Zero K, by Don DeLillo, Scribner 2016
Having never read DeLillo’s pasts works, this reading was a tabula rasa endeavor, and the refreshing clarity of his linguistic style compliments perfectly the audacity of his vision.
DeLillo’s imagining follows a restrained, if not completely objective, narrator Jeffrey Lockhart as he answers the summons of his billionaire financier father Ross to a clandestine desert facility. Here, in no-man’s land, Ross reveals to his son how he is a principle benefactor of a scientific research group there perfecting the freezing and preservation of live human beings. From there, virtually limitless time can be had to reverse-engineer the cellular process of aging. Thus, death becomes anachronistic.
Jeffrey’s natural uncertainty is compounded by the revelation that his own stepmother has volunteered to take this pilgrimage of transcendence. In the wake of her decision, Ross and Jeffrey are left to balance the worthiness of her natural life against the assumed perfect being she will be reimaged as in an undetermined future. Darker still is contemplating the invitation to join her.
The minimalistic approach to the prose, nearly void of emotion, elicits his readers to explore their own feelings and beliefs on such weighted topics. And in these pages are true heavyweights: death, immortality and the inevitability of mankind towards destruction. “Zero K” is a harrowing premonition that, regardless of its validity, is unsettling in its delivery.
Place this novel on the shelf next to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, works simultaneously breathtaking in vision and horrifying in implication.