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The Zero: A Novel
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The Zero: A Novel
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The Zero: A Novel
Ebook385 pages6 hours

The Zero: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

National Book Award Finalist 

The breakout novel from a writer of extraordinary talent: In the wake of a devastating terrorist attack, one man struggles to make sense of his world, even as the world tries to make use of him

Brian Remy has no idea how he got here. It’s been only five days since terrorists attacked his city, and Remy is experiencing gaps in his life—as if he were a stone being skipped across water. He has a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he doesn’t remember inflicting. His son wears a black armband and refuses to acknowledge that Remy is still alive. He seems to be going blind. He has a beautiful new girlfriend whose name he doesn’t know. And his old partner in the police department, who may well be the only person crazier than Remy, has just gotten his picture on a box of First Responder cereal.

And these are the good things in Brian Remy’s life. While smoke still hangs over the city, Remy is recruited by a mysterious government agency that is assigned to gather all of the paper that was scattered in the attacks. As he slowly begins to realize that he’s working for a shadowy intelligence operation, Remy stumbles across a dangerous plot, and with the world threatening to boil over in violence and betrayal, he realizes that he’s got to track down the most elusive target of them all—himself. And the only way to do that is to return to that place where everything started falling apart.

In the tradition of Catch-22, The Manchurian Candidate, and the novels of Ian McEwan, comes this extraordinary story of searing humor and sublime horror, of blindness, bewilderment, and that achingly familiar feeling that the world has suddenly stopped making sense.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 13, 2009
ISBN9780061758041
Author

Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

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Reviews for The Zero

Rating: 3.600649220779221 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

154 ratings7 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    a cop post 9/11, shady dealings, written like momemto but never really comes together
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a book that I thought was excellent for the writing and creativity of the premise. It is post 9/11 and the main character who is some sort of police officer is suffering from lapses of memory. This device is used throughout the book so your only perspective is through the main character(Remy). I, along with many other reviewers, found this annoying after a while. You never were able to get the big picture. You had to fill in the gaps so there were things about the main character that you never got answered. Maybe the author's point was look at the whole post 9/11 thing through this device. It didn't totally work for me. If you haven't read Jess Walter, then start with something else and then go to this. A worthwhile read but I like his other stuff better.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jess Walter's novel The Zero takes place in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. The hero is a policeman assigned to the disaster site in the months following the building's destruction. When the novel opens, he has the job of taking V.I.P.'s on private tours of Ground Zero or The Zero. Soon, he is involved in a clandestine investigation into the disaster itself and a certain young woman with a Saudi boyfriend who left New York on the morning of the attack.One thing that sets The Zero apart from more typical thrillers and that gives it an unexpected comic tone is the hero's mental state. Prior to the start of the novel, he receives a head wound, maybe from a self-inflicted gunshot, that leaves him with no memory of the events that followed. Throughout the novel he is wondering what is going on, why he is "here," what he is doing. He often wonders these things aloud to find that he people he is with are having essentially the same thought. How can this be?All along I wondered what the reader was supposed to make of the narrator's mental state. Is what happens to him really happening? Is he really doing what he describes? He wonders from scene to scene, sometimes jumping large sections of time without explaining or providing the reader with any backstory. Are we reading an account of his lucid moments or are we reading an account of his delusions? If you have lived though anything at all traumatic then you probably know the feeling of wondering how to act when a situation is so strange we cannot believe we're really in it. Even after looking death in the face at a funeral, it's not uncommon to still expect to find the deceased waiting patiently at home for us to return. Even something as real as death can seem un-real. I imagine that many of those who experienced the loss of someone September 11, 2001, found this to be true. We all saw the towers fall on television, but how many of us still couldn't quite believe it was real in the days that followed? One way to read Jess Walter's novel The Zero is as a commentary on the way America reacted to and dealt with the destruction of the Twin Towers. Faced with the greatest tragedy many of us could remember, we were told to go shopping. Did that really happen? What were we doing? What was going on? Mr. Walter's novel allows him ample room to take satirical shots at a wide range of topics. For example, the hero's best friend, also a policeman, is offered a contract to appear on a cereal box in full uniform along with a fireman even though neither were in New York on September 11, 2001. The hero's son pretends his father died in the collapse of the towers because he feels as much grief as though he really did what with all the news stories about the men who died and the families they left behind. His son goes through counseling to help him deal with his pretend loss, eventually recovering so completely that he refuses further contact with his father in order to move on with his life. Is this a comment on the television audience in America far from New York City who wallowed in grief they did not actually experience?In what I think is a brilliant piece of satire, Mr. Walter creates a fictional mayor of New York known as The Boss who uses the attacks as a way to promote his own career. The Boss brings every V.I.P. who comes to town down to The Zero for a personal tour of the disaster site. He soon creates a clandestine network of agents and informers that rivals anything the Federal Government has in place.In the end, though, I found myself wondering if The Zero is a satisfying novel? I'm not sure. Ambitious, yes. Well-executed, yes. Very funny in places, too.But I kept getting the feeling that this has been done before. The hero's condition feels much like the one in Christopher Nolen's movie Momento. But audience's position in The Zero leaves us in the dark much more than we were in Momento. In Momento we knew what was really going on in the end even if the movie's hero did not. The plot in The Zero does not hang together as well as it did in Momento. Some of the more comic situations echo Jerzy Kozinski's, novel Being There which featured a hero who was so uneducated, so stupid, that he never really knew what was happening around him, which didn't stop his rise to the presidency of the United States. But this is where the best comedy in The Zero lies. Frequently the response "I don't know what's going on, here," appears profound. The hero uses it, or something like it, so often and to such powerful affect that I'm tempted to give it a try the next time I find myself at a loss for words or just stuck in a bind. The hero sincerely admits he has no idea how he came to be where he is, and everyone around him simply agrees with him. We don't know how we got here either.I think I'm just going to have to say that I've so much to say about this book that I must have loved it. I enjoyed reading it, and it certainly gave me lots of food for thought. Something I don't typically get in a thriller.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm going to try not to give anything away -- this book is probably best read if you only know that it's about 9/11 and it's a satire.

    THE ZERO is fascinating and frustrating, but ultimately satisfying. The conceit, wherein the protagonist Brian Remy suffers from "these gaps [of time]," requires a bit of patience. I'm surprised Jess Walter took the risk and maintains it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this requires the same focus as a stream of consciousness novel. In this case, bits are removed but are no less important (where is a regular novel things get skipped because they are non-essential).

    I found the momentum waned a bit in places and that the novel may have been a bit too long. But without giving much away, I'd recommend it for anyone interested in 9/11 fiction. Definitely worth a read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This one of Walter's odder books, but in a good way. The story opens with the main character (a police detective) dealing with the aftermath of a 9/11-type attack and shooting himself in the head. He survives, but has memory losses as he works on finding out who perpetrated the attack. The memory losses will just come at random and jump, leaving out important information, even to the reader. Its a little confusing to follow. Is he a split personality, is he making it all up, is there a shadow government agency behind the attacks? A very interesting, but challenging read (in this case Audio). Recommend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I typically read several books at a time because reading one book for 4 hours makes it difficult for me to concentrate. Switching between two or three books is much easier for me.This was the first book I've read this year where I found myself unable to pick up another book because the story was simply too engaging. The Zero starts off with the protagonist waking up on the floor while someone is banging loudly on his front door. He quickly looks around the room to note the empty bottles of liquor, as well as a discarded gun. Within a few minutes he realizes that his head is actually matted with blood - as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot to his head.Soon we learn that the book takes place days after September 11, 2001. The main character is some sort of police officer whose job it is to take celebrities and politicians on tours of ground zero. His partner is a real asshole, who expresses several times his gratitude for the attacks, as it's lead to many perks for him.There isn't a lot more I can say about the book without giving it away, but I do need to mention that the story is told in bits and pieces. The main character is losing bits of time and as the story progresses, the gap in his memory gets wider and wider. Eventually he's missing whole days.I'd read many reviews of this book and was a little concerned, as some people expressed annoyance with how the book was written. As I mentioned, the main character has huge gaps in time and it's clear throughout the book that in the gaps he's doing terrible, terrible things. Some people found it hard to follow. However, it's supposed to be. I mean, the guy wakes up and finds himself in bed with a dead woman and is confused. You are also supposed to be confused - I didn't find that to be a negative thing about the book; it was actually what made it intriguing.In summation : I want everyone I know to read this book, so we can talk all about it. However, there are very few people I would recommend it to, due to it's difficulty level (this is not a book for casual readers), its subject matter (there are many uncomfortable jokes about 9/11 that I laughed at and then felt shitty about right after) and the general genre (it's basically a police caper, which isn't anything I'm into). I'll definitely be reading more by this author.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Can't believe I finished this book. It was the worst book I've read in ages. About 9/11 aftermath from a policeman's point of view and the author claims to "make sense" of what happened and how we responded with a satire. To me it was an incoherent diatribe on how confused and inept the main character was. The style of writing was absolutely terrible. The author thinks that designing the character to have memory problems and lapses somehow enlightens the book. Instead it just makes it a nonsense story that is constantly interrupted and jumping around with no point. I did not see it as funny or at all a real attempt to make sense out of the tragedy. Sure we are a screwed up society in many ways and the government organizations are often inept and trying to one up each other and take credit for anything they can. But thats not news to me or at all interesting.