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His last novel took its title, Point Omega, from the Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin, who coined the phrase for the end-state of transcendent consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving. His prose, too, has always had a distinct bias toward the state of rapture, whether he’s observing a grungy streetscape or a desert sunrise. DeLillo sneaks a heartbreaking story of a son attempting to reconnect with his father into his thought-provoking novel.O ne doesn’t think of Don DeLillo as a religious writer, exactly, but there has always been an atmosphere of divination and prophecy about his work a tendency for his plots to take their characters through successive portals of initiation, often into vaguely cultic mysteries.

What's left behind and forgotten is the present, here represented by Jeffrey, the son whom Ross abandoned when he was 13. And his focus and curiosity have moved far into the future: much of this novel's (and Ross's) attention is paid to humankind's relationship and responsibility to what's to come. For one, DeLillo has become better about picking his spots-the asides rarely, if ever, drag, and they are consistently surprising and funny. But a few components elevate Zero K, which is among DeLillo's finest work. Longtime readers will not be surprised that there's a two-page rumination on mannequins. But as with any novel by DeLillo, our preeminent brain-needler, the plot is window dressing for his preoccupations: obsessive sallies into death, information, and all kinds of other things.

The compound is the home of the Convergence, a scientific endeavor that preserves people indefinitely in Artis's case, it's until there's a cure for her ailing health. This time, the protagonist is Jeffrey Lockhart, who is joining his billionaire father, Ross, to say good-bye to Ross's second wife (and Jeffrey's stepmother), Artis. DeLillo's 17th novel features a man arriving at a strange, remote compound (we are told the nearest city is Bishkek)-a set-up similar to a few other DeLillo books, Mao II and Ratner's Star among them.