Book Review | Zero K by Don DeLillo

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 new novel 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.”

***

"Everybody wants to own the end of the world," begins Don DeLillo's first new novel since Point Omega in 2010, and like the finest opening lines, Zero K's is soaked through with significance.

Fittingly for a work of fiction interested in "fathers and sons," this is a remark Ross Lockhart, a billionaire in his sixties, makes to Jeffrey—his aimless heir, and our narrator—as they stand in his opulent New York office, surrounded on all sides by abstract art and other markers of money: motifs readers will encounter repeatedly as they make their way through Zero K. It's important to note, furthermore, that this phrase is not spoken in the moment, but rather recalled by "a man propelled into obsessive reflection."

As to the words themselves... well. To own is to possess, yes, but these days, it also denotes domination, and this is what Ross wants: to use his dollars to dominate the end of the world. That's not to say the apocalypse, but the end of the world as we mere mortals perceive it, at the very end of our selves—in death.

Ross makes this startling statement, we learn a little later, because his second wife Artis Martineau is dying. But the owner and operator of the Lockhart fortune isn't a man so easily beaten. See, he's been led to believe that his riches might give her a future in the future, which is why he's flown her to the home of a clinical cult called Convergence, where—in exchange for substantial donation, I dare say—she'll be frozen at a temperature approaching absolute zero in her last moments, to be re-awoken one day, decades or centuries or millennia hence, when medicine is in a position to correct her condition.

Book Review | The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

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The extraordinary happens every day...

One night, George Duncan—a decent man, a good man—is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed.

The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for George, and one night she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story.

Wise, romantic, magical and funny, The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and redemptive power of love.

***

Like George Duncan's daughter Amanda, who once managed, amusingly, to do the entire Louvre in less than an hour, I am not typically the type to be "Moved By Art" (p.152), yet The Crane Wife truly touched me. Which is to say—sure—I laughed, and I cried... but before it was over, I also felt like I'd lived another life, and died a little inside.

That's how powerful Patrick Ness' new novel is. And it begins as brilliantly as it finishes, with a minor yet monumental moment: a pristine prologue wherein we glimpse something of ourselves, alongside something utterly other.

Keenly feeling his advancing years, George awakens in the wee hours one night, naked and needing to pee. Whilst attending to his business in the bathroom, however, he is startled by an unearthly sound: "a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt." (p.5) Curious, he follows this call to its point of origin, only to find that a crane has landed in his garden; a wounded one, with an arrow, of all things, shot through one of its wings.

Shocked and appalled, George—a good man through and through—attends as best he can to the bird's injured appendage... then, leaving a sense of unadulterated wonder in its wake, the crane flies away.

The next day, just as our amiable narrator is putting the finishing touches to a paper crane to commemorate, in his way, the dreamlike encounter from the previous evening, an enigmatic woman wearing "a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing" (p.67) walks into the small print shop George operates. He falls head over heels for Kumiko before she's even introduced herself.

So begins an uncharacteristically passionate affair between gentle George and this ageless, graceful lady. And when Kumiko sees the plain paper crane he has made, she demands that they collaborate on matters of art as well as the heart.

"On its own, her art was beautiful, but she wouldn't stop insisting that it was static. The cuttings of the feathers woven together, assembled in eye-bending combinations to suggest not only a picture (the watermill, the dragon, the profile) but often the absences in those pictures, too, the shadows they left, black feathers woven with dark purple ones to make surprising representations of voids. Or sometimes, there was just empty space, with a single dash of down to emphasise its emptiness. The eye was constantly fooled by them, happening upon shape when blankness was expected. They tantalised, they tricked. 

"'But they do not breathe, George.'" (p.89)

Oh, but they do when Kumiko starts incorporating George's occasional cuttings into her feathered flights of fancy! In a sense, then, she completes him, and he her, thus—as their star rises in certain circles—they embark on a sequence of 32 plates telling, in totality, the tale of "a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called." (p.250)

These the author relates as very short yet deeply surreal and equally endearing stories, which work to punctuate the chapters we spend in George's calming company and those in which we're with his rather more fraught daughter.

"Although he was the hero of his version of the story, naturally, he was also a supporting player in this same story when told by someone else. [...] There were as many truths—overlapping, stewed together—as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew." (p.42)

Undeniably, The Crane Wife is a greater, truer tale because of Amanda's part in it. She offers an alternate angle on certain events, yes, but her perspective also serves to enlarge and enrich the overall narrative. Via Amanda, the reader comes to realise that Ness' novel is so much more than just a witty twist on a tale as old as time—which, given its clarity and quality, I warrant would have been enough.

But The Crane Wife is that, and then some. It functions, over and above, as a fable about family, friendship, memory, age and the ways in which we change, all of which subjects the authors approaches with disarming frankness, acute insight and such a wealth of warmth and compassion that each chapter made me feel like a more complete human being. Through character and narrative, Ness is able to evoke bona fide emotion—with such ease it has to be seen to be believed—such that from the fantastic first part through the beautiful denouement, The Crane Wife is a revelation for the reader.

It is a novel at its most transcendent, I would add, when the author engages in some way with the extraordinary... however it his devotion to more quotidian moments which makes these passages so commanding. Cannily, this is a contrast Ness makes much of over the course of The Crane Wife.

"If it wasn't a dream, it was one of those special corners of what's real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him, so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life. Like when he lost his virginity to the girl with the eczema in his Honours English Class and it had been intensely brief, so briefly intense, that it felt like both of them had left normal existence for an unleashed physical instant. [...] Or not the birth of his daughter, which had been a panting, red tumult, but the first night after, when his exhausted wife had fallen asleep and it was just him and the little, little being and she opened her eyes at him, astonished to find him there, astonished to find herself there, and perhaps a little outraged, too, a state which, he was forced to admit, hadn't changed much for Amanda." (pp.11-12)

Patrick Ness' profile has been growing slowly but surely since he debuted with The Crash of Hennington almost a decade ago. Having written awesome genre novels for an all ages audience ever since—excepting a single short story collection—he has earned a whole legion of younger readers... to whom I fear The Crane Wife may not immediately appeal. But those who don't demand that the world end endlessly are likely to find the supernatural normalcy of Ness' acutely observed new book as affecting as any apocalypse.

With finely, frankly crafted characters and a slight yet satisfying narrative, as well as wit, warmth, and oh, such wonder, The Crane Wife is simply sublime: a story as strange, ultimately, as it is true.

***

The Crane Wife

by Patrick Ness

UK Publication: March 2013, Canongate

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

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