He seemed to not only divine what was going on beneath the surface but also see what was coming: NSA surveillance, drones, private military contractors, looming eco-catastrophe-an awful lot of our current dystopia seems to come right out of a vintage DeLillo novel. In his novels leading up to the monumental Underworld, he devoted himself, obsessively and brilliantly, to mapping the tangled networks, the deep conspiracies, the hidden inter-penetrations of randomness and bureaucratic intention that have defined our collective reality since the Cold War. In addition to people who travel there to die and have their bodies stored for future resurrection-one of them Jeffrey's young, ailing stepmother-the Convergence is populated by various escorts and explainers, all of whom speak in the fragmented, aphoristic, passionately cerebral parlance that identifies them, first and foremost, as characters in a Don DeLillo novel.įor much of his career, DeLillo was one of the pre-eminent observers of the density of contemporary life. This tendency is encouraged by the peculiarities of the place where he encounters the Monk: a cryogenic facility in the wastes of Central Asia known as the Convergence. Jeffrey has a habit of assigning fictional identities to the real people he meets. In ‘Zero k,’ the narrator, a rootless man in his thirties named Jeffrey Lockhart, has a long talk with someone he calls the Monk, who may or may not be an actual monk.

Zero k review