Steve pried his lips from the rim of a Bud Light.

Wow. Not wow as is in 'cool' but like an unexpected punch to the gut and that first stilted attempt to inhale. This is my reaction to the first 32 pages of “The Zero” by Jess Walter. I could have said that after the first paragraph. As the characters are revealed, the insight they provide is manic. Kind of how it felt just after. And how it felt reading “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center" by William Langewiesche (first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 3 parts from July-October 2002 and now a book). The kind of reading that part of you feels you shouldn’t; put it down, walk away, move on. Yet I’m pretty sure I will finish this book before the others that I’m juggling. In the back jacket flap, Richard Russo recommends the writing of Jess Walter, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book as compulsively, indeed greedily...”

“Steve pried his lips from the rim of a Bud Light” provides the first glimpse into one of the characters in The Zero. Lips liberated, Steve reveals how he would retaliate after the first hours after 9/11: bomb any country highlighted by ‘Time Magazine’ that wasn’t a travel recommendation. All of us know a Steve; his name of course is George...

I take the opinion of Richard Russo to heart because I learned something about reading (and writing) from his book “The Whore’s Child.” Picture the 9th-grade me trying to find a tread of anything (a character, narrative, description, action, ANYTHING) that would pull me into “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Somehow I passed the course but I do not remember it fondly. So here I am as an adult recently reading “The Whores Child” and I had the same problem. In "Mohegan Light", a short story (yep) about loss and missed opportunity, it got me right about when I was about to give up. Nothing pulled me in until the main character revealed a profound regret. After I finished I had to read it again. (And I don’t mean to say that I need a story to be sad or horribly dramatic for me to like it. I liked “The Nanny Diaries” for god sakes! A story needs to have some level of recognizable insight into humanity or why bother?)

In “The Zero” the writing got to me instantly and now the story is pulling at me. I love reading and I highly esteem great and good writers. So what the heck, I will give Hemingway another shot. ;-)