Zero K
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD & THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
"Among DeLillo's finest work" Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Don DeLillo's extraordinary new novel offers a bracing revision of our certitude about death and taxes... a mysterious, funny, and profound book" Sam Lipsyte
Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.
"We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?"
These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth."
Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world-terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague-against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
