In novels like Underworld and White Noise, Don DeLillo has served as a literary sentinel, on the lookout for intelligence to carry back from the borderlands of our civilization. Zero K, his 17th novel--a serious reflection on the subject of cryonics--is an unsettling dispatch from that shadowy zone.
The prospect of immortality plays out at the Convergence, in a remote area of Kyrgyzstan, where billionaire Ross Lockhart has helped underwrite a scientific complex devoted to preserving the dying and someday resurrecting them. His second wife, Artis, soon will die of complications of multiple sclerosis and is scheduled to undergo cryopreservation.
Ross invites his son, Jeffrey, to witness what the latter believes is "science awash in irrepressible fantasy." In conversations with prophet-like characters known as the Monk and Ben-Ezra, Jeffrey comes to understand the philosophical underpinnings of the Convergence, reinforced by apocalyptic scenes of war, fires and floods projected on screens throughout the facility. Ross may be planning his own departure, too; for Jeffrey, this discovery dredges up painful memories of his father's abandonment and his mother's death.
The notion of supercooling ailing bodies, intending to bring them back when cures may exist for their terminal illnesses, exudes an aura of presumption tinged with absurdity, but DeLillo makes it feel plausible. "The defining element of life is that it ends," observes one of the principals of the Convergence. In this intriguing novel, Don DeLillo trains his intense and singular vision on a future where people with the imagination and resources to achieve it may succeed in rewriting that definition. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer