_{This article was originally written in November 2022}

A coworker of mine tells her students that all literature is essentially about sex and death. This assessment seems to hold true under even moderate scrutiny, but the elements are typically only present in a symbolic or representative way. After all, if a book were purely about sex, it would come off as obscene or even pornographic. Likewise, a book purely about the process of dying would be better suited to investigative journalism, or some form of science writing lest it come off cheesy, bizarre, or outright depressing. So rarely is a novel about the actual process of death or the effects it has on people who are forced to watch it occur. The aftermath is obviously a frequent topic or thematic element in many a novel, but again, the exact process of dying, let alone the decision for a seemingly healthy person to go through with having themselves killed, is a rare topic indeed. The process of dying is largely considered taboo in American culture, and frequently brushed under the rug or pleasantly ignored, and the whole kit and caboodle seems like a shaky foundation for a novel that I would probably avoid as its hard to imagine an artistic endeavor on the topic finding its way through the typical mud pit of tired arguments against religion. Or even worse yet, I could imagine the whole thing veering off towards becoming some surrealist stream-of-conscious drivel passed off as avant-garde. I’d be especially hesitant to read a novel like this if it were written by a postmodern maximalist with a tendency to lean towards the absurd with a pessimistic worldview that borders on that of the most ardent doomsday preppers. 

Despite all of this, I decided to give the novel, Zero K, by Don DeLillo a shot because, quite simply, I trust him as a writer. I knew this experiment would either produce a magnum opus on par with White Noise, or it would crash and burn in spectacular literary fashion. And so, with mild trepidation, I started the novel and interestingly enough finished it while flying home from the funeral of a family member who had died very suddenly. The significance of this timing and the way these two moments fused together into something unexpected  will remain with me for as long as I live. Moreover, I was surprised by what this novel accomplished. I feel as though DeLillo can sometimes serve as a harbinger of doom, a writer who uses fiction to herald an incoming societal apocalypse, but this novel was almost bursting with positivity if one’s willing to put the work in and look in the right places. I was prepared for a Saul Bellow-esque charade, the type of pet project where a writer will use a shallow novel to wax poetic about whatever interest they may have at the time. Surely, I thought before digging in, this will be a straightforward and predictable rant against the strictures of organized religion. But in reality, this book is not so much a searing indictment on the tendency of religious-minded people to use spirituality as a coping mechanism for the complexities of death as much as it is a criticism of pseudo-science practices doing the same thing but passing themselves off as superior. 

While Zero K may not hold up to some of DeLillo’s other offerings, I believe it will remain a notable work of his and will actually garner additional praise and critical affirmation as time goes on. That’s because, like so many great works of fiction before it, I believe some time must pass before we realize the scope of DeLillo’s expert analysis and satirization. Moreover, this book stands out due in part to its sense of optimism that seems uncharacteristic in comparison to the rest of DeLillo’s oeuvre, though certainly not lacking his infamous tongue-in-cheek assessments of human behavior. Additionally, like other notable works of science fiction, Zero K seems almost eerie in its ability to predict future missteps and repeated mistakes. The current war in Ukraine offers a backdrop to this novel that makes it look as though DeLillo wrote this novel with a time machine at his disposal.

The novel follows a man in his 30s named Jeff Lockhart who is asked to accompany his father, a dashing billionaire businessman who is a titan of industry, but a less than stellar father to Jeff his entire life, to a remote location in order to say goodbye to Ross’s wife, Artis, Jeff’s stepmother. While there, Ross and Artis confess to Jeff that they plan on having their own bodies frozen in a bid for immortality, Artis at the conclusion of her terminal illness, and Ross some time in the future. While at the compound, Ross takes the opportunity to show Jeff the project in which he recently invested. Known as The Convergence, the complex is a series of buildings meant to facilitate the process of dying, with the necessary machinery to allow for the freezing of the bodies after death in order to one day, when the technology has caught up with intent, resurrect the people housed there so they can enjoy a world free of disease, war, famine, and conflict. 

The organization, headed by a set of twins who are like slightly more serious and successful Winklevoss twins, uses a wide variety of approaches to handle everything from what amounts to hospice, to the subsequent freezing and housing of people who have signed up to take part in what they hope will be a journey into the future. The twins and other high-ranking Convergence executives use loaded and convoluted rhetoric to defend what the Convergence has set out to accomplish. They also have a neatly packaged and dramatic doomsday message meant to convince the weary that imminent death and a prolonged, and perhaps permanent wait, for the future is the only solution to most of the earth’s ills. Through speeches and strategically placed TV screens that project literal footage of impending doom, the twins convey the idea that with so many natural disasters, famines, armed conflicts, and differing political ideologies that too often end in genocides or ethnic cleansing, one’s only hope is figuratively getting out of Dodge, by freezing your body in hopes that you can be thawed and resurrected once the geopolitical landscape has found some sense of balance and order through technological advancements and, in what seems most far fetched, a maintained sense of global peace.

Jeff, a sort of listless and aimless man who’s still looking for more concrete answers from life, is able to see right through the empty rhetoric of the twins and the others willing to carry out their bidding. He sees them for what they are, technocrats who portray themselves as the ones with the answers, who point to ample funds and the promise of science as a means of placation. The presence of various pseudo-religious figures (for instance a monk who wears robes but has no religious affiliation or really any sense of understanding in regards to why he’s there) only serves to con people into thinking The Convergence is a well-thought out endeavor with the philosophical backing to see it through the various ethical problems that are sure to pop up. Jeff recognizes the twins and the other leaders as con men. People who, through wealth and technological authority, seem to consider their position in life on par with the royalty or pharaohs of the past. 

In fact, a central idea of this book seems to be the tendency of society today to use technocrats and various silicon valley executives as a new type of idol or a replacement for a God figure, someone to be idolized during their time on earth, and cheered on as they seek the infinite. These technocrats who seem to have very little concern for alleviating actual human suffering, but instead seek out ways of reversing aging with HGH, or coming up with promising new technological advancements that will allow for your consciousness to be uploaded to either the internet or an independent server or hard drive. DeLillo rightly satirizes the Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Bezoses of the world, and the obsessive anti-aging tendencies of the ultra rich, the idea that they, through accumulated wealth, should be afforded more time with which they can horde resources and continue to oppress the working class through draconian working conditions that are just tolerable enough that they can fund their next space flight or alternate reality technology. In fact, the halls of the Convergence property seem to even parody the sleek minimalist and austere aesthetics of the tech-obsessed ultra rich, interior design as sterile, mind-numbing, and devoid of personality. 

Mixed in with his biting assessment of greedy technocrats and their failures to aid society in the assuaging of their ills, DeLillo posits a clear opinion that tricky world events aren’t reason enough to try and wipe yourself off the face of the earth, especially with only the thinnest promise that you’ll eventually be returned to full consciousness. The book comes off as especially prescient when the son of one character ends up dying in Ukraine, fighting for the country he was adopted from as they take on Russia in the earlier invasion of their country back in 2014. Despite the fact that history not only repeated itself but seems to have created an exact duplicate of a moment, DeLillo’s central thesis on dealing with the difficulties and global issues of the day instead of pretending they don’t exist or looking to the future as a form of escapism remains. In these moments, the book veers from what I thought would be the most likely route. It insists that famines, wars, conflicts, tensions, and disasters aren’t a reason to fantasize about the future at the expense of putting forth any effort for the present. Jeff, in this regard, is juxtaposed against his father’s hellbent intention of ending his own life early, and realizes that the minutiae of daily life constitutes a network and foundation of meaning, one that makes living worth it, in spite of, or even especially because of, some of life’s problems. Beauty is born in these moments of complexity, a human connection is formed and understood in suffering. 

From a purely literary standpoint, this book lacked a lot of what makes Don DeLillo’s other books memorable. First and foremost, the dialogue seems stilted and inauthentic, at times reading like dialogue that was generated by AI software attempting to pass as human. Second, the characters aren’t nearly as three-dimensional as some of his other books, and as a result, the relationship between father and son comes off as boring and ineffectual. A relationship continually painted as tense and fraught with paternal drama comes off as something with little bearing on the actual plot and significance of events. Lastly, the plot of the book comes off as half-baked at best, and lacking anything really significant at worst. Jeff’s realizations about his father’s intentions, Ross’s decline as he symbolically accepts his self-imposed impending doom, come off as afterthoughts that DeLillo came up with while working on and attending to more serious matters. 

However, on the whole, this book greatly differs from some of DeLillo’s other more recognizable works in a positive way as well. Despite whatever criticisms I may offer here, DeLillo still accomplishes something worthy of being bestowed with value, and does a good job of capturing the bizarre and obsessive tendencies and anxieties that mentally sprout up after one is forced to face the death of a loved one. Zero K offers a steadied meditation on the afterlife and how one bestows meaning on the life they’re living here in this reality, but I wonder too how people of different faiths, or people lacking faith, will approach this book. And most importantly, who will readers respond to this book if it’s read in any close proximity to the actual loss of a loved one? To that question, I have an answer. 

Through nothing more than happenstance, I finished this book on the plane ride back from my aunt’s funeral. She was my mom’s sister and I was very close with her. Some time later, but before I would force myself to finish this essay, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. In that, she says, essentially, that when facing a difficult time, one should look toward literature. I had no idea how to process the events of the week leading up to the funeral, or the funeral itself, but the words of DeLillo offered some semblance of rationalization. While the typical questions remained (why her? Why then? Why that way?) I think the book helped me to compartmentalize the impact of her life in the present and the past and, most importantly, in a healthy way. The impact my aunt had on a large number of people became clear at her funeral. This event dealt, in clear and certain terms, with what everyone in Zero K is trying to avoid: finality. This was a definitive moment, a goodbye, an ending, and a sense of closure. It wouldn’t be for the people left grieving her, but the event served a symbolic purpose. There was beauty in examining a life well-lived, a sense of beauty that would not have been enhanced, and in fact probably ruined, by some sham suggestion that she could be restored later, here on this earth, in this reality. Jeff realized what so many have realized before him, that the finality of life, the idea that this doesn’t go on forever, makes every second of the current moment capable of being, no matter the hardships, a beautiful shared experience.