Triumphs of artifice

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.

The Paris Review 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.

Review at The Rumpus: The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby.

Excerpt.

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