Zero K steers clear of minutiae, affectation that categorized Delillo’s earlier work.
In ‘Zero K’, his new novel, he returns to the territory he is most familiar with. Delillo rummages through all the themes and leitmotifs that have previously animated his work.
From his 1985 masterpiece, ‘White Noise’, to his latest work, Delillo has revelled in subjecting his characters to the fear of death. There are stark resonances of his earlier work as all of his previous themes manifest themselves into this powerful novel.
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However, this book steers clear of the minutiae and affectation that marked some of his later period works such as ‘The body artist’ and ‘Cosmopolis’. While these later works were slim, experimental and haphazard ramblings into vague and uncharted territories, with ‘Zero K’, Delillo aims to create the austere and laconic resonance of his earlier masterpieces such as ‘Libra’, ‘Mao II’ and ‘Underworld’, and in doing so, although he does not quite triumphs, he far outplays the odds.
At the beginning, the narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, is ushered to a mysterious and vaguely known location in the remote outskirts of Kazakhstan. At this bizarre location, his billionaire father, Ross, is funding a convergence centre, a cryptic compound where the living and the dead can be frozen and stored, with the possibility of being resurrected at a time when life is better. Bodies are encapsulated and often the brains or entire heads are removed for freezing and reassembly in the future. A special unit called ‘Zero K’ is used for this purpose; a ‘transition to the next level’.
Ross’s second wife and Jeffrey’s step mother, Artis, has opted for this assisted suicide of sorts. Artis suffers from several disabling ailments and hence decides to go through the procedure. However, on the eve of Artis’ transition, Ross, who is perfectly healthy and far from his natural death, announces that he will accompany his wife as well. Initially, Jeffrey had been summoned to this remote compound to bid farewell to his stepmother. However, it soon becomes apparent that Ross wants him to assume a role in his business ventures.
Immediately after this we are ushered into a well-trod Delillo territory of shattered family lives.
The novel, owing to its haphazard and laborious start, contains a few hodgepodge moments that somehow seem contrived. But these are ephemeral lapses, compensated effortlessly by Delillo’s instinctive storytelling powers and his ability to create characters who are unmoored by loss; the scatter in whose lives reflects the shatter in ours.
The novel, by its end, shrugs off its stilted moments, and convinces us of its lyrical beauty and unsentimental power. The prose, richly textured and sublime, compels us to dive into the sinuous and slow-moving river of Delillo’s sentences. ‘Zero K’ is an indelible novel; a precise and austere meditation on identity and morality and a compassionate portrait of a narrator whose silence speaks louder than his words.
Title: Zero K
Author: Don Delillo
Publisher: Picador UK
Page: 274
The writer is an undergraduate at IBA Karachi. He is an aspiring literary critic
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2016.
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