The Genius of Don DeLillo’s Post-Underworld Work (2016)
vulture.com
vulture.com
However, I quite enjoyed it. It was short and to the point. It also reminded me quite a bit of my own experience walking through the hospice ward in the days leading up to my grandmothers death. The namelessness of it, the religious iconography, even the traveling to a distant place (AR) and sleeping there in the hospital. Because of this I feel it was not so much a book about cytogenetics but how living people deal with death. The cryogenic part of it could easily be supplanted with our religious beliefs that we will die and wake up in a better world.
People who actually put money on cryonics overwhelmingly believe it’s got a super low chance of working and that the world you might wake up in is just as likely to have endemic social problems and suffering as our current world, or possibly even be far worse in a lot of unsettling ways. People who care about cryonics spend time obsessing over crazy philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and far future forecasting ideas. They don’t go into it lightly with some fluffy ideas of waking up in a peaceful utopia.
As a result, the characters in Zero K just don’t work. Their mix of naïveté but hyper progressive awareness of scientific possibility, while also being wealthy titans of industry for decades, simply doesn’t exist inside the same person at once unless the characters are just purely vehicles for allegory and symbolism, which is hardly what has made DeLillo’s other works notable.
As for adjacent authors, I think I'd probably list: David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, Franzen and Roth.
If you are asking about books from any period of his output, then White Noise can be recommended, I personally see it as his greatest achievement. Underworld gets a lot of hype due to its sheer length but I don’t find it particularly impressive or moving.