At about the same time, the philosophical implications of cryogenic success deepen. The primary architects of the Convergence, a pair of siblings Jeff calls the Stenmark twins, hold a kind of slapstick seminar on their project; it plays like the Marx Brothers doing a TED talk with the mind-body philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland. I found myself asking: What would happen if the souls of the cryogenically preserved went to heaven? Would they resurrect as zombies when science restored their bodies? The book inspires a lot of intellectual play as it drifts away from stark Kafka landscape into Borges-­inspired mindspace, even flirting with the trippier themes of Philip K. Dick, and elegy starts to compete not with science fiction, exactly, but with fiction about science.

Meanwhile, the real world — I mean yours and mine (and Jeff’s), the world of headlines and global warming — enters from the wings in the form of disaster footage projected onto white screens in those hallways Jeff roams. “There were temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides,” he tells us. “I watched as water kept rising in city streets, cars and drivers going under.” If literature is Pound’s “news that stays news,” this is news about news that stays news, for in a place like the Convergence where death has been antiquated, newspaper headlines turn into art installations. Soon the book is pulling a good number of levers, both emotional and intellectual, and really humming, so much so that when Ross, perfectly healthy, announces his intention to follow his wife on the first leg of what they hope to be a round-trip journey — “I’m going with her,” he tells his son, in a cold declaration of his suicide — I was wide-eyed, and reading as much for plot as for prose style.

DeLillo, the most perceptive (almost occult) chronicler of contemporary life, has not invented the Convergence out of whole cloth: Its DNA comes from an old evangelism dressed in a new rhetoric and streaming out of Silicon Valley. “Death makes me very angry,” Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, told his biographer, perhaps to explain why he has given nearly half a billion dollars to medical research to halt human aging. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, together with his wife, has given millions of dollars to the research of biological resiliency. Then there is the Breakthrough Prize, founded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech luminaries, with an annual pot of $3 million going to researchers who make discoveries that extend human life. And there is Larry Page’s founding of Calico (or California Life Company), an ­anti-aging research center in San Francisco, with a multimillion-dollar ­investment from Google. The list goes on. We have entered an age of messianism through philanthropy and are only a billionaire’s whim away from the Convergence and its dreams of “a promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world’s organized religions.”

The full scope of DeLillo’s vision for “Zero K” comes into view with the book’s second half, when the real world, in the form of New York City and the crisis in Ukraine, floods the page. Two years have passed since Artis’s death, and Jeff now finds himself involved with a woman named Emma and her politically precocious son, whom she adopted from Ukraine. The strife there, hopeless and cyclical, is soon to rear its terrible head, with consequences for all of them. But before any of this can transpire, we get familiar DeLillo street life, witty repartee in the backs of cabs, rooftop views of the city at dusk. We have our attention focused on those easily overlooked moments of everyday life, like standing shoeless in the airport, and those quotidian ­details — “fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed” — that give texture and pleasure to the day. We visit Emma at the school where she works with developmentally disabled children, admiring her, as Jeff does, for her tenderness with troubled souls. This teeming life, these unexpectedly touching scenes, come to the reader as both refreshing breeze and melancholy plaint, for what is observed here, what is gloried, is also what is inevitably lost with dying. The careful structure of the book won’t let us forget that: The Convergence, the dying part, came first. This is ­elegy as formal design. We carry the Convergence with us through the vibrant city like a memento mori, for toward a convergence we all must go, and with it, every attachment, every lustful look, the whole worldly kit and caboodle.

The Convergence, with its promises of everlasting life, is a seductive dream, just as Charles Maitland’s assessment of Western entanglement in far-flung lands is seductive. “It will be very gentle,” Ross says about Artis’s death. “It will be quick, safe and painless.” Death, painless! “This is real,” one of the Stenmark twins says. “Take the existential leap. Rewrite the sad grim grieving playscript of death in the usual manner.” When death is indistinguishable from a long night’s sleep among excellent accommodations and in the company of loved ones, after which one awakes rejuvenated and augmented by nanobots with spoken Greek and all of Proust, who wouldn’t love the turndown service at the Convergence?

But the seduction is every bit as illusory as Charles Maitland’s. After all, we are as far from a postracial, post-postcolonial world as we are near to arriving at whatever technique or technology is necessary for eternal life. For those inclined to believe that the rationalist mind-set, in league with science and technology, is better poised to bring about results than the old emissaries of heaven, “Zero K” reminds them that human nature is one of permanent conflict. Eternal life would only become one more instrument of power and source of human sorrow.