What does one avid reader write about the latest novel from one of, if not the, leading American author of contemporary literary fiction?
I feel like I’ve grown up with this guy through his novels. The Names was an enabler of my addiction to literary fiction when I read it in the early 1980s. Underworld is one of my all time favorite “big books.” I’ve read everything the guy’s published since Underworld, including his short stories in the The New Yorker, and gone back to read his earlier works from the 1970s, including Great Jones Street, End Zone, and White Noise.
Zero K is about a son coming to grips with his wealthy father’s impending cryogenic preservation in a personal pod at one of those remote sites where they’d have to kill you if they told you its location. About all we know about it is it is “land traveled by nomads for thousands of years.” His father wants to “own the end of the world.”
No one reads DeLillo for plot or character. You read DeLillo because he is a master at extrapolating the contemporary zeitgeist to its future state. He anticipates our future without sensationalizing it. He makes you look at it, not immerse you in it.
And you read DeLillo, or at least I do, because his writing is so exact, so precise, without ever resorting to lofty words for the sake of making the reader look them up. When he uses such a word in Zero K, he has his narrator step back and examine it, define it for you.
Zero K is a meditation on life extension, on the notion of not wanting to die, on having the means (money) to choose not to die. It probes the idea of money and science as the new religion. After all, you better have faith in the scientists who are going to restore you if you’re going to be preserved for a few decades or centuries.
Most of all, it challenges the impact of those the preserved leave behind. Isn’t that what death is all about? The dead are dead. The living have to make sense of it all. In this case, they aren’t dead, though, but a state in-between.
DeLillo uses this idea of being preserved, for later reincarnation on this planet, to explore elements of modern life, death, and everything in-between. Because being preserved for your rebirth in an enhanced physical state for whatever future society holds in store is the ultimate betwixt and between life and death, I suppose.
My observation on DeLillo is that his novels have a detachment quality which has grown over time, not linearly perhaps, but a trendline (Great Jones Street is an example of an early work with this detachment quality). This detachment hasn’t worked so well in all of his later novels. I thought Cosmopolis was kind of a dud but Point Omega was fantastic.
Detachment is extremely effective in Zero K. Maybe it works because we (the characters, us readers) are not attached to either life or death as this story unfolds. We’re observers with the narrator. It’s not the surround sound kind of effect most novels have.
The narrator is uber self conscious, almost annoyingly so at times. He ponders everything. I mean, everything. And DeLillo pauses time as part of the reading process for the narrator to ponder. Most of the time, the narrator seems detached from himself even.
The detachment of the narrator from his father, his girlfriend, his mother in law, and the death of his real mother, his girlfriend’s abandoned son, adopted from an old Soviet state, all this detachment also allows DeLillo to get away with passages which in other novels might be considered explanation getting the way of the story. We’re observing Jeffrey Lockhart, the son, ponder his father’s impending non-death.
There’s much pondering going on, but I can assure you it’s not a ponderous novel.
This is the kind of detachment which permeates this novel, from the last few pages when the narrator son is back in New York: “On public elevators, I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.” A nice metaphor for the preserved in pods half a planet away, but also cold hard truth for elevator riders everywhere.
Characters, narrator, elevator riders, readers – all are on the outside looking into something and away from others.
This is how pod residents are prepared: “You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”
Think about this the next time you watch someone with face in iphone smack into something or someone. DeLillo is extrapolating from here to Zero K. I think. After all, the narrator Jeffrey tells us in the middle of the book, “what else was there for [my father] to acquire” but “the billionaire’s myth of immortality.” The “pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”
Detachment fully serves what I perceive to be DeLillo’s purpose here, so the reader senses this in between space along with the characters, especially the narrator who has the obligation but no desire to witness his father’s preservation and privilege.
What is it like not to be attached to life or death? Zero K nails that one.
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