





For 45 years, Don DeLillo has been our high priest of the American apocalypse, having tackled just about every man-made disaster: nukes in End Zone, nukes and garbage in Underworld, toxic pollution in White Noise, financial busts in Cosmopolis, terrorism in Falling Man, terrorism and the death of the novel in Mao II, war in Point Omega. His latest novel, Zero K, clears out every end-times scenario left in the bag: climate change, droughts, pandemics, volcanoes, biological warfare, even meteor strikes and solar flares. But these only menace in the background as future probabilities, and the novel’s focus is not human extinction but its inverse: immortality through cryonics.



Our narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, is a high-rolling factotum (past gigs include “cross-stream pricing consultant” and “implementation analyst”) with an even higher-rolling father, Ross (“private wealth management, dynasty trusts, emerging markets”) who’s poured his riches into the Convergence, a project to cryonically freeze and store terminally ill people deep underground—namely, his multiple sclerosis-afflicted wife, Artis.

Ross and Jeffrey are foils, representing two competing visions of a human being, not to mention DeLillo’s competing impulses as a writer. In Jeffrey we have the Enlightenment humanist, a book-lover as much concerned with the death of the humanities as with the death of humanity, who dismisses the Convergence as “a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception.” His skepticism is rooted in a belief that death and identity are essential to being human, and that the human essence is monistic—one body, one soul, under God, indivisible: “You die as someone with a certain name and with all the history and memory and mystery gathered in that person and that name,” he avows. “But do you wake up with all of that intact?”

His father, meanwhile, is the visionary posthumanist, who sees death as a logistical problem, life as a quantifiable and measurable phenomenon (“A period so brief,” he tells Jeffrey, “that we might measure it in seconds”), and the human as a separable biological entity, essentially reducible to body and brain. He’s eager to slip the bonds of personal and cultural history, and is driven to engineer immortality from a doomed present through his command of high technology.

ZERO K by Don DeLillo Scribner, 288 pp., $27

The novel’s first half is set in the Convergence facilities somewhere in remote central Asia, a bureaucratic bunker with restricted access areas and featureless green and gray walls. The Convergence is a vision of the future where nobody has a name and nothing has a clear purpose: Inexplicable skulls and mannequins adorn the windowless hallways; movie screens randomly appear, playing scenes of violence and disaster without context; a monklike man in a cloak dispenses cryptic phrases: “The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.” Most of this section has Jeffrey ambling around trying to make sense of these things in the days before his ailing stepmother, Artis, is medically euthanized and frozen.