'Zero' sums up our paranoid moment

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

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In today's media-fixated world, the intersection of various entertainment forms -- miniseries, movies, novels, comic books -- and 9/11 was inevitable. And on occasion, incendiary. Witness the firestorm over ABC's The Path to 9/11.

It would be a shame if Jess Walter's novel The Zero were lost amid all these other 9/11 projects. The author of the unforgettable non-fiction book Ruby Ridge and the admired novel Citizen Vince, Walter uses 9/11 and the past five years as a launch pad to explore how bureaucrats and profit-hungry corporations have distorted a tragedy.

In Zero, Walter has created a satire/tragedy that Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might appreciate.

This praise comes from a critic who thinks 9/11 is too recent, too controversial, too important and too painful a topic to be used for historical fiction or docu-dramatizations with their imagined dialogue and dramatic distortions.

Zero is different, in part because Walter succeeds in creating what he calls "a 9/12 novel." It's a dark allegory about the attack, the aftermath, and what has happened to America as seen through the prism of one man's nightmarish experience.

The novel focuses on Brian Remy. A cop who ran toward burning towers in an unnamed city which is clearly New York on a day that is clearly 9/11, Remy finds himself working for a political heavy hitter in the aftermath of 9/11.

Shell-shocked, suicidal and prone to memory gaps, Everyman Remy becomes involved with a covert government agency. His assignment: Find out what happened to a woman who may have fled the towers on 9/11, warned by her Muslim terrorist lover.

This task dispatches Remy into a disturbing world of terrorist cells, victims' families, torture and spy agencies. Walter subtly presents this as a metaphor for what's happening in the USA.

Zero is not perfect. Walter often employs a very heavy trowel to apply symbolism to the novel, and Remy's fractured love and family life distract from the story.

But for a corrosive black comedy about how politicians have manipulated genuine grief and fear, count on Zero.

*Read an excerpt at books.usatoday.com.

The Zero

By Jess Walter

Regan Books, 326 pp., $25.95

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