Zero K

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

• White Noise by Don DeLillo — Full Review
• Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo — Full Review

White Noise to Zero K: Death as DeLillo’s Subject

DeLillo’s career can be read as a long meditation on death and the cultural mechanisms for managing it. White Noise (1985) examined consumer culture, pharmaceutical solutions, and media saturation as the mechanisms available in the 1980s. Zero K (2016) examines the mechanism available in the 2010s: technology, capital, and the aspiration to extend human life indefinitely.

The thirty-year gap between the two novels is not a gap in thinking but an extension of it. Dylar, the fictional drug in White Noise that promises to eliminate the fear of death, is a pharma-era fantasy. The Convergence in Zero K, with its cryonics pods and its suggestion that death is a technical problem awaiting a technical solution, is a tech-era fantasy. DeLillo is not satirising the impulse — he takes it seriously as a form of genuine human longing — but he is examining what the impulse costs: specifically, the abandonment of the present moment in favour of a future that may not arrive.

The Architecture of the Convergence

The Convergence facility — its location undisclosed, its architecture severe, its staff silent and white-suited — is rendered with the care DeLillo brings to all his imagined spaces. It has the quality of a place that has been thought through: the screens showing unidentified catastrophes, the corridors that lead to zones of increasing stillness, the ceremony in which the dying are preserved. Jeffrey’s walk through it is a movement through an argument as much as a physical space.

DeLillo was born November 20, 1936 in the Bronx, and published Zero K at the age of seventy-nine — an age at which the questions the novel addresses are not abstract. The novel’s quiet urgency comes partly from the proximity of its author to its subject: he was writing about death and its technological circumvention from a vantage where death was no longer a philosophical problem but a practical one.

Jeffrey’s Return to the Ordinary

The second half of Zero K follows Jeffrey back to New York — to his girlfriend Emma, her young son Stak, and the accumulation of small details that constitute ordinary life. DeLillo renders these details with unusual warmth: Jeffrey noticing the specific quality of morning light, the particular way Stak pronounces certain words, the texture of everyday urban existence. This half of the novel is the argument against the Convergence: the extraordinary promise of indefinite preservation requires the abandonment of the ordinary, which is, DeLillo suggests, the more remarkable thing.

The novel’s title — the temperature at which molecular motion stops, absolute zero — is the Convergence’s aspiration: a state of perfect preservation through perfect stillness. Jeffrey’s return to the ordinary is a return to motion, to change, to the temporality that makes experience possible. Zero K ends not with a verdict on cryonics but with a demonstration of what would be lost in the pursuit of its promise.

Ross Lockhart’s Choice

Jeffrey’s father Ross is the novel’s other significant figure, and his choice to eventually join Artis in the pods is handled by DeLillo with more sympathy than critique. Ross is not a villain; he is a man who loves his wife and cannot accept her death, and who has the financial resources to act on that refusal. DeLillo is interested in what this reveals about the relationship between wealth and mortality: that the very rich are not exempt from death but are the first to be offered the fantasy of exemption, and that the fantasy has costs that the very rich are also the first to be able to afford to ignore.

The father-son relationship between Ross and Jeffrey — distant, formal, marked by the specific awkwardness of a wealthy man’s relationship with the child he provided for but did not raise — is DeLillo’s quietest piece of characterisation in the novel and one of his most accurate. Jeffrey’s inability to refuse his father’s summons, and his inability to share his father’s certainty about the Convergence, is the small human drama at the centre of a novel about very large questions.

DeLillo in Later Career

Zero K is DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, published when he was seventy-nine. His later career — The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), Point Omega (2010), Zero K (2016) — is characterised by a progressive stripping away: shorter novels, more concentrated premises, less of the sprawling historical canvas of Underworld. Zero K is the most minimal of these, and it rewards the patience that DeLillo’s later style requires.