The Zero [Hardcover]

First of all, let me emphasize that I believe Jess Walter is one of the brightest lights in fiction today. He is a remarkably talented writer, and deserves mainstream success. I thoroughly enjoyed CITIZEN VINCE, his Edgar-winning novel from last year.

THE ZERO: A NOVEL, however, is nowhere near as good as CITIZEN VINCE.

Why not? Let me list the reasons:

(1) THE ZERO has no coherent plot. Brian Remy is a heroic 9/11 cop who suffers frequent "gaps" in his memory after the terrorist attack. As a result, he drifts through the entire story of this novel without really understandng why he is doing what he's doing. This leads to a large number of disjointed scenes with almost no context provided. As a result, this novel has no narrative thread, which makes for a rather disorienting (and ultimately tedious) read. Put bluntly, this novel was very hard for me to finish.

(2) THE ZERO has no likable central character. Who is Remy? What is he doing? What are his motivations? Why is he torturing terror suspects and cheating on his girlfriend? The reader never knows, because Remy himself does not know, due to his frequent memory loss. As a result, the central character of this novel is remarkably vacuous and impossible to identify with. This book has a hollow center.

(3) THE ZERO has cartoonish supporting characters. Pretty much all the supporting characters in this novel are exaggerated stereotypes. We have embarssingly macho, stupid police characters. We have extremely cynical politicians and greedy businessmen. We have Remy's pseudo-intellectual son, who pretends that Remy died at 9/11. None of these characters is even remotely believable. All of the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic. I realize this is a satirical novel, but what happened to the brilliant three-dimesional characters of CITIZEN VINCE? They do not exist in THE ZERO, with the possible exception of the girlfriend character, the only likable person in the book.

(4) THE ZERO does not resolve anything. What is the point of this novel? The ending resolves little and is quite dissatisfying. Is Jess Walter condemning post 9/11 America? He makes fun of "First Responder" breakfast cereal, but is there any real life example of such crass commercialization of 9/11? Sure, people are greedy and materialistic, but what does that have to do with 9/11? The message of this book is muddled, and I don't want to buy "Cliff's Notes" to decipher what Walter is trying to communicate.

This book isn't all bad. The prose is well crafted, and Walter does a very effective job of describing the devasation at Ground Zero. There are some decently written scenes in this book, but they just don't add up to a good story.

In short, a major disappointment from a great writer. This is the type of novel that will impress critics more than readers. I hope the next book is better.

Let me say first that this novel does not make sense in the way your average novel will. It is probably not as patriotic as anything else you've read that retells the story of 9/11. Or as sympathetic. But it is definitely the most compassionate. THE ZERO tells the story of Brian Remy, a cop who was there when it all happened - and in the subsequent months sees his life begin to unravel as he suffers gaps in his waking consciousness (in much the same way as the main character in the film, MEMENTO). Remy's waking reality is the world gone surreal.

Remy can't figure out what's happening to him, and it's nearly impossible to what's real and what's not. Every time things he begins to understand what's going on, he blacks out; and so does the reader. This leads to what is possibly the most introspective novel written in the past ten years. THE ZERO will knock you off your feet. Walter's writing (in the tradition of Kafka) is precise, beautiful, destructive, and even mesmerizing. If this novel doesn't make it into the canon of great American literature, it'll be a crying shame.

A perfect 10. The author takes the reader on a gritty, black edged, rocket fueled ride across the abyss of Ground Zero. And what a ride it is! The audacity of writing a novel loaded with satire and black humor on the outfall of a police officer's dealing with post WTC trauma and the politics of cleanup culminating with the sharp irony of survivorship. And it is just not the WTC site that is being "cleaned up". With a daring writing style and sharp characters that enhance a chaos of events, the author succeeds in creating a brute and edgy novel that rivals Catch 22's theater of the absurd.

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