“The Zero” in question is Ground Zero, though writer Jess Walter
never comes right out and says it. But it is: Smoke covers a city after
planes ram into its buildings, shards of metal and bits of bodies are
trucked away, and a president urges America to “draw your strength from
the collective courage and resilientness” as we wage a “War on Evil.”
It’s all there, familiar but askew, and Walter’s The Zero captures it with an intensity that veers from deeply unsettling to
queasily comedic.
The Zero begins with an unheard bang whose repercussions last
the course of its 300 pages—the terrorist attacks, yes, but also
the gunshot from cop Brian Remy’s failed suicide. Afterward, Remy’s
head is covered in blood and he can’t remember stretches of
time—and then shit gets worse. He’s quickly drawn into a world of
shady intelligence agencies and shadier politics, trying to find his
way though a moral morass where rescue workers are put on cereal boxes
(“First Responder: the cereal of heroes”) and torturing innocent people
is eagerly justified. We see it all—or, rather, see it all
again—through the semi-reliable eyes of Remy, whose chronic
blackouts and confusion give Walter’s disjointed novel an eerily
accurate sense of what life was like immediately after 9/11.
The Zero is a few things: A mystery (though, thanks to Remy’s
unfocused attentions, not a very successful one), a hit-and-miss
comedy, and a struggle to discover what 9/11 did, and continues to do,
to us. It’s here, toward the novel’s end—when the allegories
begin to clarify, when the too-long setup begins to gel—that
The Zero really begins to stick and squirm, becoming at once
funny and uncomfortable and disturbing.
“This is what happens when a nation becomes a public relations
firm,” one character remarks. “You forget the truth. You claim victory
in every loss, life in every death. Declare war when there is no war,
and when you are at war, pretend you aren’t. The rest of the world
wails and vows revenge and buries its dead and you turn on the
television. Go to the cinema.” Or have some First Responder cereal. Or
draw strength from our “resilientness.”
