Review by New York Times Review
SOMETHING FEELS NOT quite right about subjecting Don DeLillo to the ordinary critical apparatus. I don't read a DeLillo novel for its plot, character, setting; for who betrayed whom and how hard life with Mother was; for Phoenix days and Bombay nights; or for how to tune a fiddle. I read a DeLillo novel for its sentences. And sentence by sentence, DeLillo magically slips the knot of criticism and gives his readers what Nabokov maintained was all that mattered in life and art: individual genius. Sentence by sentence, DeLillo seduces. And I don't just mean on the question of thumbs up or down; I mean that his sentences juke and weave around the best defenses, so that not only is the playing field of the past 50 years strewn with conservative critics of all stripes, but text, subtext, ultimate meanings remain elusive and the game, at least in part, now seems original to him. For instance. Charles Maitland, a British security consultant in DeLillo's 1982 novel "The Names," compares Western expatriates - diplomats, businessmen, risk analysts - to members of the British Empire whose insouciant lives were full of "opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death." Even with so dour a conclusion, it all sounds winsome and romantic in Maitland's formulation, which fails to take into account at whose expense opportunity and adventure are made. Later, Maitland complains: "They keep changing the names... Persia for one. We grew up with Persia. What a vast picture that name evoked. A vast carpet of sand. ... I find I take these changes quite personally. ... Every time another people's republic emerges from the dust, I have the feeling someone has tampered with my childhood." Clueless but effervescent, this is wit and world-weariness as two sides of the Western coin, the sort of thing one might smile at when spoken at a cocktail party. But it masks a deeper intent. DeLillo artfully reveals Maitland's Western view of things while guiding the reader to ask: Who's changing the names, and why? Smile, and the history of colonialism and the civil wars it ignited will be scrubbed out with a quip. Local pleasures make palatable DeLillo's deep and disquieting engagement with the world on many levels: social, political, philosophical, linguistic, interpersonal. In book after book, his characters fall through constructed surfaces and constructed selves into deeper, more terrifying but also more numinous realities. They quest for truer or purer or more permanent identities, for the hidden key that will resolve them of their limitations, weaknesses and mortal bearings. More often than not, that quest leads to disillusionment and death. Thus does David Bell, in "Americana," hope to discover in the small towns and bit players of this uncontainable country something that will make him one with the pure incandescent image. Thus does Owen Brademas, searching in "The Names" for the resolution of a fallen world in a language of divine order, find that search travestied by a murderous cult seeking similar ends. And thus does Lee Harvey Oswald, in "Libra," hope to be absorbed into History with a single act of violence in order to be absolved of his otherwise small and insignificant self. In "Zero K," DeLillo's 16th and latest novel, Jeffrey Lockhart arrives in the middle of the desert at a remote compound called the Convergence. Variously described as an "endeavor," a "faith-based technology" and "the first split second of the first cosmic year," the Convergence is a cross between a think tank and a state-of-the-art hospice: the Santa Fe Institute meets Sloan Kettering, with a dollop of Heaven's Gate, all of it given over to Christo for interior decorating. Whatever it is, the Convergence coolly ignites the imagination. Jeff hopes to get his bearings, at least geographically, when he asks his father, the billionaire Ross Lockhart, where they are. "The nearest city of any size is across the border, called Bishkek," Ross answers from deep within blastproof walls. He continues: "Once you know the local names and how to spell them, you'll feel less detached." We are, in other words, far from the neocolonial world described so tendentiously by Charles Maitland. We are in a vision of the future, a postracial, post-postcolonial world where Westerners like Ross and Jeff are but one contingent of a technocratic cult with a single aim: to rid the world of that absolute, all-defining force, that ultimate despotic colonizer, death. For the Convergence, as it turns out, is a cryonic suspension facility where the dead are frozen in anticipation of that day when resuscitation is medically feasible. Jeff has arrived there to say a temporary goodbye to his stepmother, the archaeologist Artis Martineau, who is dying of several disabling diseases. Ross Lockhart, who made his billions assessing the financial risk of natural disasters, is a true believer in the promise of the Convergence. He pours money and resources into the endeavor, not to mention old-fashioned dogma. The first half of the book is devoted to abolishing any skepticism Jeff (and the reader) might have for the cryogenically inclined. "Respect the idea," Ross tells Jeff of the Convergence, after Jeff, intending only a little disrespect, says, "People enroll their pets." Yet, despite the proselytizing, Jeff, who spends his downtime wandering past door after door in a series of unending hallways, can't bring himself to understand what's all around him as anything more than it seems: a lark, a punch line, a cruel delusion. Artis "would die," he thinks, "chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception." His skepticism extends to the very rooms and doorways of the Convergence, as he becomes convinced they're decoys, elaborate fictions to some inscrutable end. He knocks on one, and to his surprise, a man answers in turban and tie. Not a lark, after all. "I must have the wrong door," Jeff says by way of apology. "They're all the wrong door," the man replies. A lark, after all. This is fiction in touch with the starker parables, with Kafka and Beckett, with the austerity of bare rooms and declarative, uninflected sentences. I was uncertain as I read these early pages. Had DeLillo created a world of pure abstraction where the reader would be left to float in the zero-gravity chamber of the death fable, everything to think about and nothing to latch on to? But this is only one of several canny feints in the book, which continually shape-shifts and reimagines itself. In the end, it all adds up to one of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo's long career. Slowly, Jeff comes to understand what's intended out there on the outskirts of Bishkek: technological utopia. Cells will be refashioned. Nanobots will restore the body and augment the brain. The old factions born of religion and geopolitics will be permanently mooted in a post-death world. Jeff's incredulity at such things allows DeLillo to render the Convergence at once otherworldly and entirely believable, one more high-flying human scheme revved on false hope and doomed to fail. What put me in mind, in the early going, of brushed-steel surfaces and lonely centrifuges becomes something warmer and more elegiac as Artis's death nears and the enormity of Ross's loss comes into view. Death, even at the Convergence, remains just that, at least for the foreseeable future. And the man does love his wife. At about the same time, the philosophical implications of cryogenic success deepen. The primary architects of the Convergence, a pair of siblings Jeff calls the Stenmark twins, hold a kind of slapstick seminar on their project; it plays like the Marx Brothers doing a TED talk with the mind-body philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland. I found myself asking: What would happen if the souls of the cryogenically preserved went to heaven? Would they resurrect as zombies when science restored their bodies? The book inspires a lot of intellectual play as it drifts away from stark Kafka landscape into Borges-inspired mindspace, even flirting with the trippier themes of Philip K. Dick, and elegy starts to compete not with science fiction, exactly, but with fiction about science. Meanwhile, the real world - I mean yours and mine (and Jeff's), the world of headlines and global warming - enters from the wings in the form of disaster footage projected onto white screens in those hallways Jeff roams. "There were temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides," he tells us. "I watched as water kept rising in city streets, cars and drivers going under." If literature is Pound's "news that stays news," this is news about news that stays news, for in a place like the Convergence where death has been antiquated, newspaper headlines turn into art installations. Soon the book is pulling a good number of levers, both emotional and intellectual, and really humming, so much so that when Ross, perfectly healthy, announces his intention to follow his wife on the first leg of what they hope to be a round-trip journey - "I'm going with her," he tells his son, in a cold declaration of his suicide - I was wide-eyed, and reading as much for plot as for prose style. DeLillo, the most perceptive (almost occult) chronicler of contemporary life, has not invented the Convergence out of whole cloth: Its DNA comes from an old evangelism dressed in a new rhetoric and streaming out of Silicon Valley. "Death makes me very angry," Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, told his biographer, perhaps to explain why he has given nearly half a billion dollars to medical research to halt human aging. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, together with his wife, has given millions of dollars to the research of biological resiliency. Then there is the Breakthrough Prize, founded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech luminaries, with an annual pot of $3 million going to researchers who make discoveries that extend human life. And there is Larry Page's founding of Calico (or California Life Company), an anti-aging research center in San Francisco, with a multimillion-dollar investment from Google. The list goes on. We have entered an age of messianism through philanthropy and are only a billionaire's whim away from the Convergence and its dreams of "a promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world's organized religions." The full scope of DeLillo's vision for "Zero K" comes into view with the book's second half, when the real world, in the form of New York City and the crisis in Ukraine, floods the page. Two years have passed since Artis's death, and Jeff now finds himself involved with a woman named Emma and her politically precocious son, whom she adopted from Ukraine. The strife there, hopeless and cyclical, is soon to rear its terrible head, with consequences for all of them. But before any of this can transpire, we getfamiliar DeLillo street life, witty repartee in the backs of cabs, rooftop views of the city at dusk. We have our attention focused on those easily overlooked moments of everyday life, like standing shoeless in the airport, and those quotidian details -"fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed" - that give texture and pleasure to the day. We visit Emma at the school where she works with developmentally disabled children, admiring her, as Jeff does, for her tenderness with troubled souls. This teeming life, these unexpectedly touching scenes, come to the reader as both refreshing breeze and melancholy plaint, for what is observed here, what is gloried, is also what is inevitably lost with dying. The careful structure of the book won't let us forget that: The Convergence, the dying part, came first. This is elegy as formal design. We carry the Convergence with us through the vibrant city like a memento mori, for toward a convergence we all must go, and with it, every attachment, every lustful look, the whole worldly kit and caboodle. The Convergence, with its promises of everlasting life, is a seductive dream, just as Charles Maitland's assessment of Western entanglement in far-flung lands is seductive. "It will be very gentle," Ross says about Artis's death. "It will be quick, safe and painless." Death, painless! "This is real," one of the Stenmark twins says. "Take the existential leap. Rewrite the sad grim grieving playscript of death in the usual manner." When death is indistinguishable from a long night's sleep among excellent accommodations and in the company of loved ones, after which one awakes rejuvenated and augmented by nanobots with spoken Greek and all of Proust, who wouldn't love the turndown service at the Convergence? But the seduction is every bit as illusory as Charles Maitland's. After all, we are as far from a postracial, post-postcolonial world as we are near to arriving at whatever technique or technology is necessary for eternal life. For those inclined to believe that the rationalist mind-set, in league with science and technology, is better poised to bring about results than the old emissaries of heaven, "Zero K" reminds them that human nature is one of permanent conflict. Eternal life would only become one more instrument of power and source of human sorrow. The good news, modest as it must be, is "Zero K." DeLillo's novels generally offer consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world, by probing deeply and mystically into so much, and by offering the pleasures of his unique style. Just as his characters plunge through constructed realities in quest of truer selves, so do we, as DeLillo's readers, find in his pages something akin to insight of a gnostic order. DeLillo's characters long to penetrate the enigmas and intrigues of his conjured worlds; DeLillo's readers devour his sentences, images and narratives for what amounts to something similar: for all that DeLillo - the seeker, the prophet, the mystic, the guide - sees. That consolation is every bit as present in "Zero K" as it is in the best of DeLillo's previous novels, down to the pleasures of the final page. The scene takes place in New York, with Jeff on a crosstown bus. It ends the book powerfully. I finished it stunned and grateful. DeLillo has written a handful of the past half-century's finest novels. Now, as he approaches 80, he gives us one more, written distinctly for the 21st. JOSHUA FERRIS'S novels include "Then We Came to the End," "The Unnamed" and "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In DeLillo's new novel, which, like Point Omega (2010), is austere in setting yet lush in thought and feeling, global financier Ross Lockhart marshals his wealth and power to fight a covert holy war against death. He summons Jeffrey, his brooding son, to join him and his second wife, Artis, an archaeologist afflicted with a debilitating disease, at the Convergence, a secret bunker/catacomb equipped with faith-based cryopreservation technology promising a future reawakening. Intently observant and obsessively concerned with language and meaning, Jeffery is a mesmerizing and disquieting narrator as he describes the eerie and disembodying ambiance of the Convergence and its ritualized, morally murky amalgam of mysticism and science, from the post-mortem décor, punctuated by unnerving sculptures and violent cinematic montages, to the sarcophagus-pods containing naked, cryopreserved voyagers to the unknown. As history-steeped Artis is prepped for her frozen journey, and Jeffrey confronts mysteries in both this high-tech tomb and cacophonous New York, DeLillo infuses the drama with metaphysical riddles: What of ourselves can actually be preserved? What will resurrection pilgrims experience in their cold limbo? With immortality reserved for the elite, what will become of the rest of humanity on our pillaged, bloodied, extinction-plagued planet? In this magnificently edgy and profoundly inquisitive tale, DeLillo reflects on what we remember and forget, what we treasure and destroy, and what we fail to do for each other and for life itself. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters added to his long list of honors, DeLillo reaffirms his standing as one of the world's most significant writers.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
DeLillo's 17th novel features a man arriving at a strange, remote compound (we are told the nearest city is Bishkek)-a set-up similar to a few other DeLillo books, Mao II and Ratner's Star among them. This time, the protagonist is Jeffrey Lockhart, who is joining his billionaire father, Ross, to say good-bye to Ross's second wife (and Jeffrey's stepmother), Artis. The compound is the home of the Convergence, a scientific endeavor that preserves people indefinitely; in Artis's case, it's until there's a cure for her ailing health. But as with any novel by DeLillo, our preeminent brain-needler, the plot is window dressing for his preoccupations: obsessive sallies into death, information, and all kinds of other things. Longtime readers will not be surprised that there's a two-page rumination on mannequins. But a few components elevate Zero K, which is among DeLillo's finest work. For one, DeLillo has become better about picking his spots-the asides rarely, if ever, drag, and they are consistently surprising and funny. And his focus and curiosity have moved far into the future: much of this novel's (and Ross's) attention is paid to humankind's relationship and responsibility to what's to come. What's left behind and forgotten is the present, here represented by Jeffrey, the son whom Ross abandoned when he was 13. DeLillo sneaks a heartbreaking story of a son attempting to reconnect with his father into his thought-provoking novel. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
In this new work, DeLillo (Underworld; Point Omega) ruminates on a concept from his breakout 1985 novel, White Noise: "You have said goodbye to everyone but yourself. How does a person say goodbye to himself?" At the request of his father, Ross, -Jeffrey Lockhart is flown to an obscure compound where his stepmother, Artis, Ross's second wife, has chosen to die. Upon arrival, he learns that Artis will be cryogenically frozen, and that Ross intends to do the same. Wandering the caverns of the compound known as Convergence, replete with looping images on screens and monks shrouded in secrecy, Jeffrey stumbles upon the true ethos of the group. Faced with the prospect of losing both Artis and Ross to a theosophical cult, he struggles to argue against his father's longing for immortality while justifying the importance of transience. VERDICT DeLillo's rich language and rhythmic prose draw readers deep into a rumination on both the inescapability and alluring possibilities of the eternal return as the protagonists push against the physical and philosophical walls of Convergence. [See Prepub Alert, 11/23/15.]-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cryogenic facility beyond the edges of civilization provokes a series of meditations on death and life. "The thinness of contemporary life," DeLillo writes in his 16th novel. "I can poke my finger through it." This sentiment reverberates throughout this elusive book. Set in part at a facility in the trackless steppes of a former Soviet republic, it tells the story of a Manhattanite named Jeffrey, his financier father, and his stepmother, Artis, who has traveled thousands of miles to be cryogenically preserved. Artis is dying, but then, DeLillo makes clear, so are all of us, every day, our lives a series of choices, less drama than determination as we move through a world we cannot control. And yet, here at the end of life, there seems a promise: that we can take charge of our destinies once and for all. "Terror and war, everywhere now," DeLillo suggests, "sweeping the surface of our planet.And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia." In removing ourselves from everything, then, even the inevitability of death, we achieve a kind of purity. This, of course, is classic DeLillo, the tension between body and mind. How do we live the more we distance ourselves from our common physicality, the more we lose ourselves in circuits, video clips? From Great Jones Street (1973) to Running Dog (1978) to Underworld (1997), DeLillo has long traced the power of the image both to illuminate and to insulate. In this new novel, however, such tropes lack a certain urgency. Partly, it's the static nature of the narrative; this is a book, after all, about waiting to die. But even more, it's that these concepts no longer seem so revelatory in a world as overmediated as ours. No, in such a culture, it is not death that moves us so much as the question of how to live. Or, as DeLillo puts it: "Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am." DeLillo's latest novel asks compelling questions, but its answers are a bit shopworn. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
