‘A boy’s adventure in the void’
Don DeLillo, Zero K
Picador, 288pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781509822850
reviewed by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
‘The death of the novel’ is still a popular phrase bandied about by writers and critics both – particularly popular, it seems, for those authors who pride themselves on a cultivated cantankerousness, such as Will Self or Philip Roth. Roth in particular seemed rather churlish in his dismissal of the novel, as it coincided with the announcement of his retirement from fiction writing, seemingly suggesting that his retreat from the world of literature somehow accelerated the inevitable collapse of the form.
Don DeLillo, though now comfortably nestled amongst the elder statesmen of American fiction, does not appear to have the same interest in killing off the form that has made him so famous. In a recent interview with the Guardian, DeLillo appears to show a quiet faith in novel writing: ‘People are going to keep writing novels. The form is strong enough to endure. And there will be enough other people, particularly as they get older, who find that words on a page – or words on a screen – are the highest form of self-realisation. It’s the best form to explore the human experience.’
DeLillo’s long-awaited 16th novel, Zero K, is a familiar DeLilloan balancing act between the individual and the world, an exploration of the textures of the human experience DeLillo has made it his business to explore since the 1970s. The narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, a young man who drifts from job to job, is confronted by the fact that his wealthy father has invested in an experimental form of cryonics and that his dying stepmother will be one of the first people to undergo this procedure. The novel moves between New York and a remote location somewhere in Kazakhstan, between long corridors and apartments and aimless wanderings round a city. It is a truly beautiful book, filled with DeLillo’s famously haunting sentences.
Of course, the central storyline, of cryonics and bodily freezing, appears on first look to suggest a novel of prediction, a future-oriented novel that explores possibilities of future technologies. But, like many other DeLillo novels, though the plot has some ostensible forward movement – the freezing of his stepmother and then the possible freezing his father – his narrator meanders in and around the plot, straying from what seems to be propelling it onwards. In a recent talk at London’s Southbank Centre, DeLillo commented that, unlike some of his earlier fictions, he did not undertake extensive research for this novel. Rather than the wide reading he did on mathematics for Ratner’s Star, or the now infamous story about folders kept on his desk labeled ‘Art’ and ‘Terror’ during the writing of Falling Man, the inclusion here of decidedly speculative science means that this novel reads not so much about the repercussions of cryogenics in actuality but instead about how faith and belief sustain human existence and feed technological development, what the main character’s father calls ‘faith-based-technology.’
The opening line immediately situates the DeLillo reader in familiar territory: ‘Everybody wants to the own the end of the world.’ This would seem to immediately speak to the somewhat tired label of prophetic visionary, used in a way that suggests the man writing at his typewriter, divining the spread of global terrorism, the fall of the twin towers or the crash of 2008. This sentence, however, does not pave the way for a plot in which the end of the world occurs but instead frames the novel as imaginative space where the end of the world exists in several ways.
Though it’s possible to engage with these enormous themes and ideas, the real beauty of the novel lies in its interest in the most personal moments of lived experience, filtered through a sustained attention to childhood. Throughout his career, DeLillo has written several child and adolescent characters, imbuing them with an earnest seriousness and wry humour. We can think of the excerpt of Tap’s novel in The Names, with its depictions of speaking in tongues and its phonetic misspellings, or Wilder in White Noise, cycling on a tricycle over a motorway. But in this novel DeLillo’s interest in boyhood, whether it be the childhood of the main character Jeffrey Lockhart or of his girlfriend’s son Stak, appears to be accompanied by a deep shock, a sudden realisation that these moments do not accompany or transcend a life but are the very material of life itself.
DeLillo seems to transform this interest in memory into a new deep attention to the fleeting sensations and emotions that make up childhood. This is not an idealised childhood, or indeed a Proustian transportation back in time, but instead a recovery in the form of a piecemeal personal archeology, dredged up through half-remembered words, rhythms and rituals. Peeling the label off of an apple, rubbing the edge of a wallet in a pocket to check that it is still there, closing one’s eyes in a dark room – DeLillo imbues these moments with a stilled wonder, as if they can mean both everything and nothing in their mundanity: ‘I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am.’
The narrator is a keen observer of others, attempting to understand himself and the world through the observation and imagining of other people; most importantly, this imagining and understanding comes from naming. Naming has always had a specific significance in DeLillo novels: in a recent Guardian Book Club talk on Underworld, DeLillo discussed how he understands his characters only through their names, that by finding the right name the nature of that character seems to emerge from within the space of the letters themselves. But though he may share this quirk, Jeffrey is not authoring these others or functioning as some kind of author proxy; rather, through imbuing the characters with lives and histories of their own, Jeffrey appears to use this process of naming as a way to bring himself into clearer being.
As the novel progresses, we come to understand that for Jeffrey, this need to name comes from his own father’s renaming of himself and his distaste for it. ‘The name Lockhart was all wrong for me. Too tight, too clenched. The solid and decisive Lockhart, the firm closure of Lockhart. The name excluded me. All I could do was peer into it from outside.’ In seeking to know and understand others around him, Jeffrey seeks to redraw the boundaries of intimate knowledge, and indeed self-knowledge. His intimate knowledge of his father, someone who is essentially a stranger to him, has drastically altered his understanding of anyone. Jeffrey’s relationships with those around him are constituted through a failed imaginative process, an inability to locate another individual in the world.
This exploration of the relationships between individuals is also echoed in the relationship between Lockhart and the spaces he moves through. He notes at one point: ‘This is what I did in any new environment. I tried to inject meaning, make the place coherent or at least locate myself within the place, to confirm my uneasy presence.’ This search for belonging and coherence finds an echo in the architecture of the cryogenic facility, named, fittingly, Convergence. As the barriers between Jeffrey and other seems to be insurmountable, DeLillo collapses the distinction between the building and the concept of art itself. DeLillo has always been interested in the gallery space, of the ways that individuals look at art and can be looked at while looking at art. But he has also thought about land art, about spaces outside of the containment of the gallery. His 2003 play Love-Lies-Bleeding contains an image of a painted room inside of a mountain that exists in its description and the imagination of the artist but not in real life. In this novel, DeLillo’s concept of imagined or possible art has evolved from a mountain room to a whole building. Walking along the corridors, Jeffrey experiences a new kind of being in space that is directly related to looking at art. The building functions both as a building to be used and as a series of corridors filled with doors that lead nowhere and artworks that suddenly appear. In the creation of this building, DeLillo creates a new kind of land art that is expansive and unlimited, where the artwork exists in its very possibility of existence, its becoming-art.
Walking through the halls, Jeffrey considers that this chance encounter with art ‘met the standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck, that can mark the most compelling art.’ This contingent artwork exists in its moment before creation, refiguring a new space between individual and object, suggested only in its possibilities. The final chapter of the novel, written in short, separated paragraphs, seems to enact this perpetual becoming – a life lived moment to moment, a creative waiting in which nothing arrives.
In the aforementioned interview with the Guardian, Don DeLillo discusses his new interest in his own past, commenting that ‘more and more I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx. I’ve reached the age when that identity becomes more accessible. Once I left the Bronx I didn’t think of it much except when I was visiting my parents. But it crept back in when I was working on Underworld and now it’s returned on a whole other level.’ This interest in memory, in childhood and indeed in the making of an individual in the world, fill the pages of Zero K in DeLillo’s exquisitely rendered prose:
Don DeLillo, though now comfortably nestled amongst the elder statesmen of American fiction, does not appear to have the same interest in killing off the form that has made him so famous. In a recent interview with the Guardian, DeLillo appears to show a quiet faith in novel writing: ‘People are going to keep writing novels. The form is strong enough to endure. And there will be enough other people, particularly as they get older, who find that words on a page – or words on a screen – are the highest form of self-realisation. It’s the best form to explore the human experience.’
DeLillo’s long-awaited 16th novel, Zero K, is a familiar DeLilloan balancing act between the individual and the world, an exploration of the textures of the human experience DeLillo has made it his business to explore since the 1970s. The narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, a young man who drifts from job to job, is confronted by the fact that his wealthy father has invested in an experimental form of cryonics and that his dying stepmother will be one of the first people to undergo this procedure. The novel moves between New York and a remote location somewhere in Kazakhstan, between long corridors and apartments and aimless wanderings round a city. It is a truly beautiful book, filled with DeLillo’s famously haunting sentences.
Of course, the central storyline, of cryonics and bodily freezing, appears on first look to suggest a novel of prediction, a future-oriented novel that explores possibilities of future technologies. But, like many other DeLillo novels, though the plot has some ostensible forward movement – the freezing of his stepmother and then the possible freezing his father – his narrator meanders in and around the plot, straying from what seems to be propelling it onwards. In a recent talk at London’s Southbank Centre, DeLillo commented that, unlike some of his earlier fictions, he did not undertake extensive research for this novel. Rather than the wide reading he did on mathematics for Ratner’s Star, or the now infamous story about folders kept on his desk labeled ‘Art’ and ‘Terror’ during the writing of Falling Man, the inclusion here of decidedly speculative science means that this novel reads not so much about the repercussions of cryogenics in actuality but instead about how faith and belief sustain human existence and feed technological development, what the main character’s father calls ‘faith-based-technology.’
The opening line immediately situates the DeLillo reader in familiar territory: ‘Everybody wants to the own the end of the world.’ This would seem to immediately speak to the somewhat tired label of prophetic visionary, used in a way that suggests the man writing at his typewriter, divining the spread of global terrorism, the fall of the twin towers or the crash of 2008. This sentence, however, does not pave the way for a plot in which the end of the world occurs but instead frames the novel as imaginative space where the end of the world exists in several ways.
Though it’s possible to engage with these enormous themes and ideas, the real beauty of the novel lies in its interest in the most personal moments of lived experience, filtered through a sustained attention to childhood. Throughout his career, DeLillo has written several child and adolescent characters, imbuing them with an earnest seriousness and wry humour. We can think of the excerpt of Tap’s novel in The Names, with its depictions of speaking in tongues and its phonetic misspellings, or Wilder in White Noise, cycling on a tricycle over a motorway. But in this novel DeLillo’s interest in boyhood, whether it be the childhood of the main character Jeffrey Lockhart or of his girlfriend’s son Stak, appears to be accompanied by a deep shock, a sudden realisation that these moments do not accompany or transcend a life but are the very material of life itself.
DeLillo seems to transform this interest in memory into a new deep attention to the fleeting sensations and emotions that make up childhood. This is not an idealised childhood, or indeed a Proustian transportation back in time, but instead a recovery in the form of a piecemeal personal archeology, dredged up through half-remembered words, rhythms and rituals. Peeling the label off of an apple, rubbing the edge of a wallet in a pocket to check that it is still there, closing one’s eyes in a dark room – DeLillo imbues these moments with a stilled wonder, as if they can mean both everything and nothing in their mundanity: ‘I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am.’
The narrator is a keen observer of others, attempting to understand himself and the world through the observation and imagining of other people; most importantly, this imagining and understanding comes from naming. Naming has always had a specific significance in DeLillo novels: in a recent Guardian Book Club talk on Underworld, DeLillo discussed how he understands his characters only through their names, that by finding the right name the nature of that character seems to emerge from within the space of the letters themselves. But though he may share this quirk, Jeffrey is not authoring these others or functioning as some kind of author proxy; rather, through imbuing the characters with lives and histories of their own, Jeffrey appears to use this process of naming as a way to bring himself into clearer being.
As the novel progresses, we come to understand that for Jeffrey, this need to name comes from his own father’s renaming of himself and his distaste for it. ‘The name Lockhart was all wrong for me. Too tight, too clenched. The solid and decisive Lockhart, the firm closure of Lockhart. The name excluded me. All I could do was peer into it from outside.’ In seeking to know and understand others around him, Jeffrey seeks to redraw the boundaries of intimate knowledge, and indeed self-knowledge. His intimate knowledge of his father, someone who is essentially a stranger to him, has drastically altered his understanding of anyone. Jeffrey’s relationships with those around him are constituted through a failed imaginative process, an inability to locate another individual in the world.
This exploration of the relationships between individuals is also echoed in the relationship between Lockhart and the spaces he moves through. He notes at one point: ‘This is what I did in any new environment. I tried to inject meaning, make the place coherent or at least locate myself within the place, to confirm my uneasy presence.’ This search for belonging and coherence finds an echo in the architecture of the cryogenic facility, named, fittingly, Convergence. As the barriers between Jeffrey and other seems to be insurmountable, DeLillo collapses the distinction between the building and the concept of art itself. DeLillo has always been interested in the gallery space, of the ways that individuals look at art and can be looked at while looking at art. But he has also thought about land art, about spaces outside of the containment of the gallery. His 2003 play Love-Lies-Bleeding contains an image of a painted room inside of a mountain that exists in its description and the imagination of the artist but not in real life. In this novel, DeLillo’s concept of imagined or possible art has evolved from a mountain room to a whole building. Walking along the corridors, Jeffrey experiences a new kind of being in space that is directly related to looking at art. The building functions both as a building to be used and as a series of corridors filled with doors that lead nowhere and artworks that suddenly appear. In the creation of this building, DeLillo creates a new kind of land art that is expansive and unlimited, where the artwork exists in its very possibility of existence, its becoming-art.
Walking through the halls, Jeffrey considers that this chance encounter with art ‘met the standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck, that can mark the most compelling art.’ This contingent artwork exists in its moment before creation, refiguring a new space between individual and object, suggested only in its possibilities. The final chapter of the novel, written in short, separated paragraphs, seems to enact this perpetual becoming – a life lived moment to moment, a creative waiting in which nothing arrives.
In the aforementioned interview with the Guardian, Don DeLillo discusses his new interest in his own past, commenting that ‘more and more I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx. I’ve reached the age when that identity becomes more accessible. Once I left the Bronx I didn’t think of it much except when I was visiting my parents. But it crept back in when I was working on Underworld and now it’s returned on a whole other level.’ This interest in memory, in childhood and indeed in the making of an individual in the world, fill the pages of Zero K in DeLillo’s exquisitely rendered prose:
The emptiness, the hush of the long hall, the painted doors and walls, the knowledge that I was a lone figure, motionless, stranded us a setting that seemed designed for such circumstances – this was beginning to resemble a children’s story. I open my eyes. Nothing happens. A boy’s adventures in the void.