Sunday, November 15, 2009

Table of Contents: The Zero

Author: Jess Walter
Publisher: Harper Collins
Year: 2006
Synopsis: Hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head-and so begins 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 highly uncertain.



What Others Have To Say:
The New York Times
"This book’s heightened paranoia invites the asking of more questions, from why cellphones need to take pictures to why a piece of cake is so much more than its component parts."

The Washington Post
"It becomes increasingly hard to care for a narrator who is unsure of his own motives and whose goals remain murky even to himself."

Entertainment Weekly
"political satire at its best"

Wally Lamb, Author
"Jess Walter's The Zero is 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."

No comments:

Post a Comment