Artis is much younger than his father and suffers from multiple sclerosis. As the book opens, he is traveling to a mysterious, isolated location to pay his final respects to his stepmother, Artis. He is a disaffected, aimless man who has worked several meaningless, unsatisfying jobs and engaged in several meaningless and unsatisfying relationships. Zero K explores themes of mortality and fear, which DeLillo has explored before (most notably in his novel White Noise) but inverts them here so that the fear is not of death and the unknown that follows, but of life and the unknown future. The story involves a billionaire, his estranged son, Jeffrey, from a first marriage (who is also the narrator), and a mysterious, unnamed organization running an isolated facility where people are frozen and preserved before they die, in the hope of being revived later. Zero K (2016), a dark, post-modern science fiction novel by Don DeLillo, uses a sense of disconnection and an aura of oppressive paranoia (as in most DeLillo novels) to interrogate the fundamental fact that human beings are incapable of truly understanding their existence.
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