Zero K
Don DeLillo
[Scribner]
At first glance, Don DeLillo’s 17th novel Zero K comes off a little like a parody of Don DeLillo. Introduced at breakneck speed in these first five pages are, in order of appearance: the apocalypse; a bloated businessman named Ross Lockhart; Ross Lockhart’s drifter son, Jeff, who narrates the story; Ross Lockhart’s second wife, Artis; the similarity between corporate offices and barren desert voids; and the “agoraphobically sealed” vaulted headquarters of a cultish group named the Convergence, who freeze bodies through cryonic suspension so as to reanimate them at a future date. The Convergence asks their followers – and the reader – to recognise the detached listlessness of contemporary being: “The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere . . . Do you ever feel unfleshed?” Their solution to the alienation of modern life seemingly lies in becoming ever more alien to ourselves. By creating a new space and language, purged of those shared associations that connect us, this group seek an equally captivating and terrifying sublimation of all that is familiar and known.
The book is so over-the-top DeLillo that it finally winds up being one of his best. On the border between sci-fi and the novel of ideas, Zero K subordinates character development and the messiness of human relationships to the relentless probing of futurist concepts. DeLillo’s language is steelier than ever. His bare skeletal sentences have an uncanny quality that both heralds the strange new world of the Convergence and suggests its haunting by the old one.
Words: Gill Moore
