At different times, as we wander around in the company of Lockhart’s disaffected son, Jeffrey, the place reads like a new age retreat, a Bond villain’s lair, a Matthew Barney installation, and the rarefied monastic academy of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. For all his prophetic genius he’s a chronicler of reality, not a high-concept fantasist, and his lavish verbal resources seem to me wasted on trying to imbue this glorified meat-safe with consequentiality. The whole notion of this fortified desert compound, with its enlightened but sinister scientists and slightly robotic functionaries (or “escorts”), seems ill suited to DeLillo’s gifts. I have to confess, reluctantly, that I found this section (which occupies two thirds of the book) hard to like. And one of our objectives is to establish a consciousness that blends with the environment.” Surprisingly (for DeLillo) their solution turns out to involve the old sci-fi idea of cryonic suspension, necessitating several scenes with frost-rimed pods, the hoariness of which isn’t entirely mitigated by the rhetoric surrounding them: “This is the future, this remoteness, this sunken dimension. The long first section is set in the deserts of central Asia, at a (mostly) underground facility referred to as the Convergence, where, under the patronage of a visionary billionaire named Ross Lockhart, an army of global illuminati are attempting to solve the problem of mortality. The main difference is that while Point Omega tackled questions of oblivion and extinction obliquely, Zero K goes at them full on. From Point Omega to Zero K would seem a short distance, conceptually, and the books certainly share an interest in Last Things. His last novel took its title, Point Omega, from the Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin, who coined the phrase for the end-state of transcendent consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving. His prose, too, has always had a distinct bias toward the state of rapture, whether he’s observing a grungy streetscape or a desert sunrise. O ne doesn’t think of Don DeLillo as a religious writer, exactly, but there has always been an atmosphere of divination and prophecy about his work a tendency for his plots to take their characters through successive portals of initiation, often into vaguely cultic mysteries.

Zero k by don delillo