
philosophical queries: Can the mind exist independently from a body? What is
the quality of a mind-activated avatar life? All (current) cryogenics rest on
the assumption that science is the new god everlasting–stay frozen long enough and
science will develop a cure for what killed you.
Zero K centers on
the character of Jeff Lockhart, the not-even-close-to-doing-well son of
billionaire finance capitalist Ross Lockhart, from whom Jeff has been
semi-estranged for many years. He is invited by his father to accompany him and
his dying second wife, Artis Martineau, to Convergence, a secret facility
somewhere in a remote section of Asia Minor built with Ross' money. There,
Artis will undergo assisted suicide and immediate internment in a freezer
capsule. Jeff is free to investigate most of the facility and contemplate
Artis' last challenge: "Come with us." Ross isn't quite ready, but
Jeff returns two years later when Ross goes into the capsule beside Artis. As
he awaits his father's procedure, Jeff views montages of the world's horrors on
large TV monitors: floods, earthquakes, executions, epidemics, and wars. It's
hard for Jeff to watch all of this, given the nature of his own life and a
recent end of a weird relationship.
DeLillo didn't invent the concept of Convergence either. In
1987, followers of various beliefs loosely labeled "New Age" awaited
the "Harmonic Convergence" when the
planets went into their once-every-10,000-years alignment. Synchronous
mediation across the globe was supposed to usher in an age of peace, ecological
balance, and universal tolerance. (The comic strip Doonesbury parodied the Convergence in a series of strips that
recently re-ran.) These days, the concept of Technological Convergence has
become fashionable–the now-familiar idea that improvement in one area of
technology often leads to advances in other areas. (A Swiss Army knife is one
example; your multi-purpose cell phone another.)
DeLillo's novel is where the two convergences come together
in a Kurzweilian way. At its best, Zero K
is creepier than a Stephen King horror offering and as surreal as anything
Franz Kafka wrote. It is certainly provocative on many levels, including the
question of where the lines lie between skepticism, narcissism, religious
seeking, life, and death. But then we touch upon other questions: How does one feel about
postmodernist prose that is simultaneously elegant and sterile? Is DeLillo's
novel ultimately nothing more than a literary strip tease? Or worse, is it just
a frozen zombie book? Worse still–are the questions raised in this review more
intriguing than the book?
Many critics have placed this on their Best of 2016 list. As
for me, I'm a bit like Jeff Lockhart; I can't decide. If this sounds like
something you'd like, give it a whirl; if not, walk away. But do not think of
it as you would most novels.
Rob Weir
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