The Zero and The One

The Zero and the One is a novel about intellect, questioning morality, and how people can be pawns in a larger game. Owen is an Oxford fresher from a working class background who, feeling lonely and out of place anywhere other than stuck into his work, ends up befriending a visiting student who believes they have a similar mindset for discussing philosophy. However, Zachary Foedern is more complicated than Owen first thought, constantly trying to defy convention, and their friendship lasts barely more than a term before Zach proposes his greatest transgression yet: a suicide pact.

The novel moves between Owen in the aftermath of Zach’s plans and showing Owen and Zach as friends, from meeting until ending. The narrative is unfurled like a mystery, though it is not a hugely surprising one, not even as Owen gets to know Zach’s twin sister Vera who he never met during their time at Oxford. The ultimate denouement is definitely set up, but this seems to work with Owen as a clever and also short-sighted narrator caught in this dark, recognisably literary fiction world.

The earlier narrative is more centred around students obsessed with their intellectual quest: in this case, an obscure philosopher and questions about the morality of suicide, with an Oxford and Berlin backdrop. The later plot, with Owen in New York, feels quite different, with hints of a mystery and a fish-out-of-water Englishman in America vibe. This variation can be a bit strange: it feels like a mixture of The Secret History, the Netflix series ‘The Good Place’, a dash of Brideshead, and maybe a bit of Nabokov too. The Oxford parts were surprisingly decent with only the odd jarringly Americanised detail, though the Berlin trip felt too fleeting.

The Zero and the One is clearly trying to be a certain kind of book, a literary thriller type with intellectual obsession and dark characters hiding secrets. At times it pulls this off better than others, but it still makes for an intriguing read.

Owen is full of fear. He hates flying, maybe because he hasn’t done it quite so often. But there was no way of avoiding his best friend’s funeral, he has to go to New York to attend the service. How could he end on this plane? Owen Whiting has fought his way from his non-academic family up to Oxford where he spends his first months mostly alone and an outsider. Only when Zach approaches and befriends him do things change. The young American has seen something in Owen that was hidden to the others, Owen is his equal, he can share his thoughts and is ready to transgress the boundaries of life. Still, Owen cannot fully comprehend how it all could have ended like this, maybe he will find answers across the ocean.

“The Zero and the One” keeps the secrets about Zach for quite some time; the structure of narrating the events surrounding the funeral and disrupting them with narratives of the past, postpones the clear picture and the full understanding of the events repeatedly. The beginning was rather slow, nevertheless I liked Owen’s background story, his family, his own expectations of life and his fight for a higher education. After the boys have met, the focus shifts a bit and the whole novel becomes a lot more philosophical. Their treasure hunt for the not so famous author of “The Zero and the One” already provides some suspense, however, it is only in the third part that the action really accelerates and Ryan Ruby can surprise the reader. Never would I have imagined such a story as the one that lies beneath it all.

To some extent, it is a classic coming-of-age novel, on the other hand, we also have quite a typical story of an ambitious young person from a poor background who suddenly enters a completely new sphere where he does not fit in at all and where intelligence and thirst for knowledge just aren’t enough. Thirdly, there is a psychological thrill particularly towards the end which I found most intriguing and fascinating. Zach is the character who can enthral the reader and who is not easily tangible, but here, the protagonist has to offer much more than some well-known cliché.

For quite some time I thought “The Zero and the One” was a good and entertaining novel. The closer I got to the climax and the end, the more I was drawn into it and spellbound.

The Zero and the One, by Ryan Ruby, is imperfect, but I loved it. It's a college novel, and a pursuit of a rare book, with a heavy dose of philosophizing. The novel starts with a suicide and the rest of the book uncovers how we got to this point, through flashbacks on the school year at Oxford and muddling through the funeral aftermath in New York City.

Obvious comparisons for The Zero and the One are Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Patricia Highsmith's Talented Mr Ripley. I'd add a dose of Patrick Hamilton's Rope. It doesn't have the emotional or moral heft of these, but I was perfectly satisfied to be immersed for a couple days in student life in Oxford and NYC, with a side trip to Berlin.

Owen (like "one") is on scholarship and is consumed by his studies, until Zach (like "zero") zooms in from America and enlists Owen's help in getting a girl. Zach gets the girl, Owen gets her friend. Zach develops an obsession with philosopher Hans Abendroth. Everyone revels in academia. Until they don't. Then Owen meets Zach's twin sister.

My favourite sentence: "A typical late winter sky, dull and grey as an oyster shell, hung like a Rothko in the window frame."

Structurally, each chapter is headed with a passage from Abendroth, who turns out to be entirely fictional. His rare collection of aphorisms, Null und Eins, is at the centre of this novel, which could be described as an investigation into the ethics of suicide. The sensibilities expressed in The Zero and the One borrow heavily from Dostoevsky.

"Stupidity is not just the result of false consciousness and organized oppression. It's the natural condition of the vast majority of mankind. It's the one thing that is equally distributed among the rich and the poor. Solving our political and economic problems will do nothing to answer the question, Why bother? In fact, all evidence suggests that it will only make that question more difficult to answer."

<a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/03/14/null-und-eins-aphorisms/">The Paris Review</a> gives us a biography of Hans Abendroth with an extensive extract of his work.

Some aphorisms from Abendroth:
• Never and nowhere is man truly at home. In order to experience this all he needs to do is to return, after even a short absence, to the city of his birth.
• Happiness, when ill timed, can maim a life just as thoroughly as sorrow.
• The difference between being in the world and reading the world breaks down and woe to the man who does not recognise which story he is living in!
• The use people make of their freedom is the best argument against allowing them to have any.

I'd be quite happy to spend many more meditative hours with this book within a book.

"Abendroth thought parks and gardens belonged in the same conversation as novels and paintings. They are all, he writes, triumphs of artifice."

This is a dark, coming of age, novel, with a twist. Our protagonist Owen, is a classic outsider. He doesn’t fit in at Oxford, and, because he’s gone to Oxford, he doesn’t really fit in with his family anymore. So, understandably, when Zachary appears - all confidence, cleverness and self-assurance - it’s understandable that Owen is all too eager to be taken under his wing. Zach pushes Owen, and at first it’s good - he brings him out of his shell. But all too soon it gets riskier, and darker, until he proposes their final dramatic act - a suicide pact - an idea conceived apparently on the basis of philosophy and how suicide is a perfect act.

Of course there’s rather more to it than this.

There are shades of Brideshead Revisited throughout this novel, though one rather gets the feeling that Ruby intended his work to be a more intellectual version of it. And as it gets darker, the claustrophobic nature of it reminds me a little of Christopher Isherwood’s Alone in Berlin. Ruby is clearly well read, and has taken influence from a vast spectrum of literature. You can tell this in the way that it is written - the prose itself its very good. But it does lack the follow through.

The novel dips between the present and the past. It begins with Owen on his way to Zach’s funeral, so everything we hear about Zach is told via flashback. This almost works, it’s almost a confessional, it’s almost very clever - but it doesn’t quite get there. It is a sympathetic way of writing - everyone who has been bereaved will understand the need to revisit memories - but it fails to really bring anything new to the story. We don’t get the impression that Owen might be hiding anything until right at the end of the book, he’s far too parrot like in his reporting of life with Zach. It’s a compulsive confessional in many ways, except you don’t see the final confession coming.

It has to be said that none of the characters in this novel are particularly likeable. At first you so desperately want to root for Owen - the shy, unassuming person who has just lost his best friend - but as it goes on you learn that he’s actually quite unfeeling and callous. It makes it hard to empathise with him. Zach is extreme, and brash. When we meet Zach’s twin Vera, she is equally bizarre and unsympathetic. When you have a novel which is made up of entirely unsympathetic characters like this, it does make it hard to care about the outcome and this is what I found happening as The Zero And The One reached its denouement. What should have been thrilling ended up seeming a little bit flat. It should of been dramatic, but because I didn’t care enough about what happened to the characters, it didn’t work, for me at least.

Ultimately, this book thinks it is more clever than it actually is. It’s not bad - the writing itself is good, if a little pretentious in places. Some parts are better thought out than others. The faux philosophy and quotes from the fictitious Hans Abendroth The Zero and the One book are some of the best bits of this novel. There are some aspects which make the reader feel uncomfortable - which isn’t in itself a bad thing. However, as bits start to unravel it does start to become a bit… ridiculous. There’s enough plot in the latter chapters for at least three books, and so some of it becomes superfluous. And it’s not believable.I’d give the first part of this book 4s, but unfortunately the ending really does let it down - so its 3* from me.