Customer Reviews

The Zero CD

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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 jerk, 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 pieces 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 terrible about right after) and the general genre (it's basically a police caper, which isn't something I'm typically into). I'll definitely be reading more by this author.

I read the "most helpful" 2-star review and saw the overall low rating. I thought the book was brilliant. I disagree completely with all the points the most helpful reviewer raised. Remy's actions weren't "likable" but I for one do not find that American political responses to 9/11, ie, in general, The War on Terror and Guantanamo, to be "likable." Remy seems to be a metaphor for opposition to overwhelming craziness on the part of government institutions. I liked the side of him that appeared in his moments of coherency, and I rooted for him to "get it together," as another reviewer put it.

The most helpful reviewer states that the characters are all cartoonish. Well, it's a satire...did you see Dr. Strangelove, it's like that, and it is funny. This book nails the personal physical characteristics of the "cartoonish" characters' conversational style. Vivid as a movie, but this will probably never be one.

Third, the most helpful reviewer says the story doesn't conclude satisfactorily. On the countrary, I feel that the narrative lean toward heavier social commentary at the end IS the conclusion. Walter put words to my internal ravings about 9/11 I have heard nowhere else so succinctly. His commentary on...I guess what we'd call "media cycles" .. and the other philosophical ideas expressed by Jaguar, I found them a little mind-bending, a welcome experience in this age.

The only criticism I'd mark is that if this is to be compared to Kafka, well, it's trying hard...but there are points where an optimistic reader will feel that Walter is still struggling to reach his peak. It can be a trifle tiring, as you're wondering if in the end it is going to cheap out or just be a paltry latecomer to the postmodernism party...but with a dose of suspension of disbelief, you may find it exciting and thought provoking and just a good read.

This is an exhausting read, but might be the best 9/11 novel so far. Walter creates one of the most interesting characters of early 21st Century American letters and surrounds him in somewhat chaos. Walter continues his streak for creating amazing sentences and funny analogies -- such as "it was colder than two lesbians at a frat party."

Set in the aftermath of 9/11, this is a dark comedy about American politics, a sort of Kafka meets the movie Memento. Except this was less lucid than Memento. Despite feeling increasingly irritated at the novel, I read to the end. At the end, I thought...well, "so what?" Was this whole thing written just to say "fascism is bad"? Derhay. If you need a weak novel to tell you that, we're in more trouble than even Walter seems to think.

I really enjoyed Walter's first book (Citizen Vince), so I picked up this, his second, knowing absolutely nothing about it. The story revolves around New York City police officer Brian Remy, who must deal with his newly unstable memory in the weeks after 9/11. It seems that while he physically survived being at Ground Zero, the mental trauma has done all kinds of interesting things to Remy's judgment -- including leading him to possibly shoot himself in the head.

His head injury leads to irregular blackouts: Remy is in the midst of doing something and then minutes or hours later snaps to in a new situation, with no recollection of what happened during his blackout (shades of Memento). As a result, the book is told in a series of flashes -- a scene will start conventionally, unfold conventionally, and somewhere along the way just stop, as Remy has another of his blackouts. This is awfully daring storytelling, as it withholds resolution over and over and over, which can get very frustrating if you aren't prepared to simply go with the choppy flow. The main narrative problem this causes is that it makes Remy into a purely reactive character, never able to drive the story -- and this will frustrate many readers (like those in my book club). My personal suspicion/rationalization is that Remy's condition is meant to represent post 9/11 America: a country stuck in a pure reactive mode, with little ability to contextualize, influenced by secret government agencies.

Indeed, Remy's weeks following 9/11 are a kaleidoscopic satire of post-9/11 America and its response to that dark day. The main plotline concerns Remy's assignment to work for the DoD (here, the Department of Documentation), which is an obscure arm of an NSA-like government entity. The belief is that by restoring and filing every scrap of paper from Ground Zero, the terrorists will have been defeated. At the same time, some of the half-burnt scraps collected from the streets may be clues in identifying a terror cell. Remy is assigned to this potential mystery, which leads him into confusing conversations with competing FBI and CIA agents running their own operations. However, his inability to convince anyone that he's having blackouts allows for a whole line of "idiot savant" comedy, as everyone around Remy thinks he's being tougher/wiser/cannier than he is (shades of the great film Being There).

There's are a plenty of targets for Walter's satire: a Giuliani-like mayor, a national security apparatus that will invent plots if it can't find any actual ones (shades of reality there), over-the-top hero-worship of firemen and police, New York City real-estate madness, the one-upsmanship of connection to 9/11 (Remy's son tells his classmates that Remy died at Ground Zero), belief in technology, and more. Remy remains at the core of it all, swept up by larger forces, confused, literally going blind (here, the metaphor is a little too blunt), panicked, and unable to make sense of it all. He is we.

The only book that in any way encompasses the events after 9/11. A post traumatic stress of a book. What does one do after? Attack the terrorists, make a war in Iraq which makes terrorism worse, sacrifice liberties to wage war on terror, go on with selling cheap real estate, make love, divorce, sell your horror story of 9/11, get on with whatever you get on with- except you have these gaps, lose whole days and maybe years. They write that this book is Kafka-esque. More like James Joyce, I think. Images and bits of lives come and go fast and furious. You may re-read whole pages and still not get it. You don't know what is real. I gave this book four stars instead of five as it takes us over the same ground and gets us no closer to what we're looking for. Is that it? A lot like life? If that's the point, this book is a ten.

Honestly, I had high expectations for this book. The initial premise seemed interesting-- a man shoots himself in the head, experiences strange gaps and finds himself in the middle of intrigue. However, the follow through is anything but satisfying. The continual gaps, jumping from one place to another gets old half way through, the writing is very good, yet, it comes off boring and unappealing. I can't explain it. Jess Walter is a great writer, incredibly talented, but the writing just didn't grab me at all. The plot is probably the biggest killer. It just stinks. The initial attempted suicide is quickly forgotten and plays zero role in the outcome. The fulcrum of the plot itself, these gaps the protagonist experiences, aren't fleshed out enough. Really the elements that Walter sets into play never lead up to anything. They never hit a climax and are left as novelty. The Zero isn't a zero but honestly, it's not much better. Peace.