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The Zeroes
This is story about the dawn of the twenty-first century. About music and memory. About friends and heroes. About growing up in a world already past its prime. About what it means to follow your bliss when bliss don't pay the bills.
This is a story about shit not working out.
- GenresFiction
300 pages, Paperback
First published February 4, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 3, 2025
Here’s the short version: Please, give the book a try. The Zeroes is very good, and I’m strongly recommending you read it. It costs $2.99/£2.30 on Kindle. Go out on a limb and buy it here.
Here’s the slightly longer version: For reasons that mystify me—it certainly has nothing to with its quality—the novel is self-published. (A lot of self-published fiction is great; so much of it is not.) The Zeroes doesn’t advertise itself beyond allusions to its tone, so I’ll write a blurb:
A group of kids tears into the summer of 2000, their first out of high school. They’re passionate, talented, and bursting with potential. The local scene, itself nothing but energy, loves their band. The narrator is a tagalong, providing artwork. The world is their oyster, and they have dreams.
But things don’t quite work out, and the story follows its characters' lives over a decade, ending in 2009.
(Hence the title. The Zeroes doesn't intend to say its characters are losers, as I suspected it would when I started it.)
The Zeroes was written by Patrick Roesle. Best as I can figure, Roesle wrote the book while doing retail work after completing an English degree, sent it off to agents/publishers, and came up empty. He finally threw up his hands and self-published the novel. Years later, I discovered it through pure, happy chance.
But this Roesle fella—he’s the real deal, I think. I’ve been a fan of his writing for a couple of years, starting with his blog, where he writes on…pretty much everything, actually, from smoking breaks to the importance of context to pop culture comedy like The Simpsons to this long discourse on Emmanuel Kant, but it took a while for me to turn to his long-form fiction.
My loss, since the two novels of his read I are (not to belabour the point) excellent. There are themes in his blog there I latch onto—a deep desire for enlightenment, for spotting beauty in the mundane, an obsession with the passage of time and how we spend it—which show up in The Zeroes. They’re excavated from the story carefully; there's real narrative craft. That he'll touch on his various interests (comic books; the Limp Bizkit song "Nookie" makes an appearance, much to a character's chagrin) is just part of who he is, I think.
##
So the guy should be read. The guy should be doing talks at Waterstones/Politics and Prose and signing books. He’s a damn sight more talented than so much of what I find at the average bookshop. I’m a little mad at how good The Zeroes is, because it's just unknown.
It isn't a happy novel, let me tell you that much. It’s beautifully written and the characters are (mostly) well-realised (maybe a couple are interchangeable), and there are moments of joy, but hot-diggity, the characters wouldn’t take an exit if their lives depended on it, which, in a case or two, it does. (The Zeroes could, in a shallow reading, be misconstrued for a novel about a generation’s failed ambitions at a superstardom the characters feel they’re entitled to. The novel’s thrust makes it clear it’s not that, no, instead putting forward a thesis that I think has only become more relevant in our AI-created, "content"-driven age.) The book’s decision to periodically brush up against tropes of vindication or absolution then subvert them makes it relentless, depressing if it weren’t for the bright spots. There were moments where I wanted to step in and throw the characters through the exit sign. Your way out is right there!, I'd think. Take it, for heaven's sake!
(But to criticise The Zeroes for being dark is like criticising a pretzel for being salty.)
And it’s not a flawless read. The female characters a little weaker than their male counterparts, for example, and there's a section or two professional editors could amalgamate. But then I think about…
Part of it is just verisimilitude, I guess, as in this description of a PTSD’d character that I immediately recognised:
Part of it is just this, with the older narrator looking back...
...And how even this wistful tone for a moment of meaning eventually weaves itself into the story Roesle has chosen to tell—a snapshot of a time and place I can never enter but which I feel like I have and which, in a lesser writer's hands, could have mere nostalgia—and I tell you: Please, read this book.
##
The long analytical review may have to wait. I wrote this in a burst, but want to take the book apart and really analyse it someday. As it is, I'm very ill; call it a testament to my passion that I'm writing this anyway.
Here’s the slightly longer version: For reasons that mystify me—it certainly has nothing to with its quality—the novel is self-published. (A lot of self-published fiction is great; so much of it is not.) The Zeroes doesn’t advertise itself beyond allusions to its tone, so I’ll write a blurb:
A group of kids tears into the summer of 2000, their first out of high school. They’re passionate, talented, and bursting with potential. The local scene, itself nothing but energy, loves their band. The narrator is a tagalong, providing artwork. The world is their oyster, and they have dreams.
But things don’t quite work out, and the story follows its characters' lives over a decade, ending in 2009.
(Hence the title. The Zeroes doesn't intend to say its characters are losers, as I suspected it would when I started it.)
The Zeroes was written by Patrick Roesle. Best as I can figure, Roesle wrote the book while doing retail work after completing an English degree, sent it off to agents/publishers, and came up empty. He finally threw up his hands and self-published the novel. Years later, I discovered it through pure, happy chance.
But this Roesle fella—he’s the real deal, I think. I’ve been a fan of his writing for a couple of years, starting with his blog, where he writes on…pretty much everything, actually, from smoking breaks to the importance of context to pop culture comedy like The Simpsons to this long discourse on Emmanuel Kant, but it took a while for me to turn to his long-form fiction.
My loss, since the two novels of his read I are (not to belabour the point) excellent. There are themes in his blog there I latch onto—a deep desire for enlightenment, for spotting beauty in the mundane, an obsession with the passage of time and how we spend it—which show up in The Zeroes. They’re excavated from the story carefully; there's real narrative craft. That he'll touch on his various interests (comic books; the Limp Bizkit song "Nookie" makes an appearance, much to a character's chagrin) is just part of who he is, I think.
##
So the guy should be read. The guy should be doing talks at Waterstones/Politics and Prose and signing books. He’s a damn sight more talented than so much of what I find at the average bookshop. I’m a little mad at how good The Zeroes is, because it's just unknown.
It isn't a happy novel, let me tell you that much. It’s beautifully written and the characters are (mostly) well-realised (maybe a couple are interchangeable), and there are moments of joy, but hot-diggity, the characters wouldn’t take an exit if their lives depended on it, which, in a case or two, it does. (The Zeroes could, in a shallow reading, be misconstrued for a novel about a generation’s failed ambitions at a superstardom the characters feel they’re entitled to. The novel’s thrust makes it clear it’s not that, no, instead putting forward a thesis that I think has only become more relevant in our AI-created, "content"-driven age.) The book’s decision to periodically brush up against tropes of vindication or absolution then subvert them makes it relentless, depressing if it weren’t for the bright spots. There were moments where I wanted to step in and throw the characters through the exit sign. Your way out is right there!, I'd think. Take it, for heaven's sake!
(But to criticise The Zeroes for being dark is like criticising a pretzel for being salty.)
And it’s not a flawless read. The female characters a little weaker than their male counterparts, for example, and there's a section or two professional editors could amalgamate. But then I think about…
Part of it is just verisimilitude, I guess, as in this description of a PTSD’d character that I immediately recognised:
[He] was his old guileless, affable self, though there was a new sort of remoteness about him, like he was constantly preoccupied by some vexing, unrelated thought. He was often unable to remain on a topic for longer than two minutes, and when he wasn’t unfocused, he was too focused.
Part of it is just this, with the older narrator looking back...
It’s still hard to look back and not believe the third and final wave of ska and the last days of punk’s still barely meaning something was a special time, and that I was fortunate to be a young man when I was. Four years eating, sleeping, and waking to shouted celebrations of defiance, authenticity, and holding your head high in the face of adversity and hocking a loogie toward it when it blinks. Four years of innumerable spring and summer nights at local shows, sweating it out shoulder to shoulder with strangers I counted as friends because they shared and contributed to my experience as I shared and contributed to theirs, shouting and believing in the same lyrics and surrendering to the same typhoons of sound and sensation and meaning, as whirlingly drunk on music, camaraderie, and youth as they were. These feelings and sounds were the compass of my seminal years, and I can never forget or dismiss them. It will always be July, and I am eighteen years old for the rest of my life…
...And how even this wistful tone for a moment of meaning eventually weaves itself into the story Roesle has chosen to tell—a snapshot of a time and place I can never enter but which I feel like I have and which, in a lesser writer's hands, could have mere nostalgia—and I tell you: Please, read this book.
##
The long analytical review may have to wait. I wrote this in a burst, but want to take the book apart and really analyse it someday. As it is, I'm very ill; call it a testament to my passion that I'm writing this anyway.
November 13, 2015
I'm not sure how to review this novel. Despite my love for reading, I rarely get emotional responses to most novels. This novel was an exception. The characters may have been interchangeable and the plot simplistic, but the author managed to make even these flaws work towards the themes of the story. And boy, were these some heavy themes. The story got rather bleak at points, and does not end on a happy note, but rather a realistic one. I'm assuming the author based this story heavily on his past experiences. The ways characters weave in out of each others lives, move out of their hometowns only to come crawling back, all these feel like genuine consequences of their actions rather than an author crafting a plot.
To summarize the story would only trivialize it; suffice it to say, it's a character-driven novel that chronicles the day-to-day failures and successes of a twenty-something artist and his revolving group of friends, enemies, and lovers. The unnamed main character manages to have an interesting voice. While the other band members have personality, they also have very common names, which sometimes made it hard to distinguish between them.
It's a coming-of-age story, a structure I'm a sucker for, yet it's never conventional. The characters are not beautiful. The setting is not romanticized. They have big plans and dreams, but fail to accomplish them due to either character flaws or circumstances beyond their control, but never for lack of trying. All this makes the book that much more concrete, and the character arcs all the more compelling. This is not a book about characters. This is a book about the friends you had at twenty. Yet as depressing as I'm making it out to be, it's never overly grim.
It paints a realistic story of the lives of these kids just trying to play some music and make enough money to survive. There are numerous references to countless bands and video games and other pop culture, but they never feel dated, as Roesle stated he intended Zeroes to be a period piece. If you've made it to the end of this review, you'll probably like this book. This book shows that writing for a niche audience can be infinitely rewarding and genuine.
(It's $3.99 on Kindle! Best money I ever spent.)
To summarize the story would only trivialize it; suffice it to say, it's a character-driven novel that chronicles the day-to-day failures and successes of a twenty-something artist and his revolving group of friends, enemies, and lovers. The unnamed main character manages to have an interesting voice. While the other band members have personality, they also have very common names, which sometimes made it hard to distinguish between them.
It's a coming-of-age story, a structure I'm a sucker for, yet it's never conventional. The characters are not beautiful. The setting is not romanticized. They have big plans and dreams, but fail to accomplish them due to either character flaws or circumstances beyond their control, but never for lack of trying. All this makes the book that much more concrete, and the character arcs all the more compelling. This is not a book about characters. This is a book about the friends you had at twenty. Yet as depressing as I'm making it out to be, it's never overly grim.
It paints a realistic story of the lives of these kids just trying to play some music and make enough money to survive. There are numerous references to countless bands and video games and other pop culture, but they never feel dated, as Roesle stated he intended Zeroes to be a period piece. If you've made it to the end of this review, you'll probably like this book. This book shows that writing for a niche audience can be infinitely rewarding and genuine.
(It's $3.99 on Kindle! Best money I ever spent.)
August 20, 2024
Like The Big Chill meets Catcher in the Rye for the elder-millennial generation. Perfectly captures the disillusionment of the new millennium’s hope gradually fading into the reality of the 21st century. Thank you Mr. Roesle and God bless! 🙏🏻
October 9, 2012
Having spent the majority of my adolescence at rural Pennsylvania fire-hall, skateboard park and bowling alley punk shows and walking endless loops around the local mall to meet the handful of misfit teens that liked the same music and "manic panic" hair dye shades as I did,I wholeheartedly feel as though this book truly captures the spirit of my generation. The thread of hope and eventual disillusionment that captivates and haunts readers long after they finish reading speaks to the fate of so many people I've known. We are the generation where no one ever comes in second place, of gold stars and soccer trophies for all participants, who finally figured out that in the real world we all can't be winners.
January 6, 2019
The Zeroes hit me like a train, devastated me in the best possible way. It feels like it was specifically written for myself and the group of friends I grew up with. One of my all time favorite books nowadays, a chilling reminder of what it was like to enter the workforce in the wasteland of the late 00’s, certainly as someone with a creative aspirations.
October 11, 2023
this was a miserable book but in a way where reading it ruled and having read it also rules. it is a bildungsroman featuring the inevitable despairful cynicism of growing up, but its love infused in nostalgia of youth and the cascading devastating significance of memory is also devastatingly cascadingly loving and sincere. i barely know what bildungsroman means, i just want you to believe me and have complicated feelings about that word
March 17, 2013
http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/12/book-review-zeroes-by-patrick-roesle....
True story: I met Pat Roesle, author of The Zeroes, in a diner in New Jersey a couple years ago. He had worked at a Border's with my then girlfriend, now wife.
Also true: While my wife chatted about hometown stuff with the other folks at the table, Pat and I discussed William Carlos Williams' This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
My position was, and still is, that the speaker is a prick, and that if your significant other ever eats the food in the fridge that he/she knows you are probably saving for breakfast, you have every reason to expect that person to drive you to the nearest diner and feed you.
Also true: My now-wife and I were not in the diner because one of us had eaten the other's potential breakfast.
Final true story: I'm a big fan of Pat's blog.
So now you know the background. You know why I read Pat's book, why I've spent a couple weeks thinking about what to say about it, and why I'm willing to admit to not being able to get beyond my biases. Still, from here on out, he's Roesle, the author. I want to talk about his book, which I think you should read. If I'm lucky, I'll even manage to talk about the things that The Zeroes made me think: about being young, about writing while young, about writing about memory.
Because I like The Zeroes despite its flaws.
Here's the briefest synopsis:
Boy meets girl at a wonderful time of life, when everything is going up for boy and boy's friends who are in a band. Then things stop going up, girl stops seeing boy, and everyone tries to move on.
Above all else, it's a story of the power of nostalgia to gloss periods of our lives, especially when the words first and love are used in the same sentence. How youth can make crummy everyday life feel limitless. It reminds me of Nabokov's Mary, which I read in between bouts with The Zeroes.
Unlike the young Nabokov, Roesle doesn't try to use flashbacks to recapture his narrator's lost love, instead he takes us through the relationship day by day. It allows us to feel more connected to the relationship, but it also gives the book a certain plodding feeling- first person narrator, simple progression from event to event. When I think about first person books I love (Good Morning Midnight leaps to mind, as another seeped in professional and personal failings), there's almost always a flashback dynamic.
And we really do get to live with the unnamed narrator. His world is painfully detailed, though I often wished those details (like the recurring references to underground and semi-underground ska bands) had been showing details, rather than listings of names. It was a feeling I had when reading Perks of Being a Wallflower a year ago.
The narrator's friends are alternately manic to escape their suburban dungeon and listless prisoners, a Jersey feeling I recognized. The "Zeroes" of the title is as much a reference to the characters as to the decade from 2000 to 2009 the story is meant to reflect.
As I read, I thought a lot about This is Just to Say. I wonder what early drafts of it looked like. Likewise, I'm glad I already loved Nabokov before I read his first book, just as I'm glad I loved Vonnegut before listening to While Mortals Sleep. First books are tricky thing, and much easier to read in retrospect. See there? the author has already begun to develop a cadence for his voice, develop themes for his works, develop structure for his story.
I hope that in a few years, when Roesle's next work has been published, we'll be able to compare it to The Zeroes, see his growth as a writer and see how he's continued to explore the disenfranchisement of middle class youth in the 21st century.
True story: I met Pat Roesle, author of The Zeroes, in a diner in New Jersey a couple years ago. He had worked at a Border's with my then girlfriend, now wife.
Also true: While my wife chatted about hometown stuff with the other folks at the table, Pat and I discussed William Carlos Williams' This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
My position was, and still is, that the speaker is a prick, and that if your significant other ever eats the food in the fridge that he/she knows you are probably saving for breakfast, you have every reason to expect that person to drive you to the nearest diner and feed you.
Also true: My now-wife and I were not in the diner because one of us had eaten the other's potential breakfast.
Final true story: I'm a big fan of Pat's blog.
So now you know the background. You know why I read Pat's book, why I've spent a couple weeks thinking about what to say about it, and why I'm willing to admit to not being able to get beyond my biases. Still, from here on out, he's Roesle, the author. I want to talk about his book, which I think you should read. If I'm lucky, I'll even manage to talk about the things that The Zeroes made me think: about being young, about writing while young, about writing about memory.
Because I like The Zeroes despite its flaws.
Here's the briefest synopsis:
Boy meets girl at a wonderful time of life, when everything is going up for boy and boy's friends who are in a band. Then things stop going up, girl stops seeing boy, and everyone tries to move on.
Above all else, it's a story of the power of nostalgia to gloss periods of our lives, especially when the words first and love are used in the same sentence. How youth can make crummy everyday life feel limitless. It reminds me of Nabokov's Mary, which I read in between bouts with The Zeroes.
Unlike the young Nabokov, Roesle doesn't try to use flashbacks to recapture his narrator's lost love, instead he takes us through the relationship day by day. It allows us to feel more connected to the relationship, but it also gives the book a certain plodding feeling- first person narrator, simple progression from event to event. When I think about first person books I love (Good Morning Midnight leaps to mind, as another seeped in professional and personal failings), there's almost always a flashback dynamic.
And we really do get to live with the unnamed narrator. His world is painfully detailed, though I often wished those details (like the recurring references to underground and semi-underground ska bands) had been showing details, rather than listings of names. It was a feeling I had when reading Perks of Being a Wallflower a year ago.
The narrator's friends are alternately manic to escape their suburban dungeon and listless prisoners, a Jersey feeling I recognized. The "Zeroes" of the title is as much a reference to the characters as to the decade from 2000 to 2009 the story is meant to reflect.
As I read, I thought a lot about This is Just to Say. I wonder what early drafts of it looked like. Likewise, I'm glad I already loved Nabokov before I read his first book, just as I'm glad I loved Vonnegut before listening to While Mortals Sleep. First books are tricky thing, and much easier to read in retrospect. See there? the author has already begun to develop a cadence for his voice, develop themes for his works, develop structure for his story.
I hope that in a few years, when Roesle's next work has been published, we'll be able to compare it to The Zeroes, see his growth as a writer and see how he's continued to explore the disenfranchisement of middle class youth in the 21st century.
June 1, 2021
Tragically relatable
Here’s a book that will stick with you long after you’ve read it. If you’ve ever had dreams to make it big one day as an artist while stuck in the never ending cycle of having to support yourself financially, you’ll feel for the characters. Also, the prose is just superb.
Here’s a book that will stick with you long after you’ve read it. If you’ve ever had dreams to make it big one day as an artist while stuck in the never ending cycle of having to support yourself financially, you’ll feel for the characters. Also, the prose is just superb.
January 27, 2025
This book felt like a crystallized part of my youth. The scene in the mall's maintenance stairwell, with its graffiti backdrop and adolescent awakenings, will remain with me forever.
August 19, 2012
It's seems that the more profound a book is, the harder it is for the lay-person to understand. Not so with The Zeroes. It's an admirably well written and easy to understand book.
Describing the plot would be superfluous, it would sound like the most mundane and pointless novel ever written. However, that's where the greatness lies, it's so real.
You already know every character in this book, and there's a very good chance that this book is about you. It's about the average person, hoping to make something of themselves. It's about failure. As the authour put it: "It's about shit not working out"
Describing the plot would be superfluous, it would sound like the most mundane and pointless novel ever written. However, that's where the greatness lies, it's so real.
You already know every character in this book, and there's a very good chance that this book is about you. It's about the average person, hoping to make something of themselves. It's about failure. As the authour put it: "It's about shit not working out"
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews