The Zero - by Jess Walter (Paperback)

About the Book

In the tradition of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Don DeLillo, comes this extraordinary story of searing humor and sublime horror, of blindness, bewilderment, and that achingly familiar feeling that the world has suddenly stopped making sense.

Book Synopsis

National Book Award Finalist

"Political satire at its best: scathing, funny, dark. Grade: A." --Entertainment Weekly

The breakout novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter: In the wake of a devastating terrorist attack, one man struggles to make sense of his world, even as the world tries to make use of him

Brian Remy has no idea how he got here. It's been only five days since terrorists attacked his city, and Remy is experiencing gaps in his life--as if he were a stone being skipped across water. He has a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he doesn't remember inflicting. His son wears a black armband and refuses to acknowledge that Remy is still alive. He seems to be going blind. He has a beautiful new girlfriend whose name he doesn't know. And his old partner in the police department, who may well be the only person crazier than Remy, has just gotten his picture on a box of First Responder cereal.

And these are the good things in Brian Remy's life. While smoke still hangs over the city, Remy is recruited by a mysterious government agency that is assigned to gather all of the paper that was scattered in the attacks. As he slowly begins to realize that he's working for a shadowy intelligence operation, Remy stumbles across a dangerous plot, and with the world threatening to boil over in violence and betrayal, he realizes that he's got to track down the most elusive target of them all--himself. And the only way to do that is to return to that place where everything started falling apart.

In the tradition of Catch-22, The Manchurian Candidate, and the novels of Ian McEwan, comes this extraordinary story of searing humor and sublime horror, of blindness, bewilderment, and that achingly familiar feeling that the world has suddenly stopped making sense.

From the Back Cover

The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.

From its opening pages--when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head--novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a Machiavellian mayor known as "The Boss," and peopled by gawking celebrities, anguished policemen peddling First Responder cereal, and pink real estate divas hyping the spoils of tragedy. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he doesn't know, a son who pretends he's dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency known as the Department of Documentation. Whether that trail will lead Remy to an elusive terror cell--or send him circling back to himself--is only one of the questions posed by this provocative yet deeply human novel.

From a novelist of astounding talent, The Zero is an extraordinary story of how our trials become our transgressions, of how we forgive ourselves and whether or not we should.

Review Quotes

"This is political satire at its best: scathing, funny, dark. Grade: A." - Entertainment Weekly
"An original page-turner... a nifty spin on the genre. This fine novel has a memorable cast of characters..." - Philadelphia Inquirer
"A powerful fiction debut" - Seattle Times
"A deliriously mordant political satire...Walter's Helleresque take on a traumatic time...carries off his dark and hilarious narrative with a grandly grotesque imagination." - Publishers Weekly
"A tense and compulsively readable roller-coaster ride fraught with psychological thrills, unanticipated dips and lurches, and existential truths. The novel frightened and fascinated me in equal measures. Walter has written a neo-noirish masterpiece." - Wally Lamb, author of I know this Much is True
"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." - Library Journal
"Perceptive, ingenious satire...fascinating and important" - BookPage
"Compelling, intelligent... Walter keeps the suspense at a high level to the very end." - Library Journal
"Exceptional... trancends the mystery of crime and takes a courageous look at an even more profound mystery--the mystery of what it takes to continue living. Totally absorbing." - Ursula Hegi
"A disquieting first novel... Walter applies the same incisive sensitivity to the victims, the stalker, and the city itself." - New York Times Book Review
"A home run off the first pitch... A tremendous debut, full of pace and tensoin and unexpected twists... head and shoulders above the pack." - Lee Child
"Stunning... a splendid thriller, loaded with knuckle-whitening tension... First-rate writing." - Oregonian
"Suspenseful, challenging and intelligently written... a first novel of considerable depth and insight." - Dallas Morning News
"Aa satire/tragedy that Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might appreciate." - USA Today
"Refreshing... entertaining... for readers who appreciate wry precisions and expert timing." - Janet Maslin, New York Times
"Fresh and different--a gritty story of betrayal, and an extended riff on life, death, and politics. Walter is a literary talent writ large." - Boston Globe
"Admirably unpredictable... a story full of wonderful small surprises. Dispassionate amd compassionate by turns, and always engrossing. Walter's best by far." - Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A mystery novel of profound death. Despite themselves, readers will question their own self-images and assess just how far they've really come from the scared high-school kid who wanted to be exactly like everyone else but somehow still unique. A haunting, deeply troubling novel." - Booklist (starred review)
"Absorbing... Walter renders his blind land with a clear-eyed, compassionate vision." - Kirkus Reviews
"Exquisitely written. . . . Like a paranoid Being There, The Zero is suspenseful, satisfying and unforgettable." - "Galley Talk" Publishers Weekly
"A brilliant tour-de-force that's as heartrending as it is harrowing...the breakout novel of a brave and talented young writer." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A ridiculously talented writer." - New York Times
"The Zero could end up as the Catch-22 of 9/11. ...The book's brilliant ironies, its deadpan truths, its insider smarts and its everyguy hero may lead even skeptical readers to forgive the irreverent point of view.... "Ground Zero (in cop talk, "the Zero") is seen through the watery eyes of detective Brian Remy. A drunk with an estranged wife and teen son, Remy is assigned to a secret detail that investigates sensitive documents blown out of the World Trade Center....As Remy's dark half violently cuts corners in the investigation, his twisted excesses will be interpreted, no doubt with self-righteous joy by some, as shorthand for Abu Ghraib or Gitmo. But The Zero has far broader appeal than most mockery of the current administration. Comedy is funny when it's true, and the ragged conspiracy theories of jesters from Michael Moore on down aren't funny because they aren't true. Mr. Walter's comic exaggerations are, like those in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, true on some level. [And] Mr. Walter's hard humor can be almost poetic... "Mr. Walter is among the first to diagram the tragedy-into-kitsch machine that many of us have stumbled across ourselves. [And] Remy's exhausted confusion, his sense that the world has grown beyond his control or comprehension, distills what many Americans have felt for the past five years. Who hasn't wondered whether the Remys that the U.S. sends out on black operations could be stumbling into new rattlesnake dens? In the book's most poignant scene, one that elevates The Zero above mere satire to Kafkaesque parable, Remy seizes on a spell of clarity to hide out with his girlfriend, April, in San Francisco, the two of them adopting disguises as they try to escape his fellow operatives and start over. Who hasnt felt the urge to flee everything and leave 9/11's aftershocks to someone else--another generation, another country, any sucker willing to take them? - Kyle Smith, Wall Street Journal
"In The Zero, Walter has created a satire/tragedy that Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might appreciate. . . . The Zero is different, in part because Walter succeeds in creating what he calls 'a 9/12 novel.'" - USA Today
"Entertaining ... refreshing ... (with) wry precision and expert timing" - Janet Maslin, New York Times
"Moving and inspirational ... excruciatingly breathless ... utterly inventive. You just have to read it. Maybe if Aaron Copland had written the score for a film noir starring the Marx Brothers there would be some prototype for Walter's fusion fiction, but he didn't and there isn't ... F. Scott Fitzgerald constructed a pretty good fictional situation in Gatsby upon which to hang that final verdict about American social mobility, but Walter arguably concocts an even better one ... an affecting testament to American faith in the common man." - Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post Book World
"Immensely entertaining ... [Walter's] wry social commentary [has] a decidedly different set of twists." - Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune
"Dazzling ... and perfectly believable ... a major leap forward ... a book that speaks of intangibles like hope and redemption as authoritatively as it depicts gangsters, hookers and high-stakes poker games. It's rich in robust characters and wry dialogue, with agile prose, a big heart and a finely tuned plot." - Adam Woog, Seattle Times