What We're Reading Now - The Zero by Jess Walter

by Carolyn, editor


I used to be anti-genre fiction, which is to say that I used to be a Serious English Student. 


Then it turned out that my favorite movies were thrillers. As in I noticed a pattern of "What kind of movie do you want to watch?" preceding "Thriller!" and I guess that's how I started gravitating to the book jackets with blurbs like "keep you guessing in this race against time" and "a roller-coaster ride" and "a psycho-sexual thriller". 


Okay, that last one was the tagline that drew me to see Black Swan (but regardless of how traumatized you were by seeing Natalie Portman get nasty on herself, you've got to admit that was a must-see movie for making conversation with people you don't really feel like talking to)


The point is that in my staid old age of responsibility and sobriety, a really compelling thriller is peak excitement - right up there with ordering uni and spotting the neighborhood Newfoundland. And, in case you thought I had totally lost the thread: The Zero is a fantastic thriller with enough substance for even the most Serious of English Students to have a good chaw. 


[Enter comment here about how refreshing it is for an author with literary talent to wade unapologetically into genre fiction, to write something that can confound bookstore clerks by being genre-proof. Of course Jess Walter performed the same trick in his previous novel Citizen Vince, which I read, sadly, before the birth of this blog, but also recommend.]


I'm assuming that - if you cared - Amazon would tell you that The Zero is a fictional story of a cop after the September 11th attacks, who wakes up in the first scene after trying to shoot himself in the head (the bullet grazes his head - just stitches. This isn't a post-suicide in the hospital sort of deal.) 


Beyond the 9/11 premise, The Zero is too dark and unforgiving to feel like propaganda. Instead, it's told in sharp flashes as the cop becomes part of the confusing aftermath of clean-up, intelligence rivalries, and coping. It works partly because of a complete lack of name-dropping - the words "September 11th" never appear, nor do "World Trade Center" or even "NYPD" - and partly because Walter's writing is so fluid and his characters so flawed that they feel real enough to touch. 


The line that keeps you guessing (and reading) is that our protagonist cop is having "gaps" in his memory, so that the story is told not in chapters, but in fragments of consciousness. I think there is an obligatory reference to Fight Club that needs to be made here, but rather than feeling tricked at the end, the reader sees the careful orchestration of story lines that read as a whole, over and above the fragments. 


That wasn't a spoiler, so sit back down. I always find my eyes trying to skip down a page when I want to know what happens - it takes discipline to read a good thriller line-by-line. (Sidenote: did you see that article about how you enjoy a book more when you know the ending? Such bullshit.) 


So here is my attempt to tie this back neatly to the reason we're all here:
If it's possible to write a genre-proof novel with the intrigue of a thriller, the grit of noir, and the human frailty of literary fiction, can you create a genre-less fragment of it on a 4x6" card? Better yet: can you write a story in 250 words that builds so much tension that the reader must train his or her eyes to read line-by-line, and not skip to the bottom? 


Note: Brian has informed me that the tie-back-to-kindling is not necessary. What a waste.