Synopsis
The richest, wisest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don Delillo, one of the great American novelists of our time—an ode to language, the heart of our humanity; a meditation on death and an embrace of life.
Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a George Soros-like billionaire now in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a deeply remote and secret compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until a future moment when medicine and technology can reawaken them. Jeffrey joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.
Ross Lockhart is not driven by the hope for immortality, for power and wealth beyond the grave. He is driven by love for his wife, for Artis, without whom he feels life is not worth living. It is that which compels him to submit to death long before his time. Jeffrey heartily disapproves. He is committed to living, to “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”
Thus begins an emotionally resonant novel that weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, death—against the beauty of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” Brilliantly observed and infused with humor, Don Delillo’s Zero K is an acute observation about the fragility and meaning of life, about embracing our family, this world, our language, and our humanity.
Review
An Amazon Best Book of May 2016: Jeffrey Lockhart, son of billionaire Ross Lockhart, is staying with his father and his stepmother at a cryogenics facility in central Asia. His stepmother, Artis, is waiting to have her body preserved until a treatment for her disabling multiple sclerosis can be found and she can be reawakened and cured. Despite referring to cryogenics as “faith-based technology,” Jeffrey’s father is a big investor in the facility—where the three of them stand on the very spear tip of the future. Thus, the stage is set for DeLillo to riff on life and death, life and family, life and money, life and technology, and to examine the difference between life and Life. DeLillo is very much in his comfort zone in this book and he pushes the existentialist envelope. “I’m someone who’s supposed to be me,” says Artis at one point in the novel. That’s true for all of us. The question is how? And do you do it by adding or subtracting? --Chris Schluep
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