There's a special unit. Zero K. It's predicated on the subject's willingness to make a certain kind of transition to the next level.Don DeLillo makes me feel dumb. I've tried to give him a fair shake, having read White Noise and Underworld, and while the opening baseball scene in the latter book would be on my list of the best things I've ever read, everything else went right over my head and I remember very little from either (A creeping black cloud? A toxic waste dump in the desert?). I'd say that, in comparison, Zero K is the most accessible DeLillo I've read, and even so, I have to assume that either his writing is purposefully inscrutable or I'm just not up to it. Yet, there were some fascinating scenes in this book, I was consistently charmed by the naturalistic dialogue, and unlike with those earlier books, I was onboard this time as DeLillo sounded his anti-tech klaxons. I may not have understood everything, but I did like the journey.
What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?In a nutshell: Jeffrey Lockhart's billionaire father, Ross, left him and his mother when the boy was thirteen. Now a man, Jeffrey has developed a cautious relationship with Ross and his second wife, Artis. As the book opens, Jeffrey is being driven to a remote facility (a desert setting somewhere in the former USSR) named the Convergence: part doomsday cult/part vanity project, its designers have perfected cryogenics, and as Artis is slowly dying of MS, Jeffrey has been summoned to witness her last days. Not only will Artis and her fellow early-joiners be held in their pods until such a day comes that their illnesses might be cured upon reanimation, but with the use of nanobots, their bodies will be kept alive indefinitely (providing centuries, perhaps millennia, of semi-consciousness) and software will spend this time teaching them a common artificial language so that they will understand one another upon awakening in the post-human world. As Jeffrey tours the subterranean catacombs, he views scenes of modern terror on intermittent video screens – environmental disasters, monks self-immolating, violent uprisings – and he realises that not everyone who joins the Convergence is necessarily about to die: some have the vast sums necessary to simply sleep through the end times that are obviously in store for the rest of us; secure in the knowledge that this facility is essentially invisible and impervious to all cataclysm, from earthquake to nuclear war. While Jeffrey can see the program's appeal for Artis, he's less understanding towards those who want to make the leap for more nihilistic reasons. The second half of the book rejoins Jeffrey in his unambitious Manhattan-based life, where the simple pleasures of watching a storm roll in from the rooftop or witnessing the rare phenomena of the sunset aligning with the street-grid seems to argue for the beauty of living life in the now.
So far as the plot goes, I would heartily agree that the Convergence sounds like a nightmare (I have no desire for immortality; am resigned to being satisfied with my mortal share, whatever that will be), and if Zero K were just about the plot, I wouldn't feel so out of my depth. There are odd parallels between the two worlds – the kind of things that I can imagine students parsing and writing doctoral theses on – and I don't know if I could have possibly caught them all in one read-through. Most obviously, Jeffrey notices that the facility is decorated (populated?) with mannequins (some females in chadors outside, another in an alcove carved into the stone wall; not to mention the actual headless bodies that have been preserved and posed upon pedestals), and on the perimeter, he happens upon some mannequins that have been half-buried in the sand:
Here were figures submerged in a pit, mannequins in convoluted mass, naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an entanglement of tumbled forms with jointed limbs and bodies, neutered humans, men and women stripped of identity, faces blank except for one unpigmented figure, albino, staring back at me, pink eyes flashing.Back in NYC, there are sporadic images of similarly stilled and unseeing people – a woman sunbathing spread-eagle on the roof, a woman who freezes in yoga poses in the sea of midtown pedestrians, a woman standing with eyes closed on a subway platform – and both Jeffrey and his girlfriend's son have a habit of standing with closed eyes in an empty room: but what does it mean? (Yes, I also see the corresponding image of the hundreds of people – hairless and sightless – suspended in their pods as they await reanimation; but as to the larger meaning?) And there are so many ironic parallels: Ross made his fortune investing against disasters and now his money is a shield against the apocalypse; Jeffrey was obsessed with obscure words and their definitions as a child and is informed of the eventual adoption of a more straightforward language; Artis was an archaeologist but is one of the first immortals; the Convergence takes place far below-ground and Jeffrey's favourite place is up on his roof. The parallels are obvious, but I fail to see what purpose they really serve. And that's why Don DeLillo makes me feel dumb.
Three, four, five days, however long I'd been here – time compressed, time drawn tight, overlapping time, dayless, nightless, many doors, no windows. I understood of course that this place was located at the far margins of plausibility. He'd said so himself. No one could make this up, he'd said. This was the point, their point, in three dimensions. A literal landmark of implausibility.I've noted many times that I don't like it when an author writes, “You couldn't make this stuff up” – when he's obviously making this stuff up – but in this case, it's entirely appropriate. The Convergence is plausible (or at least at the margins of plausibility), and while I understand that Zero K is meant to be a warning, it's not really a lesson I need to learn: this level of preservation would only be available to billionaires, those modern day pharaohs and demigods, and besides, like I said, I'm not interested. I'm sure that DeLillo is a genius and that makes me want to inflate my rating to four stars (I know there's more going on here than I'm getting), but even if it makes me look dumb, I'm going to award it the three stars that my enjoyment-level is demanding.
