Zero K by Don DeLillo – profound and beautiful

Mortality is at the heart of this powerful new novel set in a cryonics lab – Don DeLillo’s best work since Underworld

Don DeLillo’s late period work, which we can date from 2001’s The Body Artist, has been marked by novels that are slim, stark, conceptual, and that seem designed to provide as few of the traditional satisfactions of the form as possible. Endings are left untied, characters nameless and one-dimensional, plots thin and haphazard. After maximalist, wholehearted novels such as Libra, White Noise and Underworld, DeLillo’s austere, mindful, laconic late novellas feel, like those of Philip Roth, as if they’re trying to deconstruct the machinery of fiction, to back away from the world.

Zero K initially seems like a break from the abstruse and impressionistic recent work. We are plunged into a vividly realised world: an underground cryonics laboratory called the Convergence, situated in a place where Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan meet, a “harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability or law”. The narrator of nine-tenths of the novel, Jeffrey Lockhart, is the 34-year-old son of one of the Convergence’s backers, Ross, who’s in his 60s and a financier of fabulous wealth. Ross’s second wife, Artis Martineau, was an archaeologist, but is now dying of complications from MS and has come to the Convergence to be frozen.

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