Don Delillo, Zero K

In his 17th novel, DeLillo follows Jeffrey Lockhart and his father Ross, a billionaire, to a place where Ross’s younger second wife Artis – “the archaeologist, the one whose mind and failing body would soon begin to drift, on schedule, into the void” – can preserve her body indefinitely until medical advances can heal her. While son struggles to reconnect with father, DeLillo’s characters discuss the nature of time and the consequences of ‘literal immortality’ – “What will poets write about? What happens to history? What happens to money? What happens to God?” We are even privy to Artis’s musings in her suspended state: “But am I who I was.” (She is “first person and third person both,” DeLillo writes.) Zero K is one of DeLillo’s best – audacious, heartfelt, elegantly shaped and filled with provocative obsessions.