When Jeff blows up at Ross for wanting to check out early, the exchange brings some much-needed heat to the novel’s otherwise chilly pages. On the eve of Artis’s scheduled encapsulation, Ross announces that he will be “going with her.” Since he’s nowhere near a natural death, he’s headed for a special unit called Zero K, available to subjects willing “to make a certain kind of transition to the next level.” (Jeff has already sat at the deathbed of his mother, Madeline-whose name Ross is either unable to remember or unwilling to say aloud.) Soon, however, it becomes clear that Ross wants Jeff to assume a role in his business ventures.
Now 34 and personally and professionally adrift, Jeff is summoned to the compound by Ross, purportedly to say goodbye to Artis. Ross walked out on Jeff and his mother when the boy was 13. Ross’s son, Jeffrey Lockhart, is the narrator of Zero K, which returns to the well-trod DeLillo territory of unstable families. Days of travel from any remotely familiar place, its physical habitat is a “subplanet,” a network of areas that cumulatively function as a portal through which a handful of believers-Artis among them-can escape a decaying Earth and “stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human.” The Convergence is nowhere near Arizona or even the hypnotic desert DeLillo conjured in another time/space odyssey, 2010’s Point Omega. In other words, this is more than a fictionalized version of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a real-world enterprise with a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, where 144 bodies are currently stored in liquid nitrogen. In the meantime, advancing technology will soon allow organs to be refreshed and colonized with embryonic stem cells and “nanobots.” Brain receptors will be re-fed the stimuli acquired over a lifetime. Bodies are stored in capsules, sometimes with brains or entire heads removed for future thawing and reassembly. Headquartered in a mysterious compound, the “Convergence” is a many-tentacled community/project/scientific and spiritual movement whose mission revolves around preserving life through cryonic freezing. If not exactly a visionary himself, he’s an enthusiastic bankroller of what is arguably the most complicated and far-reaching vision DeLillo has concocted over the course of his 17 novels, some of which have pursued metaphysical inquiry into the realm of science fiction. And whereas Jack had the misfortune (or was it the benefit?) of being told by a computer program that he was likely to die prematurely, Ross, who is in his 60s and in generally good health, is faced with an indefinite number of years alone.īut the man is a doer, a change agent, a global financier of master-of-the-universe proportions (he has appeared on the cover of Newsweek in a pin-striped suit). One is dying and the other, who doesn’t want to lead the life he’d be leading without his wife, is not. Artis, his elegant, formidable, and younger second wife, is an archeologist in the end stages of multiple sclerosis. Ross is a billionaire businessman of the art-collecting, island-retreat-owning, private-jet-traveling variety. Ross Lockhart and Artis Martineau, the couple not quite at the center but certainly at the existential heart of DeLillo’s latest novel, Zero K, are experiencing a nonhypothetical version of Jack and Babette’s imagined dilemma. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you? But I don’t want to be alone either … Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide.
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