Zero K by Don DeLillo

'Everybody wants to own the end of the world'

The arrival of a new Don DeLillo novel is always going to create a ripple of excitement. He occupies a place at the top of the pecking order in American literature and after Roth’s retirement some would argue he sits at the pinnacle. His books are seldom what might be called perfect however. Underworld may consistently appear on those lists of great American novels but it’s as bloated as some of those other greats meaning it sits unfinished on many a bookshelf and, personally, I’ve always felt that the opening section describing ‘the shot heard around the world’ is by far the best part of the book.

The excitement from readers and writers comes from the fact that he remains a writer who has consistently been able to see so clearly something about the times he writes in. He has been described by some as a seer for his ability to tell us not only where we are but where we might be heading. Zero K exemplifies this before you even start reading. That futuristic cover, the blurb mentioning cryogenics; this is all about man’s wish to extend life into the future, perhaps to avoid death at all. But this is far from a foray into science fiction. It is a book rooted in the now, in the world in which we live and in fact it articulates something about our anxiety so incisively that you realise he might just be the first to say it and how strange that the man to engage so brilliantly with the contemporary is an 84 year-old who doesn’t use email and still writes his novels on a type-writer.

Jeffrey Lockhart narrates the novel (the first-person narration is key to making this a more accessible book than some) as he visits the Convergence, a remote facility in which his billionaire father, Ross, has invested heavily. This facility allows the wealthy to enter a cryonic suspension until such time as technology and medicine have advanced sufficiently to awaken them again. Jeffrey is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, whose terminal illness has led her to this facility. The father/son relationship is brilliantly drawn, Ross has not been there for much of Jeffrey’s life and there is an awkwardness about their every exchange intensified by the strangeness of the surroundings.

Scenes of conflict, climate change and disaster are played on screens, the facility seems to be made up of long corridors of identical rooms, there is something dreamlike about everything that happens here, as if limbo were a place on Earth. I wouldn’t want to give too much plot away – this is a novel of ideas rather than plot anyway – but Jeffrey is a character far more interested in living the life he has been allotted rather than one that might be gifted now or promised for the future. DeLillo writes some stonking dialogue to go along with the rather more portentous stuff and I loved the brain-fizz that comes from reading something that makes you think ‘Yes! That is so true.’

This novel might appear to be ice-cold on the exterior but it manages to include an ending of such warmth that I couldn’t help but look back on what I had just read and think about the human heart that was beating throughout. It made me want to read it again, to examine those moments which hadn’t quite landed on the first read. Always a good indication of a novel that might last. If you’ve ever watched the news or looked around you and worried about the way the world is heading, wishing that you could transport yourself to some utopian future - DeLillo has expressed your anxiety in a piece of art.

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Even when something happens, you're waiting for it to happen'

Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

I've only read a couple of DeLillo's; the brilliant Libra and the bloated Underworld. The first is a superior look at the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the events leading up to the assassination of JFK. In a bit of a Dealey Plaza splurge I read it in close proximity to James Ellroy's American Tabloid and repeated viewings of Oliver Stone's movie, and DeLillo wipes the floor with both of them. Underworld has faired less well in my memory. The book's opening section, describing the baseball match that contained 'the shot heard round the world' (published separately as 'Pafko At The Wall') is a tour de force but I'm ashamed to admit that almost none of the following 750 pages has stayed with me. Thankfully, DeLillo has turned his hand to slimmer novels of late and his latest, at a little over a hundred is easily digested.

Or perhaps that's not quite accurate. The novel is framed by two short sections, Anonymity and Anonymity 2. Douglas Gordon's art installation 24 Hour Psycho (in which Hitchcock's film is slowed down to screen over the period of twenty four hours, just two frames per second) provides the backdrop to the slightly bizarre thoughts of an unnamed narrator.

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress.

Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind.

The two men he has watched happen to be the protagonists of the central novella. One, Richard Elster, is the same age as DeLillo himself, 73, and a former architect of the war in Iraq, an academic rather than a military man, retired now to the desert of Anza-Borrego in San Diego. The other, Jim Finley, is a filmmaker less than half his age who wants to shoot a single take interview with Elster, just him against a wall, to document his experience.

I said, " I have the wall, I know the wall, it's in a loft in Brooklyn, big messy industrial loft. I have access pretty much anytime day or night. Wall is mostly pale grey, some cracks, some stains, but these are not distractions, they're not self-conscious design elements. The wall is right, I think about it, dream about it, I open my eyes and see it, I close my eyes it's there."

"You feel a deep need to do this thing. Tell me why," he said.

"You're the answer to that question. What you say, what you'll tell us about these last years, what you know that no one knows."

Elster invites Finley to his shack in the desert and here the two men talk. What was supposed to be two days stretches to three and then more, Finley aware that he has become a 'confidant by default' and that 'he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here, we were both here, in isolation, drinking.' Amongst their discussions are various philosophical themes, one providing the book's title. Pierre Teilhard, a French Jesuit priest, coined the term Omega Point to describe the point of maximum complexity and conciousness towards which he saw the universe developing. For Elster, who has tried to reduce war to a haiku and retired to the desert as a place where time stands still, this development is imminent and closer to a reversion than a giant leap forward.

"We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."

It might be unfair to take an excerpt like that out of context and judge it, but if it turns you off then there's a fair chance that this novel may leave you wanting. Beyond the men's musings there's little by way of plot, even the arrival of Elster's twenty-something daughter does little more than add a suggestion of sexual tension and a plot-twist that sends things reeling off at the end. Personally I found the book provocative and thoughtful, the kind of book that tempts you towards an immediate second reading (I haven't yet). It's possible that those who have read more of DeLillo's work will find it to be less than a stand-out work, the prose being as bleached as that desert landscape and the pace generally close to that of the film that bookends the action. Perhaps this is more of a continuation on a theme rather than anything genuinely new but it remains compelling and enigmatic, as satisfying as a shot of the bourbon that lubricates the conversation.

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