Editors Reads Verdict
DeLillo's meditation on cryonics, death, and the technology-fuelled fantasy of transcending mortality — characteristically meditative and formally precise, and a valuable companion to his earlier work on death (White Noise) from a different angle.
What We Loved
- The Convergence facility — its architecture, its screens, its language — is rendered with DeLillo's characteristic ability to make the fantastic feel plausible
- The meditation on death as the defining human problem connects cleanly to White Noise's preoccupations
- Jeffrey's observations of ordinary life in New York — the second half of the novel — are among DeLillo's finest prose passages
Minor Drawbacks
- Less dramatically compelling than DeLillo's major works — meditative to the point of stasis
- The characters are thinner than in White Noise or Underworld
Key Takeaways
- → Cryonics is the most literal expression of the refusal to accept death — a technological fantasy of continuity that requires the complete erasure of the present moment
- → A facility built to preserve the dead from death would inevitably develop its own theology — its own account of what the preservation means
- → The ordinary life that Jeffrey returns to after the Convergence is more remarkable, not less, than the facility's promises
| Author | Don DeLillo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Pages | 274 |
| Published | May 3, 2016 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | DeLillo readers working through his later novels, and anyone interested in the philosophical dimensions of life extension and cryonics technology. |
The Convergence
The Convergence is a facility somewhere in the landscape of central Asia — remote, architecturally severe, staffed by white-suited attendants who do not speak. Jeffrey Lockhart’s father Ross, a billionaire, has arranged for Jeffrey’s stepmother Artis to be preserved here as she dies of multiple sclerosis. Ross himself intends to be preserved eventually, though he is currently healthy.
Jeffrey comes to witness. He walks the corridors of the Convergence, watches screens showing footage of unidentified disasters, attends a ceremony in which Artis is placed into her pod. He talks to his father. He tries to understand what he is looking at.
Death as DeLillo’s Subject
Zero K is, in a sense, the companion to White Noise — both novels are organised around the fear of death and the cultural mechanisms for managing it. White Noise’s answer was consumer culture: the supermarket, the television, the pharmaceutical (Dylar). Zero K’s answer is technology: the promise that death is a problem that can be solved if sufficient capital is applied to it.
DeLillo is not satirising the impulse — he takes it seriously as a form of human longing. The tragedy of the Convergence is not that it is stupid but that it is serious, and that its seriousness requires the abandonment of the present in favour of a future that may not arrive.
The second half of the novel, in which Jeffrey returns to ordinary New York life, is the quiet argument against the Convergence: the ordinary is more worth attending to than the extraordinary promise.
Our rating: 3.8/5 — DeLillo meditative: a quiet, formally precise companion to White Noise on the same subject from a different technological moment.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Zero K" about?
Jeffrey Lockhart is summoned to a remote facility in central Asia where the ultra-wealthy can cryonically preserve their bodies until medicine can cure what ails them. His father has paid for Jeffrey's stepmother to be preserved as she dies of multiple sclerosis. The novel meditates on death, technology, and the human refusal to accept mortality.
Who should read "Zero K"?
DeLillo readers working through his later novels, and anyone interested in the philosophical dimensions of life extension and cryonics technology.
What are the key takeaways from "Zero K"?
Cryonics is the most literal expression of the refusal to accept death — a technological fantasy of continuity that requires the complete erasure of the present moment A facility built to preserve the dead from death would inevitably develop its own theology — its own account of what the preservation means The ordinary life that Jeffrey returns to after the Convergence is more remarkable, not less, than the facility's promises
Is "Zero K" worth reading?
DeLillo's meditation on cryonics, death, and the technology-fuelled fantasy of transcending mortality — characteristically meditative and formally precise, and a valuable companion to his earlier work on death (White Noise) from a different angle.
Ready to Read Zero K?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: