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Zeroes: The Reunion
The sequel to The Zeroes. Maybe there will be a happy ending this time.
709 pages, Paperback
Published December 28, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 22, 2021
The largest shadows of their land pass in mutual darkness and a new sun is born in the moment of their chill.
So, you’re wondering - who the fuck is that guy (Roesle)? Who the flying fuck is this guy (you won’t ever know)? That’s okay. Let’s leave it like that for now - as questions - and as the review gets going you can realize that I am just another bit of thoughts and this is a bit of my soul left to space reflecting on another person’s deposits of their own thinking time. This is the Great American Review for the Great American Novel.
Zeroes: The Reunion (ZTR) is our generation’s Great American Novel. I do not think of the quality of a book by the number / prestige of awards conferred onto the book, but by the awards that could be conferred onto a book and the book would still pass muster. ZTR could win any of these awards but it will not. This obscurity is not part of the charm, rather, it is both a justification while being simultaneously entirely irrelevant to the artwork. Its obscurity justifies the fugue of literary arts in our current era and it is entirely irrelevant because of the insurmountable beauty in this book. Roesle has written IT, IT being the swirl of the lived multitude passed through single series of linear words. IT is the moment. IT is both the here and now and infinitely beyond it, the spirit of a fish swimming around its own tank and telekinetically telling the fish what it’s like to be in that tank. Roesle has written the singularly most beautiful time capsule to our time that can be written, and yet, what the book lends itself to temporality it regains in the compassion with which the author deals with his subject matter. Roesle in The Zeroes (the first), wrote as a young writer writes, incurring the wrath of one’s self and justifying one’s soul to the world and, obviously, the book, though possessing the beauty and punch of a high calibre writer (think Thomas Wolfe without a drinking problem), it lacked love and was driven by pity. This book is different. The obscurity of the writer guarantees that this book is not only true, but it is true in charity and in quality, and the content plays this out. This book is not an act of spite, it is an act of profound and painfully held love. The prose is at best incisive while being poetic (Stendhal but without the French floral perfume in the incisive moments, Melville in the more florid sections), while in the more typical passages it is nothing less than a 21st century Tolstoy, which is, the words are mere parcels of reality that are to be digested to then taste, no, become the story that they hold. From a spiritual standpoint, this is America’s Brothers Karamazov.
If I wanted to give a book to my children, no, my grandchildren, and even their children and so on, to answer: “Grandpa, what was IT like?” ZTR would be the book. This is IT. It is not the representation of IT, it is not the scapegoat of IT, ZTR is a higher fidelity representation of our times than our times is even thought capable of producing and definitely better than what we deserve. Roesle may or may not go down as one of the greatest American writers, not for his ability to pick the right pop culture references, but because of the unflinching nature in which he not only uses them but realizes that weirdly eunuch embrace we give to these figures. It is as if we love them, wishing to simultaneously be engulfed in them and to totally make them powerless. The ability to not only intersperse a narrative with pop culture references while simultaneously putting in transcendent considerations about the human spirit is not only a feat, it is a miracle. This is a book that only the Real Author could write. The Real Author is an author that realizes his goal is not to show people their flaws and then to prove that the writer is smarter than them (a la DFW), but to show them their flaws kindly, mercifully, and tenderly so that they may take the thorn out of their eye. Roesle accomplishes this masterclass feat in the dead center of the most artless time known to mankind.
Will Roesle be remembered? In this book, and only among the few Real Authors, he has realized that it doesn’t really matter. Roesle wrote this book not out of catharsis, not out of rage, not out of having nothing left to do, but because he had to - because he couldn’t stand the hurt in everyone’s eyes. ZTR is a book that revisits the themes of The Zeroes (despondency, confusion, and mass-cliche from the culture industry of our times) but does so for our times while also bringing the transcendent light. Typically, The Great American Novel captures the spirit of the age without too many particulars. ZTR has a lot of particulars - a ton - but that’s partly the point. We don’t have Orchids, we have Rose Gold iPhone 10X’s. This is a dangerous thing to play with and authors do struggle with the right amount of contemporary Proper Nouns to bring into a narrative (Pynchon dove in too far, DFW made his own, and DeLillo ignores them). Proper Nouns (PN) don’t seem to be anathema to a book’s ability to be remembered, but stylistically it is a gamble and, unlike The Zeroes where I felt dislocated, I understood ZTR much better and felt that the PNs were kept almost out of the way of the main story yet still an important part of it. If you were climbing up the stairs, the PN would be the photographs on the wall, but you’d still be able to follow the stairs easily, but you know whose house it is and maybe some bits of context about it, though it’s not the purpose of the climb.
As far as to what this book is about, this book doesn’t need a description. No. Nor an answer for what it’s about. Even so, people will invariably ask and so I will answer, what is Zeroes: The Reunion about? It’s secondly about a high school reunion of mid thirty year olds. It’s firstly, however, about you.
Should you read this book? Yes. Now. You should have finished it yesterday if you had any sense in you. Should I tell all my friends about it? Yes. What if I disagree with your review and don’t think it’s TGAN (The Great American Novel) of our generation? We are all wrong sometimes. Should I read The Zeroes before? It doesn’t really matter; it is nice if you have the time and adds some depth, but it’s definitely not necessary.
Long story short - read it.
So, you’re wondering - who the fuck is that guy (Roesle)? Who the flying fuck is this guy (you won’t ever know)? That’s okay. Let’s leave it like that for now - as questions - and as the review gets going you can realize that I am just another bit of thoughts and this is a bit of my soul left to space reflecting on another person’s deposits of their own thinking time. This is the Great American Review for the Great American Novel.
Zeroes: The Reunion (ZTR) is our generation’s Great American Novel. I do not think of the quality of a book by the number / prestige of awards conferred onto the book, but by the awards that could be conferred onto a book and the book would still pass muster. ZTR could win any of these awards but it will not. This obscurity is not part of the charm, rather, it is both a justification while being simultaneously entirely irrelevant to the artwork. Its obscurity justifies the fugue of literary arts in our current era and it is entirely irrelevant because of the insurmountable beauty in this book. Roesle has written IT, IT being the swirl of the lived multitude passed through single series of linear words. IT is the moment. IT is both the here and now and infinitely beyond it, the spirit of a fish swimming around its own tank and telekinetically telling the fish what it’s like to be in that tank. Roesle has written the singularly most beautiful time capsule to our time that can be written, and yet, what the book lends itself to temporality it regains in the compassion with which the author deals with his subject matter. Roesle in The Zeroes (the first), wrote as a young writer writes, incurring the wrath of one’s self and justifying one’s soul to the world and, obviously, the book, though possessing the beauty and punch of a high calibre writer (think Thomas Wolfe without a drinking problem), it lacked love and was driven by pity. This book is different. The obscurity of the writer guarantees that this book is not only true, but it is true in charity and in quality, and the content plays this out. This book is not an act of spite, it is an act of profound and painfully held love. The prose is at best incisive while being poetic (Stendhal but without the French floral perfume in the incisive moments, Melville in the more florid sections), while in the more typical passages it is nothing less than a 21st century Tolstoy, which is, the words are mere parcels of reality that are to be digested to then taste, no, become the story that they hold. From a spiritual standpoint, this is America’s Brothers Karamazov.
If I wanted to give a book to my children, no, my grandchildren, and even their children and so on, to answer: “Grandpa, what was IT like?” ZTR would be the book. This is IT. It is not the representation of IT, it is not the scapegoat of IT, ZTR is a higher fidelity representation of our times than our times is even thought capable of producing and definitely better than what we deserve. Roesle may or may not go down as one of the greatest American writers, not for his ability to pick the right pop culture references, but because of the unflinching nature in which he not only uses them but realizes that weirdly eunuch embrace we give to these figures. It is as if we love them, wishing to simultaneously be engulfed in them and to totally make them powerless. The ability to not only intersperse a narrative with pop culture references while simultaneously putting in transcendent considerations about the human spirit is not only a feat, it is a miracle. This is a book that only the Real Author could write. The Real Author is an author that realizes his goal is not to show people their flaws and then to prove that the writer is smarter than them (a la DFW), but to show them their flaws kindly, mercifully, and tenderly so that they may take the thorn out of their eye. Roesle accomplishes this masterclass feat in the dead center of the most artless time known to mankind.
Will Roesle be remembered? In this book, and only among the few Real Authors, he has realized that it doesn’t really matter. Roesle wrote this book not out of catharsis, not out of rage, not out of having nothing left to do, but because he had to - because he couldn’t stand the hurt in everyone’s eyes. ZTR is a book that revisits the themes of The Zeroes (despondency, confusion, and mass-cliche from the culture industry of our times) but does so for our times while also bringing the transcendent light. Typically, The Great American Novel captures the spirit of the age without too many particulars. ZTR has a lot of particulars - a ton - but that’s partly the point. We don’t have Orchids, we have Rose Gold iPhone 10X’s. This is a dangerous thing to play with and authors do struggle with the right amount of contemporary Proper Nouns to bring into a narrative (Pynchon dove in too far, DFW made his own, and DeLillo ignores them). Proper Nouns (PN) don’t seem to be anathema to a book’s ability to be remembered, but stylistically it is a gamble and, unlike The Zeroes where I felt dislocated, I understood ZTR much better and felt that the PNs were kept almost out of the way of the main story yet still an important part of it. If you were climbing up the stairs, the PN would be the photographs on the wall, but you’d still be able to follow the stairs easily, but you know whose house it is and maybe some bits of context about it, though it’s not the purpose of the climb.
As far as to what this book is about, this book doesn’t need a description. No. Nor an answer for what it’s about. Even so, people will invariably ask and so I will answer, what is Zeroes: The Reunion about? It’s secondly about a high school reunion of mid thirty year olds. It’s firstly, however, about you.
Should you read this book? Yes. Now. You should have finished it yesterday if you had any sense in you. Should I tell all my friends about it? Yes. What if I disagree with your review and don’t think it’s TGAN (The Great American Novel) of our generation? We are all wrong sometimes. Should I read The Zeroes before? It doesn’t really matter; it is nice if you have the time and adds some depth, but it’s definitely not necessary.
Long story short - read it.
August 23, 2021
Longest book I've read.
May 9, 2021
The book that preceded this, The Zeroes, is one of my favorites. I jumped at the opportunity to read the sequel. I actually think this is a fantastic idea for a continuation of the story, but I had to put this down halfway through. It gets too dark and stressful to for me to read. Some of the characters and story beats are ticking time-bombs and it made me a bit to anxious to see where it all leads. If you liked the original though give it a shot, maybe you'll like it!
July 2, 2021
The titular reunion and the drug run after is bookended by the journal entries of Stacy, whose drug use seems to be accenting her descent into some form of schizophrenia. The middle section concerns her former schoolmate Christian, a formerly religious dealer with mental problems of his own. This book seemed quite a bit more ambitious than the original Zeroes, which I adore and have reread multiple times. Roesle attempts to grapple with the zeitgeist of the early 2010s - to reflect the pop culture, political, and memetic references of the times - and in this, he largely succeeds. Much like the original Zeroes, this is a work of fiction drawn from experience, and the voices feel authentic and true. I found the characters to be alternately neurotic, hateful, and annoying, yet I was drawn to follow their individual, intersecting journeys on the strength of the prose and insights, even at 700 pages. Like the most personally affecting art, I can't recommend it to everyone, but I will read everything this guy writes.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews