“Zero K” gets off to a stilted start — with unfortunate echoes of Mr. DeLillo’s recent novels “Point Omega” (2010), “Falling Man” (2007) and “Cosmopolis” (2003), which exchanged his jazzy, tactile feel for contemporary life for strangely stylized, almost abstract musings on identity and fate. A third or so of the way in, however, this new novel kicks into gear as Mr. DeLillo begins to actively use his radar for the incongruities and chimeras of modern life.

Image Don DeLillo Credit... Joyce Ravid

His story gradually opens outward to examine the ways science and religion have come to clash and converge in a world fearful of terrorism and war and eager to look to technology for solutions, even salvation. At the same time, “Zero K” opens inward to draw a portrait of the narrator Jeffrey’s emotionally fraught relationship with his chilly and controlling father — reminiscent of Nick Shay’s filial relationship in “Underworld,” one of the few DeLillo novels to delve beneath the brittle surface of its characters’ lives.

At the beginning of “Zero K” Jeffrey is whisked off to a remote compound somewhere vaguely near Kazakhstan, where his billionaire father, Ross, has funded the Convergence project, which freezes and preserves the dead in anticipation of the day when both mind and body can be restored. A special unit called Zero K is for patients who make a conscious decision to “transition to the next level” before their natural deaths. Ross’s beloved wife, Artis, who has several disabling illnesses, has opted for this form of assisted suicide, and Ross, who is perfectly healthy, announces that he intends to accompany Artis on her journey into the afterlife.

Jeffrey is understandably perturbed, wondering if his father has been brainwashed into some kind of dangerous cult, or whether his decision is a perverse manifestation, as an immensely wealthy man, of wanting to exert control over his life — in this case, by choosing to end it. He realizes that his reaction is complicated by his ambivalent feelings toward his father, who, decades ago, abandoned him and his mother. And that his own alienation (that state of mind shared by so many DeLillo protagonists) has roots in this Oedipal conflict.

Mr. DeLillo’s depiction of the Convergence compound will trigger all sorts of associations for the reader. There are labyrinthine hallways with inaccessible rooms behind mysterious doors, reminiscent of those portals that Lewis Carroll’s Alice had difficulty entering in Wonderland. There are also odd, Kafkaesque exchanges with Convergence escorts who speak a New Agey bureaucratese that masks their sinister work; and sci-fi-like glimpses of Artis and other patients being groomed for the next stage of their journeys, when their bodies will be placed in superinsulated pods (their brains and other vital organs having already been harvested for separate preservation, like those of Egyptian mummies).