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'Zero K,' DeLillo's latest tour de force: A Scarifying New Gospel

Don DeLillo began his crescendo of celebrated work - one cymbal crash after another through the 1980s and '90s - with a novel that may be his quietest. The Names, from 1982, doesn't investigate a president's assassination, like Libra (1988) does; rather,

Detail from the book jacket of "Zero K," the new novel by celebrated author Don DeLillo.
Detail from the book jacket of "Zero K," the new novel by celebrated author Don DeLillo.Read more

Zero K

By Don DeLillo

Scribner.

288 pp. $28

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Reviewed by John Domini

nolead ends Don DeLillo began his crescendo of celebrated work - one cymbal crash after another through the 1980s and '90s - with a novel that may be his quietest. The Names, from 1982, doesn't investigate a president's assassination, like Libra (1988) does; rather, it details a family breakup, reducing a tragedy to mute, scattered fragments - suited perfectly to the primary setting, an archaeological dig. So when I say the new Zero K recalls that '82 work, it's high praise. Almost six decades into publishing fiction, this author has put up a fresh career landmark.

If nothing else, he's brought off one of his single most arresting scenes. About midway through the novel, deep beneath an off-the-grid compound in Central Asia, the conflicted lead character is shown three cryogenically preserved corpses, hung up shaved and naked in their pods. Abandoning "the inexpressibly dense experience of a man or woman alive on earth," these three have become "laboratory life-forms . . . in a space that was anonymous, no where or when."

The vision calls a lot to mind. Mannequins, for instance, and these indeed develop into one of the novel's leitmotifs. As for the Calvary imagery, Christ between the thieves, such stuff doesn't ordinarily occur to our narrator, Jeff Lockhart. He's another of DeLillo's skeptical and disaffected New Yorkers - but then the otherworldly setting of the novel's first half is like nothing the author has presented before. Down in a high-tech "catacomb," everyone keeps bringing up religion.

Jeff's father, Ross, "a man shaped by money," has invested heavily in something called "the Convergence." This outfit sells cryogenic preservation, and the billionaire has a wife with a terminal illness. She isn't Jeff's mother - that earlier marriage failed - but Ross has whisked his son halfway around the world for the "cryopreservation." But there's more. Jeff soon discovers there's an entire busy apocalyptic cult.

In every cubbyhole, sometimes on drop-down screens, Jeff learns about "pilgrims" or "heralds." His own stepmother asserts that she'll awaken "to the second life." The Convergence, it turns out, has also claimed a few disciples who were still in good health - no one calls it murder, preferring the term suspension. So too, the term Zero K, used to describe preservation temperature, proves to have no scientific bearing. It's a myth, "pure drama."

As for DeLillo's drama, it keeps setting off fresh shivers. One vista suggests Dante's lower circles, another the far side of Alice's looking-glass. When Jeff eavesdrops on a talk by the cult's two founders, it sounds like a comic exchange, almost "Who's on First?" For them as for others - strangers, mannequins - Jeff must invent a name, "a tiny shaping element to ease the questions."

You feel the tour de force even in thumbnail descriptions such as "the strafed landscape of the desert." After father and son leave the bunker and loved one - on ice - the novel trumps its scarifying first half with a few pages so surprising a reviewer shouldn't give the game away. I'll say only that, playing in Samuel Beckett's ballpark, DeLillo proves competitive.

Afterward, the game shifts back to the five boroughs, with their bedlam and small graces. Sometimes we get both at once, as in Jeff's repartee with his lover, and naturally this disperses some tension. Still, everyone onstage can still feel that zero at the bone. "Everyone," as Ross says, "wants to own the end of the world." And isn't the end of the world back at Convergence HQ? So the novel's close pits the tomb's silence, heavenly in its way, against the city's uproar.

In this it also illuminates the change that's come over DeLillo since his last longer work, Underworld (1997). Symphonic density like that no longer interests him. He seeks instead a few resonant notes - a fable. He has brought off something simple but disturbing, revealing both the perils of faith and the power of Gospel.

John Domini's latest book is "The Sea-God's Herb," selected criticism, and in June he will bring out a new set of stories, "MOVIEOLA!"