Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say -an uncertain farewell- to her as she surrenders her body. -We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?- These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing -the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.- Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant novel Zero K weighs the darkness of the world-terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague-against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, -the intimate touch of earth and sun.
