I can't imagine there being anyone who doesn't remember where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, when they first became aware that the World Trade Centre had been struck by passenger jets being used as fuel-engorged missiles. I had emerged from my bedroom with one of those scotch hangovers that leave you functioning but sandpapery around the edges and stood there, rubbing my eyes and staring dumbly at a television displaying an eerily quiet shot of the southern tip of Manhattan island with a shockingly stark, smoking gap where those De Laurentiisian King Kong-clambering towers had long jutted up so proudly defiant of gravity—New York City's prominent underbite with its central, oversized teeth knocked out. When I asked my ex what the hell was going on, she said that the towers had come down after being struck by two airplanes, at which point I looked at her in disbelief, thinking that she was fucking with me for some boozy-retreat-at-dawn reason. And so I slowly made my way to the couch to sit down while a combination of her and the somber, pallid television anchor's voices filled me in on the gruesome details—even as I was then given my first taste of the awesome sequence of the South Tower coming down like a collapsing urban thunder cloud, a concrete and steel titan violently detonated into billions of flung-out pieces of leeched-gray dust crowned by a volcanic eruption of rippling smoke. This was followed by the similar death agonies of its murdered northern sibling—and it was as obvious as it was paralyzing that things had changed; that, as of that very day, a gap had been hewn between the United States of September 10th and its wide-eyed, wan, and wounded self aged by a matter of hours.So, a profound, momentous, existentially pivotal event, the defining moment of a young new century and unmatched in its national and personal gravity and tragedy since the assassination of John F. Kennedy—Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and Watergate being at not quite that apex level on the hierarchy of American cicatricial wounding. In a similar fashion have these two seminal haymakers spawned a plethora of controversial opinion and belief, abutting upon and encroaching into the territory of conspiracy theory, possessed by a fluctuating percentage of the populace for a number of upheld reasons: the seeming implausibility of their accepted manner of unfolding; the suspicious activities determined to have been undertaken by the government and its agencies before, during, and after the crisis; the process of inquiry in the wake of the event wherein an unaccountably hasty, incomplete, and perfunctory examination of the facts is held to have taken place in lieu of a wide-ranging and exhaustive investigation that examined every angle and avenue in depth and with competence, regardless of the controversial or uncomfortable truths they might have laid bare; and the belief, strongly held, that the existing administration, through these horrific occurrences, achieved in one stroke that which may have required many legislative and political battles, financial expenditures, and popular exertions to have been brought to fruition. And to set aside these sprawling undercurrents of suspicion, paranoia, skepticism, and cynicism we have the daytime of history in viewing the response of the nation to what transpired: in the case of the terrorist strikes, the military invasions of Afghanistan and, more controversially, Iraq, with their disastrous lack of long-term and post-battlefield planning and structure; an acute awareness by a previously apathetic America of the existence in the world of billions of Muslims of various ethnicity, branches, orthodoxy, and historical connexion to their nation; a ramped-up enlargement of the security apparatus of the republic, as well as the subsuming of the State Department to the Pentagon; the grabbing by the Executive of a wide array of powers and responsibilities from the two houses of Congress; the implementation of a shadowy, legally-tenuous system of rendition and imprisonment without formal charge for suspected terrorists; and so forth.Hence, there are rich veins of literary ore to be mined in the September attacks, inherently constituted to be approached, utilized, and explored from a wide variety of angles—and yet, prior to The Zero, I'd yet to partake of a fictional work with 9/11 as its theme. In the years since that day I've purchased around three thousand novels, and apart from Jess Walter's darkly satirical tale, I can only hold-up Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close with any confidence as being one that explicitly uses the terrorist attack as a driving force in the narrative. I can't quite explain this state of affairs; bearing in mind that the vast majority of my collection was acquired second hand and that I don't particularly endeavor to keep myself abreast of the subject matter of new fictional releases—and leaving aside the fact that the attacks are approached elliptically, allegorically, metaphorically, and/or symbolically in a spread of recent works—I have rejected out-of-hand the few tomes that I have come across that claim the Attacks for their primary fuel after being less than moved by a brief look-over and flip-through. If and when I find a copy of Falling Man, I'll buy it and read it; but that's about the only one for which I can so aver. What's perhaps more to my point, the number of books I've found that are derived from that day could probably be counted on one hand, absolutely using the pair—this seems to me to represent a curious void, one which might suggest that, for whatever reason, the subject remains sufficiently traumatic and difficult and elusive to have steered a large number of authors away from deciding to tap that vast maelstrom of visceral emotionality in order to channel and shape what bursts forth into the framework upon which to loom their story.This rather lengthy and blathering digression leads me to The Zero, of which I possess an aesthetically appealing edition from the Harper Perennial imprint. Jess Walter has here gamely charged the barriers of 9/11 fiction, breeching them with his intelligent creativity and gathering what he found inside—considerably augmented by his own personal experience dealing with the Ground Zero cleanup as a member of the Mayoral entourage—into a satirical mystery centered upon a police officer named Brian Remy, who barely escaped from the collapse of the South Tower with his life, and who awakens on the opening page having survived shooting himself in the head at his apartment shortly after the terrible business of planes and towers transpired. Walter aligns himself to the darkly humorous and enigmatic styles of Kafka, Heller, Céline and Vonnegut, borrowing from these illustrious forebears while mixing in select postmodern abstractions from DeLillo; the entirety is blended and then distilled through Walter's own talented imagination to craft what, in my opinion, proved to be about as satisfactory a Nine-Eleven novel as could be desired, all within a brisk, amusing, puzzling, and moving three hundred and twenty-six pages. Possessed of a nicely-attuned ear for dialogue, a prose that is pleasing and intelligent without drawing attention to itself, and the ability to deftly recover when his comedic stylings fall flat—which isn't often, but enough to have led me to a grimace or three—the author has offered here an episodic unfolding, a Sammy Jankis policeman-turned-intelligence-consultant who spurns the tattoos to stimulate and rekindle his memories of what has transpired in the blank periods of his life—for, perhaps, Remy does not actually want to discover what he is doing when the lights of his consciousness flicker out.That switching on and off determines the book's structure: it's a work comprised of narrative panels, for Remy quickly discovers that he will awaken, as if from a dreamless sleep, to find himself amidst the scenarios and actions and dialogues to which an alternate version of himself—a Remy of whose thoughts, feelings, and deeds he is completely ignorant and unable to access from the void of his memory—has led him. By means of these boxy, jumped processions Remy discovers that his son has decided to grieve as if his father had actually died in the tower collapse; that he has retired from the police force, under the pretension of suffering from back ailments, in order to join the newly-minted Department of Documentation, a nebulous agency tasked to recover and file the immensity of paperwork expelled into the atmosphere when the World Trade Centre went down; that his degenerative eye disease is rapidly progressing, to the degree that flaring streamers continually wriggle ablaze across his vision, impairing his ability to see the world; and that his new intelligence persona is performing morally questionable actions in a strenuous effort to penetrate a cryptically-alluded-to terrorist cell. In addition, Remy's former police partner has become a well-remunerated heroic figurehead, adorning cereal boxes and attending boat shows, while Remy himself is pleased to realize that he has found a new love in the person of April Kraft, a beautiful young woman who lost both her husband and her younger sister to the aerial-wrought destruction. Alas, it just might be that while this awareness of Remy is falling for April, his unknown half may be intimately insinuating himself into her life for a more sinister purpose.With a novel written in this fashion, one of in-and-out, stop-and-go mini-narratives in which the reader is left to piece together, along with Remy, just what exactly should be filled into the missing details, there is a potential for the story to lose momentum, confound or bore, and there are more than a few reviews, here and elsewhere, in which this seems to have been what happened. In my opinion, Walter handled this difficult process wonderfully, with even the less enjoyable segments, or the connected ones that the author himself seemed to eventually have decided to allow to slip to the most remote back-burner, adding to the whole. There are also complaints the Walter has fashioned herein cardboard characters—and while this has some legitimacy, it fits itself comfortably and workably into the structure of the story as a satire on the American reaction to this tragic event—these individuals serve as representations of the nation as a whole. What's more, in April Kraft Walter produced his strongest realization, a vulnerable, grieving, and perspicacious woman, bearing her own crippling secrets that limn the horrifying events of that day into her own more finely-tuned nightmare. Her interactions with Remy were my favorite parts of the book, her desperate need for a connexion to comfort and cleanse the most emotionally compelling of the whole.As to the satire itself, it always pulls back before taking anything to extremes—save perhaps Walter's withering portrayal of Giuliani as The Boss, a man with an eye only to the media spotlight, his rehearsed, inspirational mantras, and how to turn a profit from his sudden stardom—while continually amusing in its absurdity and surreality. As Walter sees it, in the wake of the attacks grief and anger became competitive sports; in America's almost crazed requirement to return things to normal, to retreat to the lulling security of the previous era, an opportunity to regroup, rethink, and rework the country's covenant with itself in the face of a deranged assault by religious fanatics was wasted; instead, like a tepid therapy administered via cash register chimes, the populace was urged to resume spending, to keep the mall doors revolving, to keep the inventory flowing, while any in-depth or cathartic efforts to deal with the emotions wrenched so brutally by loss and dismay and shock were anathematized by the superficiality of the approach that was not only pushed upon the public—manipulations for political and commercial gains—but embraced by a majority. In Remy, Walter has crafted the average American, a decent person with warts, faults, and flaws to their character but well-intentioned and capable of great acts of kindness, generosity, and self-sacrifice; however, like the gaps in Remy's memory of his quotidian routine, the country seemingly allowed itself to turn away from the actions being committed in its name—ones that would have aroused universal abhorrence not long before—and to desperately wish it could return to the way it was, even as it came to accept this new situation of treading water, of stutter-stepping, of accepting the reality that one finds oneself in as best as one can, without worrying too much about either how one got in or how to extricate oneself if it's not to one's liking. As April murmurs to Remy whilst abed Maybe we're all like people in dreams now, aware that something isn't right, but unable to shake the illusion.There are approaches that Walter opted not to take—mostly from the terrorist end—that would ease the blame apportioned to America; but, really, he isn't composing a tract to present to an audience or compiling a person's history, but a satirical mystery to point out errors of commission and omission while entertaining and drawing the reader into a puzzle that holds with growing force right up until the final moment. I did not anticipate the ending Walter fashioned at all; did not find his option sitting all that well with me upon reaching that final page, though, with time to think things through, I've come to appreciate it more, especially in the fact that other reviewers seem to have interpreted it in quite divergent fashion. If this represents the standard of quality of the Nine-Eleven work being produced for literary consumption, I will definitely be making an active effort to seek more of them out—assuming, that is, that they exist. DeLillo, I'm coming.
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2006/...'Zero' sum game9/11 satire is one of year's best novelsBy Jenny Shank, For the CameraSunday, December 10, 2006The Zero by Jess Walter. Regan, 336 pp. $25.95.This year saw the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the publication of several novels addressing them. Jay McInerney's "The Good Life" took a love-amid-the-ruins approach with its story of an adulterous affair between two volunteers at a Ground Zero soup kitchen. Wendy Wasserstein's posthumous debut novel, "Elements of Style," featured post-9/11 panic among New York socialites. But the best of the bunch is unquestionably Jess Walter's "The Zero," which was a finalist for the National Book Award.Although Walter doesn't name the city in which "The Zero" is set, it's clear he drew on his experiences working as a ghostwriter for a memoir by New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik in the days immediately following the attack.The protagonist, Brian Remy, is a cop who was a first responder to the terrorist attacks. He's in bad shape physically and mentally, and as the book opens, he wakes up in his apartment, bleeding, his head grazed by a bullet from his own gun. He doesn't know if he was trying to kill himself or not — a nearby note says only "etc." He's boozing heavily, has streaks and floaters in his vision that doctors tell him are the precursor to a detached retina, and has been experiencing mental "gaps" that cause him to suddenly come to his senses in the middle of doing something — talking to informants, eating, sleeping with a woman, or even participating in a man's torture — with absolutely no idea how he got there.This effect is brilliant on several levels: It conveys Remy's scattered mental state in the bewildering days following the attacks; and it provides for a lot of comedy, as Remy frequently turns up in a situation the "bad" version of himself must have gotten him into, such as cheating on his girlfriend with her scary Realtor boss. But it also makes "The Zero" action packed from start to finish — the reader is dropped into scene after scene without any exposition, and the reader is in the same position as Remy, trying to figure out what is going on.Although the bewildering gaps in his consciousness make it difficult for Remy to piece together his life, it gradually becomes clear he has retired from the force due to chronic back pain (even though he experiences no such trouble) and has taken a job working directly for The Boss, a Kerik-like figure prone to delivering patriotic pep talks: "These bastards hate our freedoms. ... They hate our tapas bars and our sashimi restaurants, and our all-night pita joints." A federal agent gives Remy an assignment to investigate whether a woman named March Selios, whom they suspect had terrorist ties, truly perished when the buildings collapsed. If she's dead, the agent says, "then everything is copacetic."As Remy trails Selios, a variety of absurdities ensue. His son, who lives with Remy's ex-wife, tells people his father died in the terrorist attacks, and concocts a performance piece for a school assembly based on his make-believe grief. Remy ends up at a monster truck rally where the starring vehicle "was painted red and blue, airbrushed with American flags fluttering in an unseen wind, with an angry-looking eagle perched on the hood and on the doors a long list of familiar names, cops and firefighters, Italian, Irish, and Latin, like the roster of a Catholic school football league." Remy discovers he's some sort of double agent trying to infiltrate a terrorist cell, sending a signal to other agents whenever he goes to a restaurant and orders wasabi-marinated duck.Walter's irreverent take on the 9/11 attacks ultimately renders "The Zero" more moving and honest than any of the books bursting with patriotism and pieties on the subject. As Joseph Heller did for World War II with "Catch-22," Walter expertly captures the absurdities that ensued from the tragedy of the terrorist attacks, and in doing so has written one of the best books of 2006.
What do You think about The Zero (2006)?
This book is just good enough to make people think it's great because it contains so many gaps and twists and many and occasionally clever references to the events of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath to make you feel like there MUST be something IMPORTANT written on its pages, even though you can't figure out exactly what it is. Perhaps it is in the same genre as books by Kafka and Heller (I think closer to Vonnegut than to either), but in terms of quality, it's not in the same ballpark.The book's biggest fault is that it lacks a plot. The author attempts to fill this void with oddball characters and bumbling bureaucracies bouncing off of each other and off of Brian Remy, a man who is inexplicably experiencing memory problems in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Oh, and Remy has macular degeneration, too, allowing the author to throw in some descriptive paragraphs of visual disorientation. The gaps in the narrative that represent the gaps in Remy's memory often come at convenient times when the author doesn't seem to know how otherwise to bring the chapter gracefully or succinctly to a close.If not for some mildly entertaining madcap antics by competing intelligence agencies, a couple of interesting character studies, and some nice descriptive passages about New York City and the physical consequences of 9/11, I wouldn't have reached the last page. Now that I think about it, the book is aptly named.
—Jane
Guterak looked over. "Hey, you got your hair cut.""Yeah." Remy put the cap back on."What made you do that?""I shot myself in the head last night.""Well." Paul drove quietly for a moment, staring straight ahead. "It looks good."—p.15This is, as it says right there on the back cover, "a novel of September 12th." That on its own should be fair warning. Jess Walter does not shy away from disturbing ground in his 2006 novel The Zero—and so, perforce, neither will this review. Infectiously fragmented; contagiously disconnected—The Zero is an amazing work, containing some of the bleakest, most bitter humor you'll ever encounter.Edgar {Brian Remy's son} wasn't finished. "Ask yourself this: what separates me from some kid whose father actually died that day?""The fact that I'm alive?" Remy asked. Even to him, his voice sounded like it was coming from another room."Fair enough," Edgar said, without meeting Remy's eyes. "Okay, now let's take that kid, the one who actually lost his father, but is somehow coping by getting consolation from his girlfriend or from drinking or from writing poems. Are you going to tell him he isn't grieving enough? Are you gonna tell some poor kid doing his best that he should feel worse about the death of his father?""No..." Carla {Remy's ex-wife} shook her head. "No. Of course not.""Then don't tell me I shouldn't be devastated by the death of my father just because he isn't dead!"—p.35The Zero in question is, of course, Ground Zero—where the twin towers of the World Trade Center used to stand in New York City, until September 11, 2001, when those crazy assholes flew our own planes into our own buildings and—as the Onion had already presciently reported in January of that year—"our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity" was finally over.Brian Remy, the protagonist of The Zero, and his partner Paul Guterak were first responders—some of the closest police officers to survive the towers' collapse, though not without great personal cost. Remy has memory problems—gaps, he calls them, during which the things he says and does don't seem to be much like what he'd do when he's aware of himself."But while he may never know if he did the right thing... I'll tell you this: He generally knows when he's doing the wrong thing."—Gerald Addich, p.299Remy's eyes are giving him trouble as well—something which connected this book inextricably in my mind with the one I read just before this one, Oliver Sacks' The Mind's Eye—especially this passage:"The body views eye surgery as such a severe violation,"{...}"a unique shock on every level. The eye is not designed to be cut into, like the skin; the central nervous system doesn't know what to make of it when someone goes poking around on the top floors."—p.265Even so, Remy seems to be coping better than a lot of people..."...don't you wonder if they're all crazy? With their stone pilgrims, and their marble soldiers, with their virgins in paradise and their demons in smoke? Sometimes I think I'm the last sane person on Earth."—Jaguar, p.291The book jacket looks burned, dusty, like a piece of paper blown from one of a collapsing office tower's many windows. That part I got pretty quickly. But... while the book's designers could reproduce the look of debris... they could not reproduce the smell. Or the sound..."People always ask the same question," Guterak said. "When everyone is around, it's all respect and bravery and what-a-fuggin'-hero and thanks for your sacrifice, but the minute someone gets me alone, or the minute they have a drink in 'em, they get this creepy look and they ask me what the bodies sounded like when they hit the sidewalk. They ever ask you that?"Remy couldn't say. "What do you tell 'em?""I say to clap their hands as hard as they can, so hard that it really hurts. Then they clap, and I say: No. Harder than that. And they clap again, and I say, No, really fuggin' hard. And then they clap so hard their faces get all twisted up, and I say, No, really hard! And then, when their hands are red and sore, they say, 'So that's that what it sounded like?' And I say, 'No. It didn't sound like that at all.'"—p.85Too soon? It may always be too soon, for some things—but that doesn't mean those things should never be said."When I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV... jumping up and down celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you know what I thought?"Remy shook his head."I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn't care about you. Or me. Or them. Or Russell Givens. This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That's the secret... what the crazy assholes will never get. You can't tear this place apart. Not this city. We've been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back."—Gerald Addich, p.303Indeed it does. A theme-park plaza filled with trees now takes in tourists to the site at $24 a head (for adults) (although Brian Remy could still get in for free). Where those towers once stood, water falls endlessly into two slightly-offset square vacancies—voids in the landscape much like the squares on the jacket of The Zero.It took me awhile to get that.This is a novel of September 12th, 2001—and what happened afterward. Walter even seemed to have a presentiment that the real-estate bubble was going to pop:In police work, there had only been decline; in real estate, there was only ascension. He found himself drifting happily as Nicole described a world in which the wealthy selflessly tried to save the city, maybe the whole country, maybe the whole world, one neighborhood at a time, cleansing blocks and doubling property values.—pp.186-187The Zero eventually rises to an angry crescendo, as Remy comes closer to understanding what's going on within his "gaps," and as our post-9/11 landscape becomes ever more absurd. Apropos of that, Walter's novel also includes an interesting meditation on the stages of (literary) grief, ending with "Nostalgia" (and profit!), that prefigures the 9/11 gift shop which recently opened at the site.I don't think Jess Walter predicted that development, specifically... but it fits. It fits.
—Alan
In "The Zero" Jess Walter uses the days after 9-11 as the setting for a hard boiled detective novel. The Zero here is ground zero. This may seem like a tight rope walk over a fine line between poor taste and sentimentality, but Walter manages to avoid these extremes. Walter was on the ground in NYC in the days after the attack working as a ghost writer on the memoir of police commissioner and tremendous asshole Bernard Kerik. This familiarity with the behind the scenes action does a lot to create a believable and familiar framework for an absurd and surreal story.The detective story keeps the plot moving forward and helps to keep Walter from spinning off into a polemics. Walter's black humor provides an ideal prism for charting the event's rapid path from tragedy to media event. The focus here is less 9-11 and more the world that it gave birth to. The events of 9-11 didn't create this world. We had been heading that way for a long time. It was our inability to understand and grapple with the tragedy that revealed where America had been heading. The other side of infantile entertainment focused populace was the cynical and greedy political establishment that saw the tragedy as an opportunity to start pursuing all sorts of things that had long been on their wish list.Walter's has made a formidable attempt to look at one of they key events of our time. By viewing it peripherally he manages to utilize humor, but still treat the tragedy with reverence. The book however isn't perfect. At times Walter gets a little heavy handed in making his points about the Bush years. The ending also feels overly tidy for such a sprawling and ambitious book. These flaws only really stand out because the rest of the book is so assured and capable.
—Sean Owen
