The Zero

Review by Booklist Review

Numerous thrillers have drawn on 9/11, but most have used those all-too-horrific events only as a frame. Walter digs deeper. This discombobulating but remarkably imaginative novel never names bin Laden or even the date, but we know where we are. Bits of paper from the explosions continue to rain down from the sky, and rescue workers continue to look for bodies at Ground Zero (or, the Zero, as the cops and firefighters who were there refer to it). One of those cops, Brian Remy, opens the novel by shooting himself in the head. But, minutes later, he can't remember doing it. Remy suffers from what he calls "gaps"--memory lapses in which he has no idea why he is doing what he's doing. These gaps are the main narrative device in the novel, and they take some getting used to, as the reader is every bit as affected by the blackouts as Remy. Gradually, both character and reader begin to piece things together: Remy has been hired by the "Boss" to lead a secret "documentation recovery" effort aimed at finding a link between the terrorists and a woman working in one of the towers. But to what end? Even in his lucid moments, Remy doesn't understand his assignment, which seems to have something to do with "applying models of randomness to the patterns in paper burns." There is plenty of stinging political satire here, but beyond that, Walter has taken the terrorist thriller into new territory, mixing the surreal cityscape of Blade Runner 0 with a touch of Kafka and coming up with what may be the perfect metaphor for the way we experience today's world. Like Remy, we suffer from gaps whenever we watch the news or try to make sense of international affairs: randomness reigns. This isn't a perfect novel, but it takes a game shot at re-creating the emotional reality of the post-9/11 world. --Bill Ott Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A deliriously mordant political satire, Walter's follow-up to 2005's critically acclaimed Citizen Vince begins moments after New York City cop Brian Remy shoots himself in the head. He isn't seriously wounded, and he can't remember doing it. It's less than a week after 9/11, and Brian serves as an official guide for celebrities who want a tour of "The Zero." With stitches still in his scalp, Brian is tapped for a job with the Documentation Department, a shadowy subagency of the Office of Liberty and Recovery, which is charged with scrutinizing every confetti scrap of paper blown across the city when the towers fell. As he learns the truth about his new employer's mission (think: recent NSA-related headlines) and becomes enmeshed in a sinister government plot, he finds an unseemly benefactor in "The Boss," the unnamed mayor who cashes in on his sudden national prominence. Meanwhile, Brian's cop and firemen colleagues shill for "First Responder" cereal, his rebellious teenage son acts as if Brian died in the attack and the president provides comic background sound bites ("draw your strength from the collective courage and resilientness"). Walter's Helleresque take on a traumatic time may be too much too soon for some, but he carries off his dark and hilarious narrative with a grandly grotesque imagination. 100,000 announced first printing; 12-city author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Real-life events still strive to catch up with the imagination of Franz Kafka. Here, Walter has NYPD member Brian Remy awaken not as a bug but as the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his own life, commemorated by a suicide note reading in its entirety, "Etc." He comes to in the nightmare of post-9/11 New York City, where his body is failing, his sight is afflicted by floaters, and his memory is subject to significant lapses. He is, in short, a mess and also an all too representative inhabitant of this brave new world, where the nation has morphed into a public relations firm and "The Boss" is determined to fight back, even at the cost of having each and every American sit through Tony and Tina's Wedding. Following his Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince (with its alternate take on the Carter-Reagan debate), Walter goes from strength to strength, establishing himself as the current master of fractured U.S. history with all of the surrealism and black humor necessary for such an undertaking. Kafka would have to laugh (and we do, too). For all public libraries.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Five days after 9/11, Brian Remy, hero cop, first responder, wanders his city like a shell-shocked pilgrim in this brilliant tour-de-force that's as heartrending as it is harrowing. Startled by an explosive noise, Remy's landlady threatens to call the police. "I am the police," Remy says, though he's not sure he spoke aloud. Nor is he sure that his gunshot scalp wound isn't self-inflicted. In the days and weeks that follow, Remy realizes he's sure of very little. There's a girl he's in love with--that much he knows--whose name he can't recall. He has a job, a recent government appointment, and he thinks it has something to do with the nation's security, but it's shadowy, and it scares him, because it seems to involve behavior that a part of him considers reprehensible. That's unsettling, too--that he's now being thrust into dark and unfamiliar places that have the potential to convert him into "the villain of his own story." Most troubling of all, though, are the gaps. "I can't keep track of anything anymore," he complains. But in the suddenly Kafkaesque world he inhabits, no one will listen to him. And so he lives his life through a series of mystifying vignettes. He'll find himself in bed with April, his lover, unable to remember how he got there. In the next moment, he's participating in an ugly interrogation. Or he's with his unlovely estranged wife. Or his traumatized ex-partner--a slipping in and slipping out, abrupt and inexplicable. Or is it all, in April's phrase, "a fever dream"? This is the breakout novel of a brave and talented young writer (Citizen Vance, 2005, etc.), though for some, it will seem so uncompromisingly chilling that it will be too much. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Zero A Novel Chapter One They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enough to see that it wasn't a flock of birds at all--it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. Fluttering and circling and growing bigger, falling bits and frantic sheets, some smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge . . . and then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of smoke. Behind the burning flock came a great wail and a moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a roiling sky and in that moment everything that wasn't smoke was paper. And it was beautiful. "Brian? Is everything okay in there?" Brian Remy's eyes streaked and flaked and finally jimmied open to the floor of his apartment. He was lying on his side, panning across a fuzzy tree line of carpet fiber. From this, the world focused into being one piece at a time: Boots caked in dried mud. Pizza boxes. Newspapers. A glass. And something just out of range . . . The flecks in his eyes alerted and scattered and his focus adjusted again: sorrow of sorrows, an empty Knob Creek bottle. They were both tipped over on their right sides on the rug, parallel to one another, the whiskey fifth and him. In this together, apparently. He told himself to breathe, and managed a rusty-lunged wheeze. He blinked and the streaks and floaters ran across his eyes for cover. Outside Remy's apartment, Mrs. Lubach yelled again. "Brian, I heard a bang! Is everything okay?" Remy had heard no bang himself, although he tended to believe literalists like Mrs. Lubach. Anyway, a bang of some sort would explain the muffled ringing in his ears. And how it hurt to move his head. He strained to raise his chin and saw, to his right, just past the bottle, his handgun, inert and capable of nothing but lying among the crumbs and hairs on his carpet. If he waited long enough, a rubber-gloved hand would pick it up by the butt and drop it in a Ziploc, tagged and bagged--and him too, as long he didn't move, a bigger bag, but the same--thick plastic the last thing he smelled before the last sigh of the reefer truck door. Mrs. Lubach's voice came muffled from behind the door: "Brian? I'm going to call the police." "I am the police." His own voice was tinny and small inside his skull; he wasn't sure the words had actually come out of his mouth. "Brian?" He sat up on the floor and looked around his studio apartment: collapsed futon, patched plaster walls, paint-sealed windows. He put his hand against the left side of his head. His hair was sticky and matted, as if he'd been lying in syrup. He pulled his hand away. Sure. Blood. Okay. Coming together now. He called to the door, louder: "Just a minute, Mrs. Lubach." Brian Remy stood, queasy and weak, trying once again to find the loose string between cause and effect--long day, drink, sorrow, gunshot, fatigue. Or some other order. Steadied on the stove, he grabbed a dish towel and held its fringed end against his head. He looked back at the table and could see it all laid out before him, like the set of a student play. A kitchen chair was tipped over, and on the small table where he had been sitting, a self-determinate still life: rag, shot glass, gun oil, wire brush, note. Okay. This was the problem. These gaps in his memory, or perhaps his life, a series of skips--long shredded tears, empty spaces where the explanations for the most basic things used to be. For a moment he tried to puzzle over it all, the way he might have considered a problem on the job. Cleaning oil might indicate an accident, but the note? What lunatic has ever written a note before . . . Cleaning a gun? He picked up the note: "Etc . . ." Et cetera? Well, that was funny. He didn't recall being so funny. And yet there it was, in his own handwriting. Okay. He was getting somewhere. Whatever had happened, whatever he'd done , it was funny. Remy stuffed the note in his pocket, then righted the chair and bent over to pick up his nine, wobbled, set the safety, and laid the gun gently on the table. "Brian?" "I'm coming." He followed the path to the wall and put his finger in the fresh hole in the brick behind his chair. Then he stepped away from the wall and held the dish towel to his head, braced against a slithering jolt of pain, and when it passed, walked to the door. He opened it a crack on the hallway outside his apartment, Mrs. Lubach's orange face filling the gap between door and jamb. "Brian? Is everything okay? It's three o'clock in the morning." "Is it?" "There are noise ordinances, Brian." Her voice echoed a split second behind the movement of her mouth, like a badly translated movie. "Rules," she continued. "And that bang . People work. We have jangly nerves, Brian. If you're not hurt, then it's inconsiderate, all that noise." "What if I am hurt?" Mrs. Lubach ignored him. "Just imagine what we thought that noise could have been." She was small and lean, with short straight white hair and wide features; her heavy makeup was painted on just a fraction off-center, giving her the look of a hastily painted figurine, or a foosball goalie. Before, she had been an accountant. Now, he thought he remembered, she wasn't sure what she would be. Would people just go back to the same jobs? As if nothing had happened? "For all we know the air might be combustible," she said now. The Zero A Novel . Copyright © by Jess Walter. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Zero by Jess Walter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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