Tom's Two Cents : Zero K by Don DeLillo

Zero K, the latest novel by the greatly admired American author Don DeLillo, is a pre/post-apocalyptic take on the state of mankind sometime in the near future.  I'm not sufficiently up on the current evolution of cryogenics to comment on where we are at this time, and I suppose I really don't care, or I would have done some obligatory research before I wrote this article.  Freezing dying bodies for the distant future seems to me a subject for science fiction, but DeLillo treats the subject with such deadpan realism that one can hardly approach this work as such, and I'm not familiar with his other work, so I can't say whether this is a departure for him or not.  To be fair, the second half of the novel is concerned with another subject entirely, and I'm not sure at this point how I would connect the two.  Those of DeLillo's fans who are interested in how young men in America might be won over to terrorism will find that topic finely explored in the second half of the book.

As for the book as a whole, it's well written, graphically presented, and clinically cold.  One could say that for the entire book and its protagonist, the only son of an American billionaire (no, not Donald Trump), who has funded an immense cryogenics project called "The Convergence" somewhere in a vast underground bunker in Outer Mongolia.  The son, who narrates virtually the entire book, is torn between his admiration for his father's second wife, a prominent archaeologist, who is dying and will be frozen in expectation of a "return," and his disdain for his father's abandonment of his first wife, the man's mother, who virtually raised him as a single parent while her ex-husband was accumulating a vast fortune.  As for his feelings toward his own father, they are, to say the least, ambivalent.

This is a novel of profound ideas and notions about death and the human desire for an afterlife.  As such, it can seriously command our attention without necessarily engaging us as readers of fiction.  As with most novels of ideas, it teeters somewhat precariously between being fiction or non-fiction, because it lacks too much of the elements of the former, that is, narrative drive, character development and emotional tone.  Are fundamental ideas about the nature of human existence best suited to philosophy or epic poetry?  Or else the tragedies of Shakespeare?  I suspect I probably think so!