“No one,” said the rock star Jim Morrison, “gets out of here alive.” Well, probably, in the near future, some of us will. Vitrification, nanotechnology and cryonics may soon make a second lease of life a possibility. It won’t be cheap. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from us. That difference may be immortality.
Don DeLillo is obsessed by mortality. His breakthrough novel, White Noise (1985), is about an extinction level event. “Catastrophe,” he says in this latest novel, “is mankind’s bedtime story.” It comes, and you go to sleep for eternity. He’s the kind of novelist who is always looking up in the sky, anticipating that meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. Our turn next. His thanatotic disposition has deepened with age — DeLillo is now 79. That many candles on the cake and you notice how ominously small the cake is getting.
Zero K is a virtually plotless novel. What story it has is merely a pretext for morbid musing. Page after page mulls over paradoxes such as: “Rocks are, but humans exist.” Human existence presupposes two things: foreknowledge of our death and of the brevity of our presence on Earth — an infinitely small fraction of the universe’s aeons. The rocks don’t worry about such things. Lucky them.
Ross Lockhart is a hedge fund manager who has made obscene billions from the “profit impact” of man-made and natural disaster. There is always money to be made by “going short” on the worst things that can happen.
Ross owns island retreats and jets. No philistine, he collects fine art and patronises young artists. Art, like the rocks, lasts longer than lifetimes. That attracts him. His second wife, Artis, is dying of multiple sclerosis. She’s not lasting at all well. Ross has created a state-of-the-art necropolis in the desert, in the depopulated wastes of Kazakhstan. It will be to Artis what her pyramid was to Nefertiti: her passport to eternal life. It’s nice to think Ozymandias’s monument is in the nearby sands, warning against such presumption.
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It’s unfair, of course, that only the rich will benefit from the greatest boon human technology will achieve: but that’s life, Ross has concluded. And, if you’re not super-rich, that’s death.
The basement in which Artis’s “converged” death and rebirth will take place is called “Zero K”. That is absolute zero, on the Kelvin scale. At Zero K atoms will stop moving. Time will have a stop. Artis’s atoms will be disassembled and reassembled like human Lego. Her remains may have to wait awhile for cryonic technology to catch up with the reassembly process. But it will.
Her brain — in cryonic suspension, or uploaded — will still think. Yet, as Hamlet asks, “in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” The Samuel Beckett loneliness, virtualised and fleshless, for lifetimes (as normally measured) will create what? A super-brain, or madness? And what kind of human being will Artis be when, long hence, she emerges, newly born, from her capsule?
“Artis’s atoms will be disassembled and reassembled like human Lego
The novel is narrated, glumly, by Ross’s son Jeffrey. An only child from an earlier marriage, he declines to be an heir. Jeff has lived his life in opposition to his father. It has not been a happy life. When his father prepares, voluntarily, to join Artis in Zero K, he observes the process, with fascinated pessimism. Jeff has an affair with a woman who has adopted a Ukrainian waif possessed of genius intelligence. The affair goes nowhere. Nothing does in life — except, of course, the unstoppable drift towards the end. Jeff chooses to drift.
DeLillo’s spare eloquence and the cosmic depression underlying it makes this emptiest of novels a rich reading experience — but so depressing the publisher should supply a rusty razor blade with every copy it sells.
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Zero K by Don DeLillo, Picador, 274pp, £16.99. To receive this book for a discounted price, call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop