Review: Zero K

Zero K by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Philip Roth dealt with old age in a series of strong and overlooked short novels that mark the last of his bibliography. Each dealt with a separate character – sometimes a revisited David Kepesh (The Dying Animal) or Nathan Zuckerman (Exit Ghost) and sometimes brand new, aging figures in Nemesis, Everyman, The Humbling, or Indignation – but the subject was always the indignation of the failing body, the central nemesis of mortality. It was always a dissection of how a single human being confronts the end of a life.

Don DeLillo deals with the same question in his own, very different fashion in a novel that seems to me to keep alive his hopes of winning a Nobel prize. (And, with Roth’s death, his chances are probably a little higher than they were, since he’s moved up a place in the line of Americans worthy of the honor.)

DeLillo has always been more philosophical, more abstract than Roth or Cormac McCarthy (whom I love to contrast him with since McCarthy is so elemental). At his worst, as in the overrated White Noise, he gives into his own concepts and loses a sense of the personal. At his best, as in Mao II or Underworld, he discovers characters who can confront his impulse to see humanity rather than individual humans.

In Zero K, DeLillo’s protagonist is a comfortably middle-aged Jeffrey Lockhart. He’s inherited enough wealth that he never needs to work, but he’s also estranged enough from his billionaire father that he doesn’t have a hand in managing anything. He’s repaired their relationship, but there’s still a clinical feel to it. And clinical is a tone DeLillo knows well.

The central action of the novel comes in the way Jeffrey’s father, Ross, has become convinced of the possibilities of cryogenic freezing – of putting dying bodies into Zero K states from which they can be awakened decades or centuries later when medical technology has improved. Ross’s second wife, Artis – with whom Jeffrey has a subtle but compelling relationship – is dying, and Ross has invited Jeffrey to join him in a former Soviet Republic for the unregulated operation that will shut her down altogether. Ross, giving into grief over the loss of Artis, eventually announces that he too would like to enter Zero K so he doesn’t have to endure life without her.

This sets up, then, a kind of dampened version of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with a son trying to pull a dying father back into life. Only here, there’s nothing of passion and little of compelling interest for the son to conjure with. Ross has done everything he can imagine with his life and wealth, and he and Jeffrey don’t exactly share a life. The only reason to stay alive is philosophical, abstract – again, DeLillo territory.

That conflict takes up the first 60 percent of the novel, and it’s compelling. DeLillo unfolds his situation with typical skill, and he reveals his characters – and their flatness – slowly and masterfully. Then, as he’s been doing in some of his other recent novels like The Body Artist and Point Omega, he disrupts the narrative form he’s used most of the way.

We get, briefly, a powerful meditation on the nature of the unraveling self from the perspective of Artis as she’s in the cooling tank. It’s got a slightly gimmicky feel to it, but it works for me, recalling the moment in As I Lay Dying when Addie Bundren reflects on her life as her family wheels her lifeless body toward her family burial ground. It works because Artis is one of those late-DeLillo characters who comes to life, whose appreciation for the concrete world acts as a check on the floating abstractions that otherwise so tempt DeLillo and his characters.

At one point before her “death,” Artis talks to Jeffrey about how she loved watching drops of water fall down the shower curtain. It’s gorgeous prose, but more than that it’s also life-affirming. It’s DeLillo reaching for what Roth found at every turn – the concrete complexity and beauty of being a human.

So, brief as the episode is, Artis’s posthumous reflections serve as a powerful check to Ross’s reluctant, deadened embrace of a final shot at life.

The final section of the novel moves us forward a couple years. Jeffrey has “come alive” in relative terms. He has, for the first time, gotten close enough to Emma that he has a real and enduring relationship. Through her, he’s come to know her son, Stak, who has his own challenges living in the concrete world. And he feels the potential of a happiness he’s never known.

At the same time, though, Ross turns out really to be dying, and he eventually asks Jeffrey to accompany him back to the Zero K facility for his own freezing operation. Soon after, Stak gives in to his preoccupation with foreignness – he’s loves speaking other languages and eventually [SPOILER] runs off to take part in a pointless internecine rebellion in the country where Zero K is located – and that sends Emma back to her estranged ex-husband. While in the country, Jeffrey sees a news broadcast that shows Zak being killed by government troops, but he can’t bring himself to tell Emma.

By the end, Jeffrey has again lost everything that tethered him to the human world. Ross is “dead,” and Emma has left him. He hasn’t even been able to tell her that he knew about – even saw – her son’s death before she could confirm it.

He has, in other words, entered into a kind of emotional Zero K. He’s too frozen to appreciate the world that he glimpsed with Emma and that Artis so movingly articulated.

To end where I started, then, I read this as DeLillo answering Roth’s (and Thomas’s) challenge to confront the fact of dying. For now, at least, DeLillo’s “death” is an emotional more than a physical experience. The work he sees as urgent is to fight against the clinical experience of losing touch with the people around us. Or, if you prefer a cynical reading, it’s to embrace the notion that we cannot take our friendships and love with us when we go.

Either way, DeLillo remains a powerful voice. I’m getting to this a year and a half after it came out, but it seems to me a powerful addition to the literature of what it means to confront death from the perspective of old age.


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