Zero Book

I've actively avoided the 9/11 novel. I read a couple in the early years, I can't even tell you which they were (oh, if I thought about it, I'd come up with the titles, but that's not the point) but they pissed me off and so I vowed to make a wide berth around the ouevre. Ian McEwan's chilling and intense Saturday was an exception to my 9/11 Literature Moratorium, yet Saturday took place in London in 2003, tangentially related to the attacks in the United States two years before.

But the others I read tried too hard to intellectualize the horror, to make me think my way through the event. But none had the courage to take me into Ground Zero, into the physical nightmare, to drag me through the visceral aftermath.

Interestingly, Jess Walter published The Zero in 2006, the same year as Saturday, but I was living in New Zealand at the time, where no one had heard of Walter. The novel never made my radar. My book club in Christchurch read Saturday; had we known about Walter's, I know we would have read and loved it; it was that kind of a book club.

I had a raging bout of insomnia last night, so I'm kind of rambling. I feel a very particular kinship today to Brian Remy, the protagonist of The Zero; life is surreal and grainy, as if I've been dropped into the middle of movie and somehow I know my lines, even though I have no idea what happens next.

This book. It's brilliant. It's brilliant for the way it takes this horrific event and shoots the reader down a rabbit hole of the absurd, using an Alice in Wonderland approach to show how we, our collective American presence, took leave of our senses in the aftermath of our grief and anger.

Our Alice is policeman Brian Remy, who wakes up in his Manhattan apartment a few days after the attacks to find he has shot himself in the head. His aim was a bit off, because he's still alive. But he's not all there. Or at least his memory isn't. The narrative careers from one scene to the next, jumping over great gaps in Remy's memory. He eventually puts together that he's been assigned to a secret task force searching for those connected to the 9/11 attacks. His colleagues, a motley crew of cops and federal agents, embark upon a very dark comedy of errors and Remy realizes with horror that his blackouts may cover for violence he inflicts on suspects.

The gaps in Remy's memory eventually make for a hole-y plot and the subtext of a political thriller blows away like confetti in the wind, but hell. I had to stand back and admire Walter's audacity, originality, piercing sense of humor and the ache of horror and bewilderment that runs through the narrative, delivered by an author who arrived at Ground Zero five days after the attacks, as a journalist and ghost writer.

This is satire, but Jess Walter does what only Jess Walter can do: he imbues his characters with such humanity and tenderness that the arch meanness inherent in so much satire, the smug distance that I cannot abide, is mellowed under his touch until it all but disappears. He reserves his stings and barbs for systems and politics, for the shallowness of popular culture and the singular American need to commodify events and wrap them up with a bow of sparkly commercial optimism.

One of my favorite authors and this book, now ten years old, delivers yet another unforgettable read.