Zero K

by Don DeLillo

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book and New York Times bestseller, “DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K—his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld” (The New York Times), is a meditation on death and an embrace of life.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”

Don DeLillo’s “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”

“One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career” (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501138072
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Hometown:

Westchester County, New York

Date of Birth:

November 20, 1936

Place of Birth:

New York City

Education:

Fordham University, 1958

Editorial Reviews

Daring... provocative... exquisite... captures the swelling fears of our age.

Washington Post Ron Charles

Zero K is science fiction of a kind that takes place five minutes from now and a novel of ideas that’s deeply emotional.

Seattle times Jeff Baker

In Zero K, Don DeLillo has found the perfect physical repository for his oracular visions. . . . His vision is ironic, sere, crackling with static like a horror film.

New York Review of Books Nathaniel Rich

Zero K stands as the best of [DeLillo’s] recent work. . . . The intense, penetrating DeLillo sentences are still here, but now with a touch of Beckett to wax their warp. DeLillo turns 80 in November, and Zero K is still years ahead of the rest of us.

Brooklyn Paper Hal Hlavinka

DeLillo homes in on what may be the ultimate—and deceptively simple—lesson of his novel, which is that in the end, the questions we ask about where death takes us are the same ones we ask about where life takes us.

The Atlantic

There are deep, slicing currents running through Zero K, despite its almost ascetic surfaces, and there are unforgettable little moments scattered everywhere in these pages.

Christian Science Monitor Steve Donoghue

The novel’s brilliance escalates sharply as it proceeds. By the end, it is absolute.

The Buffalo News Jeff Simon

"One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo's long carer... Unexpectedly touching... [DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world... I finished it stunned and grateful."

The New York Times Book Review Joshua Ferris

The sentences shimmer like specimens in laboratory jars and the characters flicker like ghosts, but at its core the novel is trying to balance the atrocities and sufferings of life with its small, human pleasures: walking down a street, checking your wallet, starting a conversation with a stranger.

Catholic Herald Stav Sherez

Reveals itself as perhaps the author’s most fully animated exploration of human feeling.

Vice Andrew Martin

"Resplendently insightful... an engrossing work of narrative art... rare and extraordinary."

Brooklyn Magazine Paul D'Agostino

"Among DeLillo's finest work... DeLillo sneaks a heartbreaking story of a son attempting to reconnect with his father into his thought-provoking novel."

starred review Publishers Weekly

"Zero K pushes its readers to feel. It is almost impossible to not. With its confluence of screens, strange artwork, empty rooms, long hallways, and shaved hands of those soon to be frozen, Zero K creates an experiment, and we, its subjects, feel pulled to interact."

The Millions

Brilliant and astonishing… a masterpiece… full of DeLillo's amazing inimitable scalpel perceptions, fluent in the ideas we'll be talking about 20 years from now… ZERO K somehow manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions….The effect is transcendent.

Chicago Tribune Charles Finch

"Lush in thought and feeling... Intently observant and obsessively concerned with language and meaning, Jeffery is a mesmerizing and disquieting narrator as he describes the “eerie and disembodying” ambiance of the Convergence and its ritualized, morally murky amalgam of mysticism and science, from the “post-mortem décor,” punctuated by unnerving sculptures and violent cinematic montages, to the sarcophagus-pods containing naked, cryopreserved voyagers to the unknown... DeLillo infuses the drama with metaphysical riddles: What of ourselves can actually be preserved? What will resurrection pilgrims experience in their cold limbo? With immortality reserved for the elite, what will become of the rest of humanity on our pillaged, bloodied, extinction-plagued planet? In this magnificently edgy and profoundly inquisitive tale, DeLillo reflects on what we remember and forget, what we treasure and destroy, and what we fail to do for each other and for life itself... DeLillo reaffirms his standing as one of the world’s most significant writers."

starred review Booklist

A return to top form . . . . this compact tale has more ideas, argument, and speculation stuffed onto nearly every page than you might find in an entire shelf of sci-fi novels. . . . But Zero K is anchored in emotions as old and primal as humanity itself: the fear of death, the passionate love of a man for his wife, the conflicted love of a son for his father. These rich veins of feeling flow like an underground river through the novel’s eerie, futuristic terrain.

Kevin Nance

A profound and deeply moral book.

Associated Press Ann Levin

"[DeLillo is] the master of the pre-apocalyptic novel, the chief literary mapper of the dehumanized places our current world may lead us. [He] is near the top of his game in Zero K."

Dallas Morning News Chris Vognar

Almost six decades into publishing fiction, this author has put up a fresh career landmark. . . . [DeLillo] has brought off something simple but disturbing, revealing both the perils of faith and the power of Gospel.

Philadelphia Inquirer John Domini

Among many delights, Don DeLillo’s extraordinary new novel offers a bracing revision of our certitude about death and taxes. . . . DeLillo has created a mysterious, funny, and profound book out of a cultural gag usually reliant on metal cylinders and dry ice. . . . ZERO K deserves to win old and new readers alike. It’s a marvelous blend of DeLillo’s enormous gifts. His bleak humor and edged insight, the alertness and vitality of his prose, the vast, poetic extrapolations are all evident. So is the visceral quickness and wit in the sentences. . . . This is one of the constant pleasures of a DeLillo novel, the talk, the shop talk, the comic talk, the cosmic talk, the way the characters feel language, its sonics, the moral and emotional pressures.

BookForum Sam Lipsyte

Like a stethoscope, Don DeLillo’s work can make the heartbeat of your life roar in your ears. . . . In Zero K, DeLillo doesn’t give the reader much room to suspend disbelief. With very deliberate words the novel wants to turn our eyes back to the artificial realities that we’ve allowed to colonize our lives. Our only chance, his fiction implies, is to define them, to master them with language — lest we continuously be defined by our technology.

B&N Review Chris Byrd

Like a stethoscope, Don DeLillo's work can make the heartbeat of your life roar in your ears. In 1997, he published Underworld, a consciousness-stirring book that seemed intent on reflecting as many dimensions of post–Second World War American culture as possible. His sentences roamed through the baseball crowds, the counterculture, and the defense industry to a starscape of other points, yielding a vision of a nation's collective imagination. The book was the defining moment of a literary career whose signal accomplishment has been to give Americans and other citizens of the world a rejuvenated sense of the psychosocial texture of American society.

DeLillo's post-Underworld novels are compact — each of the five comes in at less than 300 pages. With the questionable exception of his 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007), they lean more on the power of language than the spectacle of events. In The Body Artist (2000), a woman considers the mysterious utterances of a stranger she discovers in her house who evokes her relationship with her late husband. "She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases." In her words and "his" effects, DeLillo maps out his aesthetic agenda — one that has escaped a number of critics.

In the New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani called Cosmopolis (2003) — DeLillo's story about a billionaire's trek across Manhattan in a limo, in search of a haircut — "a dud," judging its antihero as unable to "engage our attention." As for the male protagonist of Falling Man, who, after surviving the collapse of one of the Twin Towers, drifts into becoming a professional poker player, she writes, "Mr. DeLillo leaves us with . . . a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert."

In the midst of the current political season, DeLillo's portrait of a megalomaniac billionaire of gross appetites is about as topical as can be, while the critic's contempt for games of chance seems downright passé in light of poker's increasing popularity — and its implicit relationship to the speculative nature of global finance. Still, the essence of these ahead-of-the-curve books is not to be found in their broad movements as much as in the units of their sentences and the accuracy of their judgments. Consider this appraisal of an ATM in Cosmopolis:

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerking moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace.

Or this reflection on race from Falling Man:

She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain.

DeLillo probes words to unveil the power relations inherent in them — the ATM as a symbol of the devaluation of human capital, whiteness as a mark of security and optional obliviousness. If anything, such observations are more relevant to the prevailing discourses of today than they were at the time of their publication. Furthermore, as DeLillo reminds us in Point Omega (2010), one of the best ways to understand the assertion of American power in the twenty-first century is to look at how language has been used to marshal and control popular opinion. In the novel, a former government contractor — a theorist — who helped sell the public on the Iraq War speaks of his professional mandate:

Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't.

In DeLillo's philosophical universe, words are deterministic paths that facilitate our steps and missteps.

Language is a protective stimulus for Jeffrey, the thirty-four year- old man at the center of Zero K, Jeffrey Lockhart, like the aforementioned characters, has a sharp feeling for the talismanic quality of words. When his plane gets caught in a sandstorm en route to the cryogenic facility where much of the story takes place, he calls upon words to calm his nerves:

The sandstorm was out there, more visibly now, dust rising in great dark swelling waves, only upright, rollers breaking vertically, a mile high, two miles, I had no idea, trying to work miles into kilometers, then trying to think of the word, in Arabic, that refers to such phenomena. This is what I do to defend myself against some spectacle of nature. Think of a word.

Jeffrey is the son of a wealthy man who, in his youth, ditched his unfulfilling name — Nicholas Satterswaite — to become Ross Lockhart. Nicholas shed his name to remake himself into the man of consequence symbolized for him in the words "Ross Lockhart." When Jeffrey was thirteen, Ross left the boy's mother, Madeline, for reasons unbeknownst to his son. (DeLillo exploits the Proustian undertones of her name by having Jeffrey admonish his father to remember the woman he's tried to forget.) Since the divorce, Jeffery and his dad have had a fraught relationship.

At the beginning of the novel, Jeffrey is escorted by various people to the Convergence — a cryogenic facility located at an undisclosed location somewhere in the relative vicinity of Kyrgyzstan. He is there to say goodbye to his terminally ill stepmother, Artis, whose body will be placed in storage pod to be preserved until technology has evolved to a degree where resurrection is possible. Jeffrey is skeptical that such an eventuality will ever coming to pass, but he tries to be a supportive presence while he's with Artis.

When Jeffrey questions his father about his financial stake in the project, Ross bids him to think of its interdisciplinary grandeur. The Convergence relies not just on medical personnel to fulfill its mission but also philologists who are, as Ross says, "designing an advanced language unique to the Convergence. Word roots, inflections, even gesture. People will learn it and speak it. A language that will enable us to express things we can't express now, see things we can't see now . . . " For Artis, the Convergence offers the chance of being "reborn into a deeper and truer reality."

There is a certain heavy-handed irony to the fact that a woman whose name so closely resembles the word artist should think that a technology that subsumes other intellectual disciplines, like philology, will lead to a greater understanding of reality. Zero K is the special wing of the Convergence dedicated to the processing of those true believers whose faith in technology-midwifed rebirth brings them to the conclusion that they ought to trade their current life for a better tomorrow.

Representatives of the Convergence raise ethical questions like "Aren't we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress?" before waving them away with classic "Hey, let's be disruptive" talk. "We want to do whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization." Yet, as cavalier as some of the staff are, others look out upon the world and see a techno-state from which — paradoxically — only their technology can save the privileged few:

Those of you who will return to the surface. Haven't you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some digital panic that's everywhere and nowhere?

Wandering the halls of the institution, Jeffery periodically encounters large screens that descend from the ceiling and show him all manner of ecological and humanitarian disasters. Eventually, he sees the death of someone he knows — such patented artificiality speaks to the artificiality of our age, where the virtual experiences often supersede actual ones.

In Zero K, DeLillo doesn't give the reader much room to suspend disbelief. With very deliberate words the novel wants to turn our eyes back to the artificial realities that we've allowed to colonize our lives. Our only chance, his fiction implies, is to define them, to master them with language — lest we continuously be defined by our technology.

Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.

Reviewer: Christopher Byrd

The Barnes & Noble Review

[Zero K] continually shape-shifts and reimagines itself. In the end, it all adds up to one of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo's long career…The book inspires a lot of intellectual play as it drifts away from stark Kafka landscape into Borges-inspired mindspace, even flirting with the trippier themes of Philip K. Dick, and elegy starts to compete not with science fiction, exactly, but with fiction about science…DeLillo's novels generally offer consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world, by probing deeply and mystically into so much, and by offering the pleasures of his unique style…That consolation is every bit as present in Zero K as it is in the best of DeLillo's previous novels, down to the pleasures of the final page…I finished it stunned and grateful. DeLillo has written a handful of the past half-century's finest novels. Now, as he approaches 80, he gives us one more, written distinctly for the 21st.

The New York Times Book Review - Joshua Ferris

Mr. DeLillo's haunting new novel, Zero K—his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld—is a kind of bookend to White Noise (1985): somber and coolly futuristic, where that earlier book was satirical and darkly comic…All the themes that have animated Mr. DeLillo's novels over the years are threaded through Zero K—from the seduction of technology and mass media to the power of money and the fear of chaos. This novel does not possess—or aspire toward—the symphonic sweep of Underworld; it's more like a chamber music piece…Zero K reminds us of Mr. DeLillo's almost Day-Glo powers as a writer and his understanding of the strange, contorted shapes that eternal human concerns (with mortality and time) can take in the new millennium.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Wonderfully imagined, intellectually kinetic.

Newsday Walton Muyumba

Magnificent, mesmerizing, major, and mystical. . . . This terrific novel unsettles, disturbs and undermines conventional notions and holds our contemporary existence up for examination.

Providence Journal Sam Coale

A brilliant writer putting his prose mastery on display . . . . [with] thoughtfulness and dazzling construction.

Maine Edge Allen Adams

As ever, DeLillo explores the depths of an edgy, timely topic, completely resisting cliché, and emerges with something both fresh and universal.

Huffington Post Maddie Crum

In this intriguing novel, Don DeLillo trains his intense and singular vision on a future where people with the imagination and resources to achieve it may succeed in rewriting [the necessity of death].

Shelf Awareness

Mr. DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K — his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld — is a kind of bookend to White Noise: somber and coolly futuristic, where that earlier book was satirical and darkly comic. . . . . All the themes that have animated Mr. DeLillo’s novels over the years are threaded through Zero K — from the seduction of technology and mass media to the power of money and the fear of chaos. . . . like a chamber music piece. . . . reminds us of his almost Day-Glo powers as a writer and his understanding of the strange, contorted shapes that eternal human concerns (with mortality and time) can take in the new millennium.

New York Times Michiko Kakutani

Zero K is as creepy as it sounds. But it’s also consistently funny, in DeLillo’s well-honed deadpan style. And the moral questions DeLillo deftly ponders in this masterly work of fiction may soon be more than hypothetical.

Aspen Times Weekly Andrew Travers

Brave and bracing . . . sure to solidify [DeLillo’s] reputation as one of the great American novelists of our time.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Mike Fischer

Brisk and affecting as a Teflon-coated bullet.

Arkansas Online Philip Martin

Zero K grapples with the fact our demise is profoundly at odds with this aspect of us that years to exceed every limitation. Circling around this irreconcilable dilemma, DeLillo finds a vital dialogue with his great work White Noise. It is this . . . that makes this book a provocative success.

San Francisco Chronicle Scott Esposito

Elegant written . . . Soaringly eloquent.

Miami Herald Doug Clifton

Mr. DeLillo’s true brilliance has always been as a satirist. Despite its morbid subject, this is a terrifically funny novel.

Wall Street Journal Sam Sacks

DeLillo’s prose style has undergone a quickening. His sentences have always had a cascade effect, but lately their arc is steeper. Gravity has assumed more force. And [in Zero K] style and theme have something in common.

New York Magazine Christian Lorentzen

Wonderful.

Missourian Nelson Appell

Zero K demonstrates the electrifying possibilities of DeLillo’s approach. . . . This is speculative fiction in the present tense written with an ardent concentration and economy, no superfluous words, not even a wasted comma. At its best, DeLillo’s prose buzzes with the ambient hum of modernity, attuning the reader to a subliminal frequency, the hidden meanings of everyday objects and rituals.

Slant Magazine Keith Watson

Juxtaposing . . . everyday human observation with more cosmic considerations, DeLillo creates a range of experience that is often dazzling.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dale Singer

To reconcile . . . the fear of death that informs so many egregious acts . . . and the little everyday moments that make up so much of life — is the problem DeLillo takes up again and again, and the impossibility of it is what makes his work so powerful, so comical . . . and so fine.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune Beth Akins

Handily [DeLillo’s] best book since 1997’s magnum opus Underworld . . . [Zero K] feels very much like a companion piece to White Noise. . . . It is a book that speaks to the vitality and beauty of life. . . . Zero K is DeLillo, and literature, and life, in reverse—a plot that originates in death and moves, with sly, subtle triumph, ever life-ward

Globe & Mail John Semley

Powerful. . . . Zero K may poke fun at life extension, but it gives us the warmest depicture of a DeLillo novel yet at the intimate reason for this perpetual Icarus complex. . . . the most powerful reason for this desire for transcendence is love, and as Zero K so poignantly reminds, love is one element that does not survive at subfreezing zero kelvin.

Boston Globe John Freeman

Among many delights, Don DeLillo’s extraordinary new novel offers a bracing revision of our certitude about death and taxes. . . . DeLillo has created a mysterious, funny, and profound book out of a cultural gag usually reliant on metal cylinders and dry ice. . . . ZERO K deserves to win old and new readers alike. It’s a marvelous blend of DeLillo’s enormous gifts. His bleak humor and edged insight, the alertness and vitality of his prose, the vast, poetic extrapolations are all evident. So is the visceral quickness and wit in the sentences. . . . This is one of the constant pleasures of a DeLillo novel, the talk, the shop talk, the comic talk, the cosmic talk, the way the characters feel language, its sonics, the moral and emotional pressures.

Zero K Sam Lipsyte

No one listens to a DeLillo novel for its plot, and this one is no exception. The main action is in the mind of Jeffrey Lockhart, who, like so many DeLillo heroes, is a man under extreme stress. Narrator Thomas Sadoski's rendering shows him working hard to maintain control of his emotions and his identity. That control is not always perfect, and Sadoski ranges from icy to the edge of hysteria in this very effective reading. The book is a meditation on identity, the various forms of love, and how we think about mortality and the future. This is a fine narration of what may be one of DeLillo's best books. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

MAY 2016 - AudioFile

2016-01-21
A cryogenic facility beyond the edges of civilization provokes a series of meditations on death and life. "The thinness of contemporary life," DeLillo writes in his 16th novel. "I can poke my finger through it." This sentiment reverberates throughout this elusive book. Set in part at a facility in the trackless steppes of a former Soviet republic, it tells the story of a Manhattanite named Jeffrey, his financier father, and his stepmother, Artis, who has traveled thousands of miles to be cryogenically preserved. Artis is dying, but then, DeLillo makes clear, so are all of us, every day, our lives a series of choices, less drama than determination as we move through a world we cannot control. And yet, here at the end of life, there seems a promise: that we can take charge of our destinies once and for all. "Terror and war, everywhere now," DeLillo suggests, "sweeping the surface of our planet….And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia." In removing ourselves from everything, then, even the inevitability of death, we achieve a kind of purity. This, of course, is classic DeLillo, the tension between body and mind. How do we live the more we distance ourselves from our common physicality, the more we lose ourselves in circuits, video clips? From Great Jones Street (1973) to Running Dog (1978) to Underworld (1997), DeLillo has long traced the power of the image both to illuminate and to insulate. In this new novel, however, such tropes lack a certain urgency. Partly, it's the static nature of the narrative; this is a book, after all, about waiting to die. But even more, it's that these concepts no longer seem so revelatory in a world as overmediated as ours. No, in such a culture, it is not death that moves us so much as the question of how to live. Or, as DeLillo puts it: "Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am." DeLillo's latest novel asks compelling questions, but its answers are a bit shopworn.

Kirkus Reviews