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The new ‘normal’

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Steve Almond is the author of several books, including "The Evil B.B. Chow: And Other Stories" and, with Julianna Baggott, "Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions."

BRIAN REMY, the hero of Jess Walter’s ambitious fourth novel, “The Zero,” is a burned-out New York City cop with serious time management issues. Specifically, he can’t seem to keep himself in any one time frame. Instead, he skips from one moment to another, with no recollection of what he might have done during the hours or days in between. To complicate matters, Remy is one of the survivors of a horrific terrorist attack that bears striking similarities to, well, you know.

It’s never quite clear why Remy suffers these fugue states. Did trauma short-circuit his memory banks? Is the supernatural at work? Or perhaps his staggering alcohol intake has left him with a pickled brain? Whatever the case, it leads to some awkward moments, as when our hero comes to in the bathroom of a beautiful young woman he has no recollection of meeting.

“Remy reached to open the door when he was frozen by a troubling thought. Had they already had sex? ... He looked down at his half-erection. Was it the before kind ... or the after kind? If they’d already done it, and he tried again, it might not work.”

This is amusing stuff, and it made me wish Walter had allowed himself to have a bit more fun with his conceit. But this is a 9/11 book, and as such it bears the burden of both gravitas and a plot so convoluted it would take several flowcharts to document.

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The gist is that Remy has been recruited by a private security firm and at least two shadowy government agencies to perform morally questionable acts in the name of fighting terrorism. He takes part, for instance, in the chilling interrogation of an Islamic suspect who is transported to international waters.

More often than not, though, Remy is put in the position of beaming into a scene and simply reacting, playing along, trying to keep the situation going and doing no harm. My sense is that Walter is using his protagonist to suggest the astonishing passivity with which Americans have consented to let the government do their dirty work.

But a hero with no moral knowledge feels like a crucial design flaw in a novel about moral reckoning. Remy is never forced to confront his darker impulses, and the reader is spared his anguish. (Honestly, the reader may be quite occupied just trying to unravel the skein of events.)

What Remy spends most of the novel doing is listening to the characters around him deliver soliloquies. The most affecting of these come from his logorrheic partner Paul, a guy who’s hamstrung between experiencing his grief and cashing in on it. He winds up with his mug on a box of First Responder breakfast cereal and meets a Hollywood producer hungry to option his life story.

“He said a story like mine is like owning a good stock,” Paul observes. “And that nostalgia is like the moment my little company goes public. So, after he goes through this whole explanation of everything, guy asks, do I wanna sell my stock? Do I wanna sell him my experiences? ... I said, ‘Bet your ass I’ll sell my experiences. I sure as hell don’t want ‘em anymore.’ ”

And then there’s the Boss, a grandiloquent city honcho with a nose for the spotlight. These people “hate our freedoms, our way of life,” he announces to a bank of TV cameras. “They hate our tapas bars and our sashimi restaurants, our all-night pita joints.... [T]hey hate our very ... economic well-being. This is a war we fight with wallets and purses, by making dinner reservations and going to MOMA, by having drinks at the Plaza. And we will fight back.”

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Walter is going for laughs here, but he’s chosen the broadsword rather than the rapier. Too many of the cops, politicians and spooks in this book come off as caricatures, men too cynical to believe their own pronouncements.

But of course the scariest aspect of life in what we’ve come to call “the post-9/11 world” is precisely that so many otherwise rational officials succumbed to a kind of reactionary hysteria. They became true believers.

We are also asked to accept that most of the mayhem wrought by Remy and his cohorts is the result of bureaucratic infighting. This too feels off. The real problem, as has emerged clearly over the last few years, isn’t a lack of cooperation by the agencies but the manner in which intelligence has been manipulated in the service of dubious -- make that disastrous -- political ends.

This is not to suggest that “The Zero” doesn’t have moments of tremendous intelligence and pathos. Walter has a rare knack for conveying the tender delusions of American consumer culture. As Remy listens to his girlfriend’s boss wax prophetically about the housing market, he muses to himself:

“In police work, there had only been decline; in real estate, there was only ascension. He found himself drifting happily as Nicole described a world in which the wealthy selflessly tried to save the city, maybe the whole country, maybe the whole world, one neighborhood at a time, cleansing blocks and doubling property values.... [E]ven when Remy was too drunk to understand the words, he found he could still intuit the world Nicole described, a world of glittering wealth and endless beauty, where there was no longer a need for cops or firefighters, only pink real estate agents, floating above the city on gusts of possibility.”

The piece of real estate at the emotional center of the book is, predictably, the site of the attack, which its denizens call “The Zero.” Remy spends an awful lot of time wandering the ruins -- he’s both a rescue worker at the site and a tour guide for luminaries -- surveying the “jigsawed bits of people” and breathing in the “flour of the dead.” After a while, though, these descriptions start to feel lurid.

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The last thing Americans need, at this point in history, is another sanctification of the horrors of 9/11. What they need -- and what novelists as talented and outraged as Walter should be supplying -- are books that expose the fresh horrors this sanctification has wrought.

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