This was not the not the frailty of a man who is said to be 'only human,' subject to weakness or vulnerability. "I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on Earth".ĭon 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, and "the intimate touch of earth and sun".Įverybody wants to own the end of the world. 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. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?" Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. 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 lives of transcendent promise. Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. The wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our time - an ode to language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life.
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