Contemporary Authors

• The Zero and the One ( novel) Twelve (New York, NY), 2017

1. The zero and the one : a novel LCCN 2016029450 Type of material Book Personal name Ruby, Ryan, author. Main title The zero and the one : a novel / Ryan Ruby. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Twelve, 2017. Description 258 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9781455565184 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3618.U3253 Z47 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Ryan Ruby - http://www.ryanruby.info/fiction/

  Ryan Ruby
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  Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, The Baffler, Dissent, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

  His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books.

  He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books.

  A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he currently lives in Berlin.

  He is represented by Melissa Flashman at Janklow and Nesbit. She may be reached at mflashman@janklow.com.

  He may be reached at ryansruby [at] gmail [dot] com.

  You can read more about the German philosopher Hans Abendroth here.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/05/the-story-is-the-concepts-philosophizing-with-ryan-ruby/

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  THE STORY IS THE CONCEPTS: PHILOSOPHIZING WITH RYAN RUBY
  BY AMANDA DEMARCO
  May 29th, 2017

  Ryan Ruby’s The Zero and the One follows two friends at Oxford—Owen, a wide-eyed working-class Brit, and Zach, a worldly, wealthy American—on a dark, intoxicating intellectual quest. Their pursuit of the meaning of life involves all of the philosophizing, women, and travel to be expected of bright young men eager to gain experience; and yet it ends in suicide. Ruby gradually divulges the circumstances and tendencies that drive the characters to their extremes, letting the reader piece together this tale of corruption at a slow yet scintillating pace. (As a Publisher’s Weekly review noted “The novel’s trick is that none of the characters are especially in the know at any given point—each has a blind spot.”)

  This dexterous plotting shows regard for the tradition of the novel, as well as a knack for the nuts and bolts of the craft. But Ruby also makes some daring stylistic choices—the author is himself an American but the novel is narrated in British English; furthermore, woven into the story are aphorisms by an invented philosopher whose work lies at the heart of the book. I talked to Ryan Ruby about the allure and difficulties of these traditional and unorthodox elements, and how what emerged is both a story of a tormented friendship and a parable of Anglo-American relations that plays out at the sentence level.

  ***

  The Rumpus: There’s something very classic about your plotting, the way each development reveals a bit more of the intrigue—tell me a bit about the challenges of writing such a tightly plotted book.

  Ryan Ruby: From a very practical point of view, plot is the most obvious way to get from A to Z. Writing a first draft is sort of like getting yourself stuck in a labyrinth of your own making. You want a number of things to happen—narratively, stylistically, thematically—and you try to come up with a structure that will enable you to have them all, but inevitably these desires start to contradict each other and you find yourself lost in the dark and having to discard things you feel attached to if you want to get out and go forward again. In the process of doing this I discovered that, far from being the simple addition of events, plot poses certain interesting formal challenges of its own and that the tendency to put form and content in opposition to each other, rather than finding a way for them to entail one another, is more easily justified in theory than in practice.

  Rumpus: Your prose style is quite crystalline and upright, almost old-fashioned, and I think you use it to great effect in terms of pacing and control. Was the voice of the novel clear to you from the outset?

  Ruby: That’s kind of you to say. Owen has two similar but not identical voices, the one that narrates the New York chapters in the present tense and the one that narrates the Oxford chapters in the past tense. Once I had differentiated the chapters spatially and temporally, it was important to differentiate them in terms of their style and mood as well. First person present is a pretty common perspectival technique by now—there was a kerfuffle about its overuse not so long ago if I remember correctly. I drew my use of it from the nouveau roman, where the point is not so much to convey the immediacy of action, that is, to reproduce the gaze of the camera lens, but to confront both the character and the reader with a sense of the limitations of their knowledge. The resulting mood, I hope, is one of fragmentation and dread, of Owen’s being blown about by forces beyond his understanding and control. In the past tense chapters, the prose style is indeed much more “old-fashioned” as you put it, much more indebted to the lyrical realism of the ancient roman. My agent calls it “book voice” and it came much more naturally to me than the other one did. In the past tense Oxford chapters, I aimed to use a voice that was not only setting-appropriate, but would allow for Owen to analyze and reflect in a mood of, let’s call it, elegiac nostalgia. The idea was that, although the two paths for the novel had diverged in a yellow wood, there was still a way to take them both.

  Rumpus: A fictional book of philosophical aphorisms plays a central role in story, and there’s quite a bit of philosophy woven into the plot itself. How did you go about balancing the conceptual and narrative aspects of the book?

  Ruby: Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One, that is, the book within the book, was probably the must fun thing to write. I figured I might as well use the freedom I have as a novelist to invent a philosopher to suit my purposes. After all, the advantage of the form is that it can integrate multiple voices, multiple discursive forms, and multiple genres of writing—what Bahktin, in his book on Dostoevsky, called polyphony—into a single whole. Inventing Abendroth gave me the opportunity to do something I have always wanted to do but could never have done if I followed through on my plans to get a PhD in philosophy, namely, to write a book of aphorisms, which is anyway a genre that now belongs almost entirely to poets.

  When I describe my book to people as a “philosophical novel” or a “novel of ideas” it sounds somewhat old fashioned. The people who enjoy reading philosophy and the people who enjoy reading novels aren’t generally the same people anymore. Many editors, especially the ones who were expecting a page-turner, passed on the book because they felt that the philosophy slowed the narrative down, or they thought that the aphorisms were incidental and therefore expendable. While there’s no reason to expect interpretive charity from people who have to make snap decisions about whether or not to put money behind a manuscript by a largely unknown writer, I still think it’s important to tell readers that, although my book can be blazed through in a single sitting, the details are important. Every line in the book, especially the aphorisms that head each chapter, is there for a reason, and bears on the work as a whole, and these relations are to me the substance of the entire work. The concepts are the story and the story is the concepts. Whether or not people want to give my book the kind of attention that is necessary in order to see this is of course up to them, but I think it’s the only way to get the full experience.

  Rumpus: I thought it was quite daring of you as an American author to take on a British accent—did it seem like a risk to you?

  Ruby: It did. If there was one thing I was truly apprehensive about in the writing of the book, this was it. The book is set in Oxford because that’s where I happened to be when I began writing it, but early on I decided for thematic reasons that, even though it was going to be an American’s story, it would have to be told from on outsider’s perspective. These two factors gave me the idea of telling the story from an English person’s point of view, and this in turn committed me to narrating in British English. It’s an old joke that America and England are two countries separated by a common language, but beyond the basic differences in spelling, vocabulary, slang, the usages of past participles and certain prepositional phrases, and the way it’s oh-so-English to turn a statement into a question, innit?—there were still a number of difficulties involved.

  Rumpus: Like what?

  Ruby: Well, for one thing, British English is highly sensitive to the class register of your diction: whether or not you call a thing a couch, a sofa, or a settee, for example, or whether you call it a living room or a sitting room or a lounge will locate you on a very specific rung of the British class hierarchy. But it’s not even that simple. In the last fifty years or so, middle class Britons have begun to ape speech patterns they associate with the upper class, while at the same time the upper class have self-effacingly adopted formerly down class usages to distinguish themselves from upwardly mobile pretenders. Then you add the global influence of Hollywood and Americanization into the mix and things can get very unstable and imprecise. And a character like Owen is something of a moving target: he’s self-consciously transitioning from one class position to another and the language he uses has to reflect this, too. The worry was that, for American readers, his aspirational up class usages would sound archaic and pretentious, or even Southern, whereas for British readers, his down-class usages will read, ironically, as American, and that the mixture of the two will just sound like the author’s being sloppy.

  Rumpus: How did you approach it?

  Ruby: Fieldwork, research, and lots of proofreading. Whenever I was around British people—whether they were friends or people I was eavesdropping on at cafés or bars—I’d make an assessment about their probable class background and pay very close attention to their word choices. If they said something that sounded strange to my ear I’d write it down. I have tons of iPhone notes that are just lists of English locutions and their American equivalents. I did the same thing when I listened to the BBC or read British newspapers, with special attention to the comments sections. For research on classed usages I turned to Nancy Mitford’s seminal essay on “U and Non-U” (that is, upper and non-upper class) English and Kate Fox’s update in her excellent book Watching the English. I also was a regular reader of a blog called Separated by a Common Language by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex, which is devoted to the subtle differences between BE and AE. Finally, I had my publisher use a British proofreader—who caught some pretty embarrassing errors pretty late in the game—to check my math.

  Rumpus: There’s something to be said here about America and England, an allegory of incest and codependent friendship—would you care to elaborate a bit on this layer of the text?

  Ruby: Absolutely. One of the classic American narratives is the “innocents abroad” narrative or the “international theme” as it’s sometimes known. Think The Portrait of a Lady or Tender Is the Night or The Sheltering Sky or more recent expat novels like Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. A good-natured, independent, freethinking, but perhaps a little naïve American goes abroad, traditionally to Europe, where he or she overestimates the universality of American values and is corrupted or otherwise laid low by the slightly cynical, been-around-the-bend natives of the country he or she is visiting.

  This was a story that no longer seemed possible to tell in the twenty-first century. America is a global center and an almost unrivaled imperial superpower, whose politics, culture, and military influence and impact every square foot of the globe. These are the foundations for the noticeable privileges Americans citizens enjoy around the world, so, however naïve and ill-informed they may still appear to the people whose countries they are visiting, they cannot in good faith be described as innocents. To write that story today, it seemed to me, the terms of the international theme would have to be reversed. America, the so-called New World, would actually be the “abroad” to which an innocent would go and get corrupted.

  Obviously there are any number of places where this innocent could have come from, but the “special relationship” between the US and the UK really drives the theme of imperial reversal home. America, after all, is a former British colony, perhaps the first post-colonial society, and so much of its early identity was predicated on not being like England. But in the end, like a rebellious teenager who swears he’ll never become his father, the US became an empire just like Britain had been. This suggests Oedipal sexuality rather than the schizoincest that is portrayed for other reasons in The Zero and the One, but I think that the codependency of the relationship has been pretty marked in the twenty-first century.

  The Zero and the One is set in 2000 and 2001, which I believe historians will come to regard as the apex of the American empire and the beginning of its unraveling. When I wrote it, I had 9/11 in mind and what Bush and Blair were about to do in Iraq, so the book is steeped in foreboding and dread for what is just over the horizon. But if anything, the fraying of the Anglo-American “special relationship” has become more pronounced since then. I sent off my final proofs to the publisher the week after Brexit and the book is going to be published in Trump’s America. The Zero and the One allegorizes the Bush-Blair alliance in Iraq as a kind of bi-national suicide pact; the same could probably be done for Farage and Trump. It’s not yet clear whether these two pairings are even discrete events or part of a larger historical process, but what is clear is that we’re hearing the death rattle of the Anglosphere.

  ***

  Author photograph © Camille Blake.

  Amanda DeMarco is the publisher of Readux Books and translation editor at The Offing. The recipient of a 2015 PEN-Heim grant, her criticism has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The L.A. Review of Books. More from this author →

  Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

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  HELLO
  Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more)

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  THE STORY IS THE CONCEPTS: PHILOSOPHIZING WITH RYAN RUBY
  BY AMANDA DEMARCO
  May 29th, 2017

  Ryan Ruby’s The Zero and the One follows two friends at Oxford—Owen, a wide-eyed working-class Brit, and Zach, a worldly, wealthy American—on a dark, intoxicating intellectual quest. Their pursuit of the meaning of life involves all of the philosophizing, women, and travel to be expected of bright young men eager to gain experience; and yet it ends in suicide. Ruby gradually divulges the circumstances and tendencies that drive the characters to their extremes, letting the reader piece together this tale of corruption at a slow yet scintillating pace. (As a Publisher’s Weekly review noted “The novel’s trick is that none of the characters are especially in the know at any given point—each has a blind spot.”)

  This dexterous plotting shows regard for the tradition of the novel, as well as a knack for the nuts and bolts of the craft. But Ruby also makes some daring stylistic choices—the author is himself an American but the novel is narrated in British English; furthermore, woven into the story are aphorisms by an invented philosopher whose work lies at the heart of the book. I talked to Ryan Ruby about the allure and difficulties of these traditional and unorthodox elements, and how what emerged is both a story of a tormented friendship and a parable of Anglo-American relations that plays out at the sentence level.

  ***

  The Rumpus: There’s something very classic about your plotting, the way each development reveals a bit more of the intrigue—tell me a bit about the challenges of writing such a tightly plotted book.

  Ryan Ruby: From a very practical point of view, plot is the most obvious way to get from A to Z. Writing a first draft is sort of like getting yourself stuck in a labyrinth of your own making. You want a number of things to happen—narratively, stylistically, thematically—and you try to come up with a structure that will enable you to have them all, but inevitably these desires start to contradict each other and you find yourself lost in the dark and having to discard things you feel attached to if you want to get out and go forward again. In the process of doing this I discovered that, far from being the simple addition of events, plot poses certain interesting formal challenges of its own and that the tendency to put form and content in opposition to each other, rather than finding a way for them to entail one another, is more easily justified in theory than in practice.

  Rumpus: Your prose style is quite crystalline and upright, almost old-fashioned, and I think you use it to great effect in terms of pacing and control. Was the voice of the novel clear to you from the outset?

  Ruby: That’s kind of you to say. Owen has two similar but not identical voices, the one that narrates the New York chapters in the present tense and the one that narrates the Oxford chapters in the past tense. Once I had differentiated the chapters spatially and temporally, it was important to differentiate them in terms of their style and mood as well. First person present is a pretty common perspectival technique by now—there was a kerfuffle about its overuse not so long ago if I remember correctly. I drew my use of it from the nouveau roman, where the point is not so much to convey the immediacy of action, that is, to reproduce the gaze of the camera lens, but to confront both the character and the reader with a sense of the limitations of their knowledge. The resulting mood, I hope, is one of fragmentation and dread, of Owen’s being blown about by forces beyond his understanding and control. In the past tense chapters, the prose style is indeed much more “old-fashioned” as you put it, much more indebted to the lyrical realism of the ancient roman. My agent calls it “book voice” and it came much more naturally to me than the other one did. In the past tense Oxford chapters, I aimed to use a voice that was not only setting-appropriate, but would allow for Owen to analyze and reflect in a mood of, let’s call it, elegiac nostalgia. The idea was that, although the two paths for the novel had diverged in a yellow wood, there was still a way to take them both.

  Rumpus: A fictional book of philosophical aphorisms plays a central role in story, and there’s quite a bit of philosophy woven into the plot itself. How did you go about balancing the conceptual and narrative aspects of the book?

  Ruby: Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One, that is, the book within the book, was probably the must fun thing to write. I figured I might as well use the freedom I have as a novelist to invent a philosopher to suit my purposes. After all, the advantage of the form is that it can integrate multiple voices, multiple discursive forms, and multiple genres of writing—what Bahktin, in his book on Dostoevsky, called polyphony—into a single whole. Inventing Abendroth gave me the opportunity to do something I have always wanted to do but could never have done if I followed through on my plans to get a PhD in philosophy, namely, to write a book of aphorisms, which is anyway a genre that now belongs almost entirely to poets.

  When I describe my book to people as a “philosophical novel” or a “novel of ideas” it sounds somewhat old fashioned. The people who enjoy reading philosophy and the people who enjoy reading novels aren’t generally the same people anymore. Many editors, especially the ones who were expecting a page-turner, passed on the book because they felt that the philosophy slowed the narrative down, or they thought that the aphorisms were incidental and therefore expendable. While there’s no reason to expect interpretive charity from people who have to make snap decisions about whether or not to put money behind a manuscript by a largely unknown writer, I still think it’s important to tell readers that, although my book can be blazed through in a single sitting, the details are important. Every line in the book, especially the aphorisms that head each chapter, is there for a reason, and bears on the work as a whole, and these relations are to me the substance of the entire work. The concepts are the story and the story is the concepts. Whether or not people want to give my book the kind of attention that is necessary in order to see this is of course up to them, but I think it’s the only way to get the full experience.

  Rumpus: I thought it was quite daring of you as an American author to take on a British accent—did it seem like a risk to you?

  Ruby: It did. If there was one thing I was truly apprehensive about in the writing of the book, this was it. The book is set in Oxford because that’s where I happened to be when I began writing it, but early on I decided for thematic reasons that, even though it was going to be an American’s story, it would have to be told from on outsider’s perspective. These two factors gave me the idea of telling the story from an English person’s point of view, and this in turn committed me to narrating in British English. It’s an old joke that America and England are two countries separated by a common language, but beyond the basic differences in spelling, vocabulary, slang, the usages of past participles and certain prepositional phrases, and the way it’s oh-so-English to turn a statement into a question, innit?—there were still a number of difficulties involved.

  Rumpus: Like what?

  Ruby: Well, for one thing, British English is highly sensitive to the class register of your diction: whether or not you call a thing a couch, a sofa, or a settee, for example, or whether you call it a living room or a sitting room or a lounge will locate you on a very specific rung of the British class hierarchy. But it’s not even that simple. In the last fifty years or so, middle class Britons have begun to ape speech patterns they associate with the upper class, while at the same time the upper class have self-effacingly adopted formerly down class usages to distinguish themselves from upwardly mobile pretenders. Then you add the global influence of Hollywood and Americanization into the mix and things can get very unstable and imprecise. And a character like Owen is something of a moving target: he’s self-consciously transitioning from one class position to another and the language he uses has to reflect this, too. The worry was that, for American readers, his aspirational up class usages would sound archaic and pretentious, or even Southern, whereas for British readers, his down-class usages will read, ironically, as American, and that the mixture of the two will just sound like the author’s being sloppy.

  Rumpus: How did you approach it?

  Ruby: Fieldwork, research, and lots of proofreading. Whenever I was around British people—whether they were friends or people I was eavesdropping on at cafés or bars—I’d make an assessment about their probable class background and pay very close attention to their word choices. If they said something that sounded strange to my ear I’d write it down. I have tons of iPhone notes that are just lists of English locutions and their American equivalents. I did the same thing when I listened to the BBC or read British newspapers, with special attention to the comments sections. For research on classed usages I turned to Nancy Mitford’s seminal essay on “U and Non-U” (that is, upper and non-upper class) English and Kate Fox’s update in her excellent book Watching the English. I also was a regular reader of a blog called Separated by a Common Language by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex, which is devoted to the subtle differences between BE and AE. Finally, I had my publisher use a British proofreader—who caught some pretty embarrassing errors pretty late in the game—to check my math.

  Rumpus: There’s something to be said here about America and England, an allegory of incest and codependent friendship—would you care to elaborate a bit on this layer of the text?

  Ruby: Absolutely. One of the classic American narratives is the “innocents abroad” narrative or the “international theme” as it’s sometimes known. Think The Portrait of a Lady or Tender Is the Night or The Sheltering Sky or more recent expat novels like Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. A good-natured, independent, freethinking, but perhaps a little naïve American goes abroad, traditionally to Europe, where he or she overestimates the universality of American values and is corrupted or otherwise laid low by the slightly cynical, been-around-the-bend natives of the country he or she is visiting.

  This was a story that no longer seemed possible to tell in the twenty-first century. America is a global center and an almost unrivaled imperial superpower, whose politics, culture, and military influence and impact every square foot of the globe. These are the foundations for the noticeable privileges Americans citizens enjoy around the world, so, however naïve and ill-informed they may still appear to the people whose countries they are visiting, they cannot in good faith be described as innocents. To write that story today, it seemed to me, the terms of the international theme would have to be reversed. America, the so-called New World, would actually be the “abroad” to which an innocent would go and get corrupted.

  Obviously there are any number of places where this innocent could have come from, but the “special relationship” between the US and the UK really drives the theme of imperial reversal home. America, after all, is a former British colony, perhaps the first post-colonial society, and so much of its early identity was predicated on not being like England. But in the end, like a rebellious teenager who swears he’ll never become his father, the US became an empire just like Britain had been. This suggests Oedipal sexuality rather than the schizoincest that is portrayed for other reasons in The Zero and the One, but I think that the codependency of the relationship has been pretty marked in the twenty-first century.

  The Zero and the One is set in 2000 and 2001, which I believe historians will come to regard as the apex of the American empire and the beginning of its unraveling. When I wrote it, I had 9/11 in mind and what Bush and Blair were about to do in Iraq, so the book is steeped in foreboding and dread for what is just over the horizon. But if anything, the fraying of the Anglo-American “special relationship” has become more pronounced since then. I sent off my final proofs to the publisher the week after Brexit and the book is going to be published in Trump’s America. The Zero and the One allegorizes the Bush-Blair alliance in Iraq as a kind of bi-national suicide pact; the same could probably be done for Farage and Trump. It’s not yet clear whether these two pairings are even discrete events or part of a larger historical process, but what is clear is that we’re hearing the death rattle of the Anglosphere.

  ***

  Author photograph © Camille Blake.

  Amanda DeMarco is the publisher of Readux Books and translation editor at The Offing. The recipient of a 2015 PEN-Heim grant, her criticism has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The L.A. Review of Books. More from this author →

  Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

  RELATED POSTS
  Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
  Say the Name
  A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari
  On Speaking Plainly: A Conversation with Rajith Savanadasa
  A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen

  OTHER COOL STUFF

  The Last Poem I Loved: “The Cinnamon Peeler” by Michael Ondaatje
  Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
  Both Companion and Guide: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World
  The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #103: Andrew Battershill
  Rumpus Original Fiction: Mutual Exploitation
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  $5.00$9.99
  (2993)
  Ads by Amazon

  HELLO
  Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more)

  © 2016 THE RUMPUS

  NAVIGATION
  Home
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  ShareThis Copy and Paste:) Looking at the bright side, while standing in the shade. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE STORY IS THE CONCEPTS: PHILOSOPHIZING WITH RYAN RUBY BY AMANDA DEMARCO May 29th, 2017 Ryan Ruby’s The Zero and the One follows two friends at Oxford—Owen, a wide-eyed working-class Brit, and Zach, a worldly, wealthy American—on a dark, intoxicating intellectual quest. Their pursuit of the meaning of life involves all of the philosophizing, women, and travel to be expected of bright young men eager to gain experience; and yet it ends in suicide. Ruby gradually divulges the circumstances and tendencies that drive the characters to their extremes, letting the reader piece together this tale of corruption at a slow yet scintillating pace. (As a Publisher’s Weekly review noted “The novel’s trick is that none of the characters are especially in the know at any given point—each has a blind spot.”) This dexterous plotting shows regard for the tradition of the novel, as well as a knack for the nuts and bolts of the craft. But Ruby also makes some daring stylistic choices—the author is himself an American but the novel is narrated in British English; furthermore, woven into the story are aphorisms by an invented philosopher whose work lies at the heart of the book. I talked to Ryan Ruby about the allure and difficulties of these traditional and unorthodox elements, and how what emerged is both a story of a tormented friendship and a parable of Anglo-American relations that plays out at the sentence level. *** The Rumpus: There’s something very classic about your plotting, the way each development reveals a bit more of the intrigue—tell me a bit about the challenges of writing such a tightly plotted book. Ryan Ruby: From a very practical point of view, plot is the most obvious way to get from A to Z. Writing a first draft is sort of like getting yourself stuck in a labyrinth of your own making. You want a number of things to happen—narratively, stylistically, thematically—and you try to come up with a structure that will enable you to have them all, but inevitably these desires start to contradict each other and you find yourself lost in the dark and having to discard things you feel attached to if you want to get out and go forward again. In the process of doing this I discovered that, far from being the simple addition of events, plot poses certain interesting formal challenges of its own and that the tendency to put form and content in opposition to each other, rather than finding a way for them to entail one another, is more easily justified in theory than in practice. Rumpus: Your prose style is quite crystalline and upright, almost old-fashioned, and I think you use it to great effect in terms of pacing and control. Was the voice of the novel clear to you from the outset? Ruby: That’s kind of you to say. Owen has two similar but not identical voices, the one that narrates the New York chapters in the present tense and the one that narrates the Oxford chapters in the past tense. Once I had differentiated the chapters spatially and temporally, it was important to differentiate them in terms of their style and mood as well. First person present is a pretty common perspectival technique by now—there was a kerfuffle about its overuse not so long ago if I remember correctly. I drew my use of it from the nouveau roman, where the point is not so much to convey the immediacy of action, that is, to reproduce the gaze of the camera lens, but to confront both the character and the reader with a sense of the limitations of their knowledge. The resulting mood, I hope, is one of fragmentation and dread, of Owen’s being blown about by forces beyond his understanding and control. In the past tense chapters, the prose style is indeed much more “old-fashioned” as you put it, much more indebted to the lyrical realism of the ancient roman. My agent calls it “book voice” and it came much more naturally to me than the other one did. In the past tense Oxford chapters, I aimed to use a voice that was not only setting-appropriate, but would allow for Owen to analyze and reflect in a mood of, let’s call it, elegiac nostalgia. The idea was that, although the two paths for the novel had diverged in a yellow wood, there was still a way to take them both. Rumpus: A fictional book of philosophical aphorisms plays a central role in story, and there’s quite a bit of philosophy woven into the plot itself. How did you go about balancing the conceptual and narrative aspects of the book? Ruby: Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One, that is, the book within the book, was probably the must fun thing to write. I figured I might as well use the freedom I have as a novelist to invent a philosopher to suit my purposes. After all, the advantage of the form is that it can integrate multiple voices, multiple discursive forms, and multiple genres of writing—what Bahktin, in his book on Dostoevsky, called polyphony—into a single whole. Inventing Abendroth gave me the opportunity to do something I have always wanted to do but could never have done if I followed through on my plans to get a PhD in philosophy, namely, to write a book of aphorisms, which is anyway a genre that now belongs almost entirely to poets. When I describe my book to people as a “philosophical novel” or a “novel of ideas” it sounds somewhat old fashioned. The people who enjoy reading philosophy and the people who enjoy reading novels aren’t generally the same people anymore. Many editors, especially the ones who were expecting a page-turner, passed on the book because they felt that the philosophy slowed the narrative down, or they thought that the aphorisms were incidental and therefore expendable. While there’s no reason to expect interpretive charity from people who have to make snap decisions about whether or not to put money behind a manuscript by a largely unknown writer, I still think it’s important to tell readers that, although my book can be blazed through in a single sitting, the details are important. Every line in the book, especially the aphorisms that head each chapter, is there for a reason, and bears on the work as a whole, and these relations are to me the substance of the entire work. The concepts are the story and the story is the concepts. Whether or not people want to give my book the kind of attention that is necessary in order to see this is of course up to them, but I think it’s the only way to get the full experience. Rumpus: I thought it was quite daring of you as an American author to take on a British accent—did it seem like a risk to you? Ruby: It did. If there was one thing I was truly apprehensive about in the writing of the book, this was it. The book is set in Oxford because that’s where I happened to be when I began writing it, but early on I decided for thematic reasons that, even though it was going to be an American’s story, it would have to be told from on outsider’s perspective. These two factors gave me the idea of telling the story from an English person’s point of view, and this in turn committed me to narrating in British English. It’s an old joke that America and England are two countries separated by a common language, but beyond the basic differences in spelling, vocabulary, slang, the usages of past participles and certain prepositional phrases, and the way it’s oh-so-English to turn a statement into a question, innit?—there were still a number of difficulties involved. Rumpus: Like what? Ruby: Well, for one thing, British English is highly sensitive to the class register of your diction: whether or not you call a thing a couch, a sofa, or a settee, for example, or whether you call it a living room or a sitting room or a lounge will locate you on a very specific rung of the British class hierarchy. But it’s not even that simple. In the last fifty years or so, middle class Britons have begun to ape speech patterns they associate with the upper class, while at the same time the upper class have self-effacingly adopted formerly down class usages to distinguish themselves from upwardly mobile pretenders. Then you add the global influence of Hollywood and Americanization into the mix and things can get very unstable and imprecise. And a character like Owen is something of a moving target: he’s self-consciously transitioning from one class position to another and the language he uses has to reflect this, too. The worry was that, for American readers, his aspirational up class usages would sound archaic and pretentious, or even Southern, whereas for British readers, his down-class usages will read, ironically, as American, and that the mixture of the two will just sound like the author’s being sloppy. Rumpus: How did you approach it? Ruby: Fieldwork, research, and lots of proofreading. Whenever I was around British people—whether they were friends or people I was eavesdropping on at cafés or bars—I’d make an assessment about their probable class background and pay very close attention to their word choices. If they said something that sounded strange to my ear I’d write it down. I have tons of iPhone notes that are just lists of English locutions and their American equivalents. I did the same thing when I listened to the BBC or read British newspapers, with special attention to the comments sections. For research on classed usages I turned to Nancy Mitford’s seminal essay on “U and Non-U” (that is, upper and non-upper class) English and Kate Fox’s update in her excellent book Watching the English. I also was a regular reader of a blog called Separated by a Common Language by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex, which is devoted to the subtle differences between BE and AE. Finally, I had my publisher use a British proofreader—who caught some pretty embarrassing errors pretty late in the game—to check my math. Rumpus: There’s something to be said here about America and England, an allegory of incest and codependent friendship—would you care to elaborate a bit on this layer of the text? Ruby: Absolutely. One of the classic American narratives is the “innocents abroad” narrative or the “international theme” as it’s sometimes known. Think The Portrait of a Lady or Tender Is the Night or The Sheltering Sky or more recent expat novels like Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. A good-natured, independent, freethinking, but perhaps a little naïve American goes abroad, traditionally to Europe, where he or she overestimates the universality of American values and is corrupted or otherwise laid low by the slightly cynical, been-around-the-bend natives of the country he or she is visiting. This was a story that no longer seemed possible to tell in the twenty-first century. America is a global center and an almost unrivaled imperial superpower, whose politics, culture, and military influence and impact every square foot of the globe. These are the foundations for the noticeable privileges Americans citizens enjoy around the world, so, however naïve and ill-informed they may still appear to the people whose countries they are visiting, they cannot in good faith be described as innocents. To write that story today, it seemed to me, the terms of the international theme would have to be reversed. America, the so-called New World, would actually be the “abroad” to which an innocent would go and get corrupted. Obviously there are any number of places where this innocent could have come from, but the “special relationship” between the US and the UK really drives the theme of imperial reversal home. America, after all, is a former British colony, perhaps the first post-colonial society, and so much of its early identity was predicated on not being like England. But in the end, like a rebellious teenager who swears he’ll never become his father, the US became an empire just like Britain had been. This suggests Oedipal sexuality rather than the schizoincest that is portrayed for other reasons in The Zero and the One, but I think that the codependency of the relationship has been pretty marked in the twenty-first century. The Zero and the One is set in 2000 and 2001, which I believe historians will come to regard as the apex of the American empire and the beginning of its unraveling. When I wrote it, I had 9/11 in mind and what Bush and Blair were about to do in Iraq, so the book is steeped in foreboding and dread for what is just over the horizon. But if anything, the fraying of the Anglo-American “special relationship” has become more pronounced since then. I sent off my final proofs to the publisher the week after Brexit and the book is going to be published in Trump’s America. The Zero and the One allegorizes the Bush-Blair alliance in Iraq as a kind of bi-national suicide pact; the same could probably be done for Farage and Trump. It’s not yet clear whether these two pairings are even discrete events or part of a larger historical process, but what is clear is that we’re hearing the death rattle of the Anglosphere. *** Author photograph © Camille Blake. Amanda DeMarco is the publisher of Readux Books and translation editor at The Offing. The recipient of a 2015 PEN-Heim grant, her criticism has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The L.A. Review of Books. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt Say the Name A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari On Speaking Plainly: A Conversation with Rajith Savanadasa A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen OTHER COOL STUFF The Last Poem I Loved: “The Cinnamon Peeler” by Michael Ondaatje Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation Both Companion and Guide: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #103: Andrew Battershill Rumpus Original Fiction: Mutual Exploitation You May Like These Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and the B… $33.04$40.00 (1) The Superior Foes of Spider-Man Omnibus $42.71$49.99 (8) The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape Am… $21.75$35.00 (60) Out of Breath (The Breathing Series) $5.00$9.99 (2993) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more) © 2016 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise Looking at the bright side, while standing in the shade. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE STORY IS THE CONCEPTS: PHILOSOPHIZING WITH RYAN RUBY BY AMANDA DEMARCO May 29th, 2017 Ryan Ruby’s The Zero and the One follows two friends at Oxford—Owen, a wide-eyed working-class Brit, and Zach, a worldly, wealthy American—on a dark, intoxicating intellectual quest. Their pursuit of the meaning of life involves all of the philosophizing, women, and travel to be expected of bright young men eager to gain experience; and yet it ends in suicide. Ruby gradually divulges the circumstances and tendencies that drive the characters to their extremes, letting the reader piece together this tale of corruption at a slow yet scintillating pace. (As a Publisher’s Weekly review noted “The novel’s trick is that none of the characters are especially in the know at any given point—each has a blind spot.”) This dexterous plotting shows regard for the tradition of the novel, as well as a knack for the nuts and bolts of the craft. But Ruby also makes some daring stylistic choices—the author is himself an American but the novel is narrated in British English; furthermore, woven into the story are aphorisms by an invented philosopher whose work lies at the heart of the book. I talked to Ryan Ruby about the allure and difficulties of these traditional and unorthodox elements, and how what emerged is both a story of a tormented friendship and a parable of Anglo-American relations that plays out at the sentence level. *** The Rumpus: There’s something very classic about your plotting, the way each development reveals a bit more of the intrigue—tell me a bit about the challenges of writing such a tightly plotted book. Ryan Ruby: From a very practical point of view, plot is the most obvious way to get from A to Z. Writing a first draft is sort of like getting yourself stuck in a labyrinth of your own making. You want a number of things to happen—narratively, stylistically, thematically—and you try to come up with a structure that will enable you to have them all, but inevitably these desires start to contradict each other and you find yourself lost in the dark and having to discard things you feel attached to if you want to get out and go forward again. In the process of doing this I discovered that, far from being the simple addition of events, plot poses certain interesting formal challenges of its own and that the tendency to put form and content in opposition to each other, rather than finding a way for them to entail one another, is more easily justified in theory than in practice. Rumpus: Your prose style is quite crystalline and upright, almost old-fashioned, and I think you use it to great effect in terms of pacing and control. Was the voice of the novel clear to you from the outset? Ruby: That’s kind of you to say. Owen has two similar but not identical voices, the one that narrates the New York chapters in the present tense and the one that narrates the Oxford chapters in the past tense. Once I had differentiated the chapters spatially and temporally, it was important to differentiate them in terms of their style and mood as well. First person present is a pretty common perspectival technique by now—there was a kerfuffle about its overuse not so long ago if I remember correctly. I drew my use of it from the nouveau roman, where the point is not so much to convey the immediacy of action, that is, to reproduce the gaze of the camera lens, but to confront both the character and the reader with a sense of the limitations of their knowledge. The resulting mood, I hope, is one of fragmentation and dread, of Owen’s being blown about by forces beyond his understanding and control. In the past tense chapters, the prose style is indeed much more “old-fashioned” as you put it, much more indebted to the lyrical realism of the ancient roman. My agent calls it “book voice” and it came much more naturally to me than the other one did. In the past tense Oxford chapters, I aimed to use a voice that was not only setting-appropriate, but would allow for Owen to analyze and reflect in a mood of, let’s call it, elegiac nostalgia. The idea was that, although the two paths for the novel had diverged in a yellow wood, there was still a way to take them both. Rumpus: A fictional book of philosophical aphorisms plays a central role in story, and there’s quite a bit of philosophy woven into the plot itself. How did you go about balancing the conceptual and narrative aspects of the book? Ruby: Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One, that is, the book within the book, was probably the must fun thing to write. I figured I might as well use the freedom I have as a novelist to invent a philosopher to suit my purposes. After all, the advantage of the form is that it can integrate multiple voices, multiple discursive forms, and multiple genres of writing—what Bahktin, in his book on Dostoevsky, called polyphony—into a single whole. Inventing Abendroth gave me the opportunity to do something I have always wanted to do but could never have done if I followed through on my plans to get a PhD in philosophy, namely, to write a book of aphorisms, which is anyway a genre that now belongs almost entirely to poets. When I describe my book to people as a “philosophical novel” or a “novel of ideas” it sounds somewhat old fashioned. The people who enjoy reading philosophy and the people who enjoy reading novels aren’t generally the same people anymore. Many editors, especially the ones who were expecting a page-turner, passed on the book because they felt that the philosophy slowed the narrative down, or they thought that the aphorisms were incidental and therefore expendable. While there’s no reason to expect interpretive charity from people who have to make snap decisions about whether or not to put money behind a manuscript by a largely unknown writer, I still think it’s important to tell readers that, although my book can be blazed through in a single sitting, the details are important. Every line in the book, especially the aphorisms that head each chapter, is there for a reason, and bears on the work as a whole, and these relations are to me the substance of the entire work. The concepts are the story and the story is the concepts. Whether or not people want to give my book the kind of attention that is necessary in order to see this is of course up to them, but I think it’s the only way to get the full experience. Rumpus: I thought it was quite daring of you as an American author to take on a British accent—did it seem like a risk to you? Ruby: It did. If there was one thing I was truly apprehensive about in the writing of the book, this was it. The book is set in Oxford because that’s where I happened to be when I began writing it, but early on I decided for thematic reasons that, even though it was going to be an American’s story, it would have to be told from on outsider’s perspective. These two factors gave me the idea of telling the story from an English person’s point of view, and this in turn committed me to narrating in British English. It’s an old joke that America and England are two countries separated by a common language, but beyond the basic differences in spelling, vocabulary, slang, the usages of past participles and certain prepositional phrases, and the way it’s oh-so-English to turn a statement into a question, innit?—there were still a number of difficulties involved. Rumpus: Like what? Ruby: Well, for one thing, British English is highly sensitive to the class register of your diction: whether or not you call a thing a couch, a sofa, or a settee, for example, or whether you call it a living room or a sitting room or a lounge will locate you on a very specific rung of the British class hierarchy. But it’s not even that simple. In the last fifty years or so, middle class Britons have begun to ape speech patterns they associate with the upper class, while at the same time the upper class have self-effacingly adopted formerly down class usages to distinguish themselves from upwardly mobile pretenders. Then you add the global influence of Hollywood and Americanization into the mix and things can get very unstable and imprecise. And a character like Owen is something of a moving target: he’s self-consciously transitioning from one class position to another and the language he uses has to reflect this, too. The worry was that, for American readers, his aspirational up class usages would sound archaic and pretentious, or even Southern, whereas for British readers, his down-class usages will read, ironically, as American, and that the mixture of the two will just sound like the author’s being sloppy. Rumpus: How did you approach it? Ruby: Fieldwork, research, and lots of proofreading. Whenever I was around British people—whether they were friends or people I was eavesdropping on at cafés or bars—I’d make an assessment about their probable class background and pay very close attention to their word choices. If they said something that sounded strange to my ear I’d write it down. I have tons of iPhone notes that are just lists of English locutions and their American equivalents. I did the same thing when I listened to the BBC or read British newspapers, with special attention to the comments sections. For research on classed usages I turned to Nancy Mitford’s seminal essay on “U and Non-U” (that is, upper and non-upper class) English and Kate Fox’s update in her excellent book Watching the English. I also was a regular reader of a blog called Separated by a Common Language by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex, which is devoted to the subtle differences between BE and AE. Finally, I had my publisher use a British proofreader—who caught some pretty embarrassing errors pretty late in the game—to check my math. Rumpus: There’s something to be said here about America and England, an allegory of incest and codependent friendship—would you care to elaborate a bit on this layer of the text? Ruby: Absolutely. One of the classic American narratives is the “innocents abroad” narrative or the “international theme” as it’s sometimes known. Think The Portrait of a Lady or Tender Is the Night or The Sheltering Sky or more recent expat novels like Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. A good-natured, independent, freethinking, but perhaps a little naïve American goes abroad, traditionally to Europe, where he or she overestimates the universality of American values and is corrupted or otherwise laid low by the slightly cynical, been-around-the-bend natives of the country he or she is visiting. This was a story that no longer seemed possible to tell in the twenty-first century. America is a global center and an almost unrivaled imperial superpower, whose politics, culture, and military influence and impact every square foot of the globe. These are the foundations for the noticeable privileges Americans citizens enjoy around the world, so, however naïve and ill-informed they may still appear to the people whose countries they are visiting, they cannot in good faith be described as innocents. To write that story today, it seemed to me, the terms of the international theme would have to be reversed. America, the so-called New World, would actually be the “abroad” to which an innocent would go and get corrupted. Obviously there are any number of places where this innocent could have come from, but the “special relationship” between the US and the UK really drives the theme of imperial reversal home. America, after all, is a former British colony, perhaps the first post-colonial society, and so much of its early identity was predicated on not being like England. But in the end, like a rebellious teenager who swears he’ll never become his father, the US became an empire just like Britain had been. This suggests Oedipal sexuality rather than the schizoincest that is portrayed for other reasons in The Zero and the One, but I think that the codependency of the relationship has been pretty marked in the twenty-first century. The Zero and the One is set in 2000 and 2001, which I believe historians will come to regard as the apex of the American empire and the beginning of its unraveling. When I wrote it, I had 9/11 in mind and what Bush and Blair were about to do in Iraq, so the book is steeped in foreboding and dread for what is just over the horizon. But if anything, the fraying of the Anglo-American “special relationship” has become more pronounced since then. I sent off my final proofs to the publisher the week after Brexit and the book is going to be published in Trump’s America. The Zero and the One allegorizes the Bush-Blair alliance in Iraq as a kind of bi-national suicide pact; the same could probably be done for Farage and Trump. It’s not yet clear whether these two pairings are even discrete events or part of a larger historical process, but what is clear is that we’re hearing the death rattle of the Anglosphere. *** Author photograph © Camille Blake. Amanda DeMarco is the publisher of Readux Books and translation editor at The Offing. The recipient of a 2015 PEN-Heim grant, her criticism has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The L.A. Review of Books. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt Say the Name A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari On Speaking Plainly: A Conversation with Rajith Savanadasa A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen OTHER COOL STUFF The Last Poem I Loved: “The Cinnamon Peeler” by Michael Ondaatje Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation Both Companion and Guide: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #103: Andrew Battershill Rumpus Original Fiction: Mutual Exploitation You May Like These Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and the B… $33.04$40.00 (1) The Superior Foes of Spider-Man Omnibus $42.71$49.99 (8) The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape Am… $21.75$35.00 (60) Out of Breath (The Breathing Series) $5.00$9.99 (2993) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more) © 2016 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise ShareThis Copy and Paste:)

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  Q&A with Ryan Ruby, author of debut philosophical thriller ‘The Zero and the One’
  April 10, 2017
  The Zero and The OneThe Zero and the One is Ryan Ruby’s debut novel, which has been dubbed a philosophical thriller, and has plenty of twists in the story and style, offering moments of Gothic storytelling, mystery suspense, and the wise contemplations of fine fiction. It is a brilliant story told by a shy intellectual, Owen Whiting, who is recovering from the death of his friend Zach. We spoke with Ryan Ruby about what it took to write such a fascinating and inventive book.

  Better Reading: Hi Ryan, congratulations on the publication of The Zero and the One! What’s the story about?

  Ryan Ruby: Thank you kindly, Jack. Let’s see. On the face of it, the story’s about a failed suicide pact between two Oxford philosophy students in the years 2000-1. But really, it’s about the psychology of charismatic leadership, the special relationship between the American and British empires, the special relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, the conflict between the aesthetic and the political, how to read the world as if it were a book, media technology, number theory, culture and anarchy, triangular desire, identity theft, doubles, depersonalization, the nature of taboo, how when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers, the dangers of abstract thought and, why not, the meaning of life.

  BR: Could you tell us how you ended up writing a novel?

  RR: Well, with The Zero and the One I was cheating on a different novel I had been working on for four years and which had swelled to over four hundred pages and still showed no signs of going anywhere. It was actually supposed to be a novella that I was planning to submit to a competition that was offering 10,000 euros and a flight to Paris. The goal was to win the competition, move to Europe, and go back to work on the other novel, but by the time the deadline rolled around I was way over the allotted word count and only two-thirds of the way towards the ending. At which point, since there was actually an end in sight, I decided to keep going and finish it. I didn’t know then of course that it would be another four years and ten drafts before it would finally be published, but I suppose you could say that in March I did the right thing and finally married my mistress.

  BR: What were some of the main sources of inspiration? Personal experience, philosophy, a mixture of both?

  RR: A writer is less the producer of a book than a place where a book ends up happening. Or, to look at it from the other direction, the book is, in the first place, an excretion caused by the fever that results when a receptive organism is infected by potent concentrations of language. Naturally this excretion will bear the distinctive character of the body it was filtered through: what we call inspiration—which means, literally, “to breathe in”—is barely a euphemism for this physiological process. It follows that everything that formed the organism, including personal experiences, bears on the resulting excretion, even though only ones that pass a certain threshold of intensity get expressed. Of these I suppose my experience as an only child, as an American at Oxford, as an eighteen year old in New York, as a socialist fellow traveller, of having been on both sides of the Zach/Owen relationship, of having been what the medical literature would call a suicidal ideator but I would call thinking and what the medical literature would call depersonalization but I would call modernism, and yes, even philosophy itself, which, as a way of life, provides personal experiences of the most intense variety, have had the most bearing on the manifest content of The Zero and the One.

  BR: The book deals with some pretty hefty themes, such as moral philosophy and suicide. For you, what is the attraction of using fiction as a way to explore philosophical possibilities?

  RR: The essential freedom that the novelist has, which the philosopher lacks, in exploring philosophical themes, is irony. Whatever else has to occur in a philosophical paper, the assumption is that you, the author, are saying what you believe to be definitively the case and are providing the best possible arguments for why you think it is so. With fiction you have the freedom to represent multiple points of view without ever endorsing any of them and to allow them to act as serious existential options for your characters without making any further statement about their truth-value. The point of this is not merely to engage in a kind of value pluralism that declares serious moral conflicts to be ultimately irreconcilable and skeptically “reserves judgment” about moral claims—though I also happen to think this is the philosophical stance proper to the novel—the point is also to show why views, even those with which you happen to disagree, are compelling to the people who hold them and how the phenomenon of belief is more complicated than being rationally persuaded by an argument. To take the example of the morality of suicide, I have tried to present views with equal force whether I happen to agree with them or not, and I hope the reader will not be able to tell which of my characters articulates the views I happen to agree with.

  BR: Throughout the novel your characters travel to various places: New York, London, and Berlin. How did you go about capturing the essential atmospheres of these different cities?

  RR: The book is set in the places its set because I happened to be in those places when I was writing the first draft and I wanted to send my characters off on the same (ok, well not exactly the same) adventures I was having. While all of these cities are very distinct, I attempted to depict them as paysages moralisés with a common—let’s call it gothic—atmosphere of menace and dread. This was done with weather (the oppressive humidity of New York, the obscuring fog of London), with architecture (the Twin Towers and the two churches on Gendarmenmarkt), with historical allusion (the party in London takes place in the building where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived, the publisher’s office in Berlin is located on a street named for Richard Wagner), and time of day (night, night, night).

  BR: Zach and Owen are compelling characters in their own right. Owen, the observer, is withdrawn but bold, and Zach is eccentric and bigger-than-life. What was the process like representing such different and unique characters?

  RR: What I did was to take opposing tendencies within myself, cut myself into two, push each of the newly isolated tendencies to its logical extreme. I called one Zach and the other one Owen, and then imagined how they would interact with each other if they were autonomous beings. But I wouldn’t describe Zach and Owen as different and unique so much as they are opposite and complementary: opposites aren’t mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive, they define one another, one term can’t exist without the other, and is always on the verge of becoming the other. And that’s precisely what happens to Owen. His admiration of Zach turns into a desire to become Zach and he learns, too late, of course, when he starts to see Zach from the inside, that his initial admiration was dangerously unjustified.

  BR: Are there any authors in particular that have really inspired you as a writer, and The Zero and the One in particular?Ryan Ruby

  RR: Oh, too many to name. Like many writers, I got into this mess because I read too much, too early. On the subject of influence, I consider myself to be almost omni-influencable and the meaning of my book is in a deep sense to be found in other books. And in books as in people, you never forget your first loves, which set your taste for the rest of your life. In my case I came to want to write fiction thanks to an early encounter with High Modernism: Joyce-Proust-Wittgenstein-Eliot are my gospels and they inform everything I have written and everything I will write, although the more visible influences on The Zero and the One are Poe and Dostoevsky. The Zero and the One is a book that wears its source material—literary, but also artistic, musical, and philosophical—on its sleeve, but since I have the opportunity here, I’ll trace out the genealogy of two characters, Zach and Hans Abendroth. Zach draws his ancestry from monomaniacal villains like Iago, Milton’s Satan, Captain Ahab, Kurtz, Stavarogin, and Humbert Humbert. And Abendroth’s philosophy is a self-conscious pastiche of the aphorists like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Cioran and Blanchot.

  BR: Could you tell us about your writing process? Do you write in the morning, at night, in cafes, in a quiet study?

  RR: As I was saying earlier, to ask about the writing process is to ask about the physiology of the writer. Writing is all about the physiological rhythms—circadian, digestive, ambulatory, and so forth—that put the mind in the necessary state for composition, ecstatic or reflective or analytic, given the needs of the text at the particular moment you’re working on it. So I should say that I generally wake up around 11 and I go to sleep again at 3. I get by on a half a dozen cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes a day. But being able to move has always been conducive to good writing for me, because thought induces maniacal restlessness and writing helps drive it off, though if things are going very well writing actually exacerbates the problem and then you need a stiff drink, another pack of cigarettes, and Johann Sebastian Bach. I’ve always had the good fortune to live in neighborhoods where there are many cafés so what I like to do is order a coffee, do some writing, gather my thoughts on my walk to the next one, order a cup off coffee, write down the thoughts I gathered during my walk, repeat. At night, when I’m at home, I pace around my room. But if I’m in the middle of a project and I’m awake I’m always writing, whether I’m sitting in front of a piece of paper or a computer screen and moving my fingers or just quietly talking to myself and looking at the world with a writerly gaze, looking for the world to furnish me with the details I need. The Zero and the One was written in cafés in Oxford, New York, Berlin, Tbilisi, and Los Angeles, but also in a cabin in New Hampshire, and in the trains, subways, buses, and airplanes that got me to and through all those places. If the book achieves a certain exit velocity in the reading it’s because it was written almost entirely in motion.

  BR: What did you want readers to take away from reading The Zero and the One?

  RR: I’m reluctant to answer this question because part of the pleasure of reading is solving the author’s puzzles, but thus far I’ve run into the following problem: early readers do not seem to have been aware that there are puzzles to be solved. So I would like to alert any future reader, while trying to be as vague as possible, that there are at least two parallel readings of the book, an exoteric and an esoteric reading. In each case the book is a kind of code for a program, which will produce a specific kind of hallucination in the person who reads it. From the first, which can be hallucinated easily enough by simply attending to the plot, the experience I hope the reader has is one of a descent into the maelstrom, in which the reader ingests more and more of the code to see just how far down the vortex goes and how dark it can get down there. But the second requires meticulous attention to every motif, name, detail, allusion, symbol, and repetition I’ve encoded into the book. I hope the reader will see that every word in the book was put there by design and that every part of the book is a reflection, in miniature, of the whole. My intention was to produce the hallucination that the world can be like this as well. If one reads the world as one reads my book one will have the sublime illusion that the world, in its vast proliferation of normally unremarked upon detail, is itself designed, patterned, meaningful, interconnected, and saturated with intolerable levels of significance and wonder.

  BR: What can we look forward to in the future?

  RR: If I knew that, my dear sir, we’d be having a very different conversation!

  Click here to grab a copy, start reading the opening chapter, or read the Better Reading review of The Zero and the One!
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• Affirm Press - http://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/ryan-ruby/

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  Ryan Ruby
  Ryan RubyBorn in Los Angeles, Ryan Ruby was educated at Columbia University, Oxford University and the University of Chicago. He has been a bookseller in Los Angeles, a tour guide in Berlin, a layabout in New Orleans and a lecturer in philosophy at the City University of New York.

  His fiction, literary criticism and political commentary have appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Paris Review Daily, n + 1, The Baffler, Conjunctions, Dissent and Lapham’s Quarterly. Ryan Ruby lives in Berlin.

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10/3/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507063670583 1/2
Print Marked Items
The Zero and the One
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Zero and the One.
By Ryan Ruby.
Mar. 2017. 272p. Twelve, paper, $14.99 (9781455565184); e-book, $9.99 (9781455565191).
Ruby's debut novel follows Oxford sophomore Owen Whiting as he pieces together the death of his closest friend, a
visiting student from New York City, Zachary Foedern. Zach opens the door to a racier existence for shy, quiet Owen,
taking him to parties and introducing him to women and drugs. Owens struggle to understand Zach's possible suicide
leads him across the pond for an Upper East Side funeral. There, Owen meets Vera, Zach's enchanting twin sister, who
holds a dark secret about the final year of her brother's life. Though the tone suggests a Patricia Highsmithian
midcentury setting, characters receive e-mail and the first incarnations of text messages, placing the story in year 2001.
The sense of time (and doom) is heightened by late-summer breakfast dates at Windows on the World, the famous
restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. Told in alternating chapters between the time before and after Zach's
violent demise, The Zero and the One is a fast-paced, philosophical meditation on what qualifies as the worst crime
one can commit.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "The Zero and the One." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244770&it=r&asid=1c4020bdfe8fcee2732aa1b1e8b20f89.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244770

---

10/3/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507063670583 2/2
Ruby, Ryan: THE ZERO AND THE ONE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Ruby, Ryan THE ZERO AND THE ONE Twelve (Adult Fiction) $14.99 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-4555-6518-4
A young man replaces the intensity of loneliness with the intensity of dear friendship to find it can be just as
dark.Moving back and forth in time between Owen's present at his best friend Zach's funeral in New York City and
their past together at Oxford, this novel escalates to a dramatic conclusion. Owen is a thoughtful and intelligent boy
from a working-class British background, the first in his family to go to university and an outcast among his peers;
Zach is a wealthy American boy on his year abroad, brilliant and impassioned, with a reckless approach to life. Both
are philosophy students, driven to ascertain "Why is life worth living," and both feel immediate kinship with one
another. From Zach, Owen learns to be less inhibited, learns how to interact with women, learns that "you can get
away with anything, no matter how daft, if you can do it without flinching." Together they have eye-opening bonding
experiences. What begins as jocular harmony becomes disturbing, however, as Zach pushes Owen to his limits, finally
reaching one with dire consequences. Inspired by a book of German philosophy (excerpts of which open every chapter
of this novel, nodding toward what follows), the boys enter into a suicide pact. Zach's reasoning is ostensibly moral,
metaphysical, an attempt to circumvent nature and fate, to have control and freedom above all else, to become God.
But the role of his twin sister, Vera, and their complex and ardent relationship, may be more influential than Zach is
willing to admit to Owen. This Owen learns when the pact backfires and he's left alone to navigate through the murky
story that comes to light. The writing, like the characters, is smart and engrossing. Even knowing what's to come
makes the shock no less breathtaking. A potent tale of the pull people have upon one another.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ruby, Ryan: THE ZERO AND THE ONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357398&it=r&asid=81f27242bd420f87677666d8ede6fabc.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357398

Eathorne, Courtney. "The Zero and the One." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244770&it=r. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. "Ruby, Ryan: THE ZERO AND THE ONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357398&it=r. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

• LA Review of Books
  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/philosophy-life-death-ryan-rubys-zero-one/
  Word count: 1169

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  PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE AND DEATH: RYAN RUBY’S THE ZERO AND THE ONE
  APRIL 27, 2017 LARB BLOG LEAVE A COMMENT
  By Austin Adams

  Anxiously self-aware teenagers the world over ask themselves why life is worth living, and forthwith tumble into a crisis. Life cannot be lived with purpose or grace, they swear, until the Gordian knot of this dilemma is resolved. Years later, recalling the question and crisis, mortification necrotizes in the gut: how fatuous it all seems now, the urgent, naïve philosophizing of our youth.

  But then, as adults, we are always elliptically asking ourselves the question. What we prioritize and the decisions we make all betray something of our answer, which is, whatever it is, the unconscious organizing principle of our lives.

  Unconscious though it may be when deciding which job to take, or the frequency with which we exercise, we hunger still to confront the crisis directly. When we look to literature and philosophy for wisdom this is the question we’re looking to address. And yet, sensitive to accusations of pretention, literature rarely spells out the issue. In one of the few notable exceptions, Lily Briscoe asks herself in To the Lighthouse:

  What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

  Add to that list of exceptions The Zero and the One, the debut novel by translator and essayist Ryan Ruby, which takes this question as its central concern. A propulsive murder/suicide mystery that asks not who or how, in what room or with what weapon but why — why kill oneself? Why not?

  Setting, characterization, and plot are deliberately stock — a campus novel with the the pomp and odors of Oxford. The brash outsider intellectual. His reluctant, retiring friend. There is a murder and/or suicide — the question of on who takes responsibility for this death animates much of the book. There is a troubled woman entangled in an illicit relationship. And up until the book’s closing pages, these elements develop with rollicking speed, great interest but no surprise — through one year, three cities, and a single death, the astute reader can guess with near-perfect accuracy the trajectory of every relationship. Yet in what may seem a coda, but is in fact the necessary conclusion to all this seemingly predictable development, the reader is left to puzzle over a final sequence that uncomfortably conflates into a grotesque of violence, vile servility, intellectual obsession, unwavering loyalty, and absolution.

  What the hell has happened?

  That question leads back to the original: why is life worth living? Zach, our brash outsider intellectual, ultimately determines that it isn’t. And to that end, he enlists Owen, the reluctant, retiring friend, to help him execute a suicide pact. The pact is bungled: Zach dies, Owen does not. Owen flies to New York to attend Zach’s funeral. There he meets Vera, Zach’s troubled sister. Secrets are revealed, lives are changed. These are the facts, but they disclose only the what, not the why, and everything, even facts thought firmly established, is liable to be undermined by the elusive why.

  The Charon of Zach’s death drive is Hans Abendroth, an early 20th century philosopher drawn with such realism, readers will rush to purchase his back catalogue on Amazon (they’ll find nothing). Each chapter of The Zero and the One, Ruby’s novel, begins with an aphorism from Abendroth’s recondite masterpiece, The Zero and the One (Null und Eins, in the original German). Mix the self-satisfied despair of Nietzsche with the dour stateliness of Schopenhauer and round it all out with a mystic’s disinterest in being understood, and you’ll get something close to Abendroth, whose work provides Zach intellectual enticement or exculpation to die and provides for the reader a kind of intellectual teaser at the beginning of each chapter. Take, for instance, the titular aphorism:

  A Warning to the Children of Sun, Earth and Moon — Nothingness added to Being is not oneness, but duality. But as nothingness is chronologically primary to Being, Being has never been the One. Only nothingness is oneness, wholeness, harmony and totality. Being is the name for the operation that irreparably divides the Zero in Two. Our desire to recover our lost wholeness is the desire for death.

  No one dies in the proceeding chapter — the aphorisms serve a subtler function than simple foreshadowing; rather, insofar as a psychological backstory is provided for Zach’s death wish, it’s provided here. Ultimately, the reasons he wants to die are, like any human truth, only hinted at. And it is the questions left unanswered that prove the most compelling. What is love? In what degree and fashion does love differ from transgression? In what degree and fashion does friendship differ from subservience? Why is life worth living?

  The Zero and the One can’t answer that question for you, but it will, critically, force you to ask the question again. This is a rare book — a compulsively readable page-turner that is actually, unapologetically, smart.

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  Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby
  REVIEW BY KEITH RAWSON MARCH 10, 2017
  IN: BOOKSHOTS REVIEW RYAN RUBY THE ZERO AND THE ONE

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  Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby
  Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review
  Title:
  The Zero and The One

  Who wrote it?
  The type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out.
  Essayist and Translator, Ryan Ruby.

  Plot in a box:
  Zach and Owen are philosophy students at Oxford who become bros after a night of impromptu drinking and screwing. Both become students of an obscure German philosopher and start hatching up a suicide pact. But who’s manipulating who? The wealthy Zach, or the working-class scholarship student Owen?

  Invent a new title for this book:
  Aphorisms

  Read this if you like(d):
  The Secret History By Donna Tartt

  Meet the book’s lead(s):
  Zach: Bright but easily manipulated American philosophy student studying at Oxford, who has a hankering for suicide pacts and a book of philosophical aphorisms called The Zero and The One.

  Owen: Pretty much a carbon copy of Zach: Literally a carbon copy with a few slightly sinister differences.

  Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by:
  Zach and his twin sister would be played by Natalie Portman, and Owen would be played by Ben Whishaw. You know, the guy with the limp in The Lobster.

  What was your favorite sentence/passage?
  Zach’s defense of suicide was perversely moral. And by no means unpersuasive. It was the best way, he said, to preserve human dignity and freedom from the implacable annihilation that awaited us all, the only way, in fact, to pick the pocket of Nature, to whom we all owed a death.

  The Verdict:
  I’m a fan of the literary, college “bromance.” I like intellectually inclined relationships that spur on petty rivalries and inevitably lead to back biting and the occasional murder. It’s why The Secret History remains one of my favorite novels after twenty some odd years. It’s a perfect literary invention because it’s a true stretching of the imagination in a genre which prizes realism above all else, despite there being very little realism in literary fiction that depicts collegiate life. With Ryan Ruby’s debut novel, The Zero and The One takes perfect advantage of the sub-genre and has created one of the more interesting and engaging first novels that I’ve read in quite some time.

  At first Owen and Zach seem like exact opposites, but they’re both ciphers. Neither of the bookish young men has much of a personality as the story begins, but slowly but surely, each takes on the characteristics and obsessions of the other, and eventually they become a singular, contradictory version of one another (albeit, the individual who begins as the dominating personality in the relationship is revealed throughout the narrative to be the lesser, and thus far more vulnerable to the other’s manipulations), which leads to the tragic events at the crux of the novel.

  As a first-time novelist, Ruby’s voice is very assured and steady. His deliberately measured passages reveal small glimpses of Zack and Owen’s skewed personalities with each sentence, demanding the reader’s attention so as not miss these minute Hitchcockian touches that are forming up the greater narrative. The Zero and The One has been receiving early comparisons to the novels of Patricia Highsmith, although I must admit I only found slight similarities between the two, because Mr. Ruby is definitely writing with his own strong, menacing voice.

  The Zero and The One is a rare oddity within mainstream publishing: a small, complex novel that equally entertains and challenges the reader. It’s by no means commercial fiction, but it is the type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out, and you can crawl into the clammy skins of his emotionally stunted characters.

  Image of The Zero and the One: A Novel
  The Zero and the One: A Novel

  Manufacturer: Twelve
  Part Number:
  Price:

  Keith Rawson
  Review by Keith Rawson

  Keith Rawson is a little-known pulp writer whose short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published both online and in print. He is the author of the short story collection The Chaos We Know (SnubNose Press)and Co-Editor of the anthology Crime Factory: The First Shift. He lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter.

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  Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby
  REVIEW BY KEITH RAWSON MARCH 10, 2017
  IN: BOOKSHOTS REVIEW RYAN RUBY THE ZERO AND THE ONE

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  Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby
  Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review
  Title:
  The Zero and The One

  Who wrote it?
  The type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out.
  Essayist and Translator, Ryan Ruby.

  Plot in a box:
  Zach and Owen are philosophy students at Oxford who become bros after a night of impromptu drinking and screwing. Both become students of an obscure German philosopher and start hatching up a suicide pact. But who’s manipulating who? The wealthy Zach, or the working-class scholarship student Owen?

  Invent a new title for this book:
  Aphorisms

  Read this if you like(d):
  The Secret History By Donna Tartt

  Meet the book’s lead(s):
  Zach: Bright but easily manipulated American philosophy student studying at Oxford, who has a hankering for suicide pacts and a book of philosophical aphorisms called The Zero and The One.

  Owen: Pretty much a carbon copy of Zach: Literally a carbon copy with a few slightly sinister differences.

  Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by:
  Zach and his twin sister would be played by Natalie Portman, and Owen would be played by Ben Whishaw. You know, the guy with the limp in The Lobster.

  What was your favorite sentence/passage?
  Zach’s defense of suicide was perversely moral. And by no means unpersuasive. It was the best way, he said, to preserve human dignity and freedom from the implacable annihilation that awaited us all, the only way, in fact, to pick the pocket of Nature, to whom we all owed a death.

  The Verdict:
  I’m a fan of the literary, college “bromance.” I like intellectually inclined relationships that spur on petty rivalries and inevitably lead to back biting and the occasional murder. It’s why The Secret History remains one of my favorite novels after twenty some odd years. It’s a perfect literary invention because it’s a true stretching of the imagination in a genre which prizes realism above all else, despite there being very little realism in literary fiction that depicts collegiate life. With Ryan Ruby’s debut novel, The Zero and The One takes perfect advantage of the sub-genre and has created one of the more interesting and engaging first novels that I’ve read in quite some time.

  At first Owen and Zach seem like exact opposites, but they’re both ciphers. Neither of the bookish young men has much of a personality as the story begins, but slowly but surely, each takes on the characteristics and obsessions of the other, and eventually they become a singular, contradictory version of one another (albeit, the individual who begins as the dominating personality in the relationship is revealed throughout the narrative to be the lesser, and thus far more vulnerable to the other’s manipulations), which leads to the tragic events at the crux of the novel.

  As a first-time novelist, Ruby’s voice is very assured and steady. His deliberately measured passages reveal small glimpses of Zack and Owen’s skewed personalities with each sentence, demanding the reader’s attention so as not miss these minute Hitchcockian touches that are forming up the greater narrative. The Zero and The One has been receiving early comparisons to the novels of Patricia Highsmith, although I must admit I only found slight similarities between the two, because Mr. Ruby is definitely writing with his own strong, menacing voice.

  The Zero and The One is a rare oddity within mainstream publishing: a small, complex novel that equally entertains and challenges the reader. It’s by no means commercial fiction, but it is the type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out, and you can crawl into the clammy skins of his emotionally stunted characters.

  Image of The Zero and the One: A Novel
  The Zero and the One: A Novel

  Manufacturer: Twelve
  Part Number:
  Price:

  Keith Rawson
  Review by Keith Rawson

  Keith Rawson is a little-known pulp writer whose short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published both online and in print. He is the author of the short story collection The Chaos We Know (SnubNose Press)and Co-Editor of the anthology Crime Factory: The First Shift. He lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter.

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  ShareThis Copy and PasteSkip to Main Content Area Hello, if this is your first time here, login with Facebook or create a free account to get started. Otherwise, Click here to log in Online Writing Classes Writers Workshop Magazine Community Take A Tour Frontpage News Columns Interviews Reviews Craft Essays Features Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby REVIEW BY KEITH RAWSON MARCH 10, 2017 IN: BOOKSHOTS REVIEW RYAN RUBY THE ZERO AND THE ONE 24 0 Stumble 0 Reddit 0 0 77 Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Zero and The One Who wrote it? The type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out. Essayist and Translator, Ryan Ruby. Plot in a box: Zach and Owen are philosophy students at Oxford who become bros after a night of impromptu drinking and screwing. Both become students of an obscure German philosopher and start hatching up a suicide pact. But who’s manipulating who? The wealthy Zach, or the working-class scholarship student Owen? Invent a new title for this book: Aphorisms Read this if you like(d): The Secret History By Donna Tartt Meet the book’s lead(s): Zach: Bright but easily manipulated American philosophy student studying at Oxford, who has a hankering for suicide pacts and a book of philosophical aphorisms called The Zero and The One. Owen: Pretty much a carbon copy of Zach: Literally a carbon copy with a few slightly sinister differences. Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by: Zach and his twin sister would be played by Natalie Portman, and Owen would be played by Ben Whishaw. You know, the guy with the limp in The Lobster. What was your favorite sentence/passage? Zach’s defense of suicide was perversely moral. And by no means unpersuasive. It was the best way, he said, to preserve human dignity and freedom from the implacable annihilation that awaited us all, the only way, in fact, to pick the pocket of Nature, to whom we all owed a death. The Verdict: I’m a fan of the literary, college “bromance.” I like intellectually inclined relationships that spur on petty rivalries and inevitably lead to back biting and the occasional murder. It’s why The Secret History remains one of my favorite novels after twenty some odd years. It’s a perfect literary invention because it’s a true stretching of the imagination in a genre which prizes realism above all else, despite there being very little realism in literary fiction that depicts collegiate life. With Ryan Ruby’s debut novel, The Zero and The One takes perfect advantage of the sub-genre and has created one of the more interesting and engaging first novels that I’ve read in quite some time. At first Owen and Zach seem like exact opposites, but they’re both ciphers. Neither of the bookish young men has much of a personality as the story begins, but slowly but surely, each takes on the characteristics and obsessions of the other, and eventually they become a singular, contradictory version of one another (albeit, the individual who begins as the dominating personality in the relationship is revealed throughout the narrative to be the lesser, and thus far more vulnerable to the other’s manipulations), which leads to the tragic events at the crux of the novel. As a first-time novelist, Ruby’s voice is very assured and steady. His deliberately measured passages reveal small glimpses of Zack and Owen’s skewed personalities with each sentence, demanding the reader’s attention so as not miss these minute Hitchcockian touches that are forming up the greater narrative. The Zero and The One has been receiving early comparisons to the novels of Patricia Highsmith, although I must admit I only found slight similarities between the two, because Mr. Ruby is definitely writing with his own strong, menacing voice. The Zero and The One is a rare oddity within mainstream publishing: a small, complex novel that equally entertains and challenges the reader. It’s by no means commercial fiction, but it is the type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out, and you can crawl into the clammy skins of his emotionally stunted characters. The Zero and the One: A Novel Manufacturer: Twelve Part Number: Price: Review by Keith Rawson Keith Rawson is a little-known pulp writer whose short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published both online and in print. He is the author of the short story collection The Chaos We Know (SnubNose Press)and Co-Editor of the anthology Crime Factory: The First Shift. He lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter. You Might Also Like... Bookshots: 'Dissident Gardens' by Jonathan Lethem Bookshots: 'The Maid's Version' by Daniel Woodrell Bookshots: 'The Thicket' by Joe R. Lansdale Bookshots: 'Brewster' By Mark Slouka Bookshots: 'Carnival' by Rawi Hage More By This Author Hack Dad’s No Good Very Bad Day Bookshots: 'Tacky Goblin' By T. Sean Steele Alright Kids, We’re Gonna Talk About Race: 5 Books that Get it Right The Hack Chronicles—The Dadonauts: Time Management Hail Satan! The Return Of REAL 80's Nostalgia To leave a comment or create a free account. Editor's Picks 10 Stephen King Sequels I Want to Read Column by Max Booth III So I Heard Y'all Want to Float: The Past, Present, and Future of Stephen King's IT Column by Max Booth III The Life and Death of Richard Bachman Column by Max Booth III The Sex Scene In Stephen King's 'IT' Column by Peter Derk 13 Tips on Plowing Through 'IT' (or any long book) In A Few Days Column by Peter Derk Our Upcoming Classes What's Popular? The Top 10 Rare and Pricey Stephen King Books Column by Gabino Iglesias Six Lessons I Learned Co-Writing A Novella With James Patterson Column by Rob Hart The Sex Scene In Stephen King's 'IT' Column by Peter Derk 10 Easy Edits to Improve Your Manuscript Right Now Column by Repo Kempt Kirk Clawes, LitReactor's Co-Founder And Technical Lead, Passed Away Last Night News by Rob Hart Learn with LitReactor Online Writing Courses Craft Essays Resources for Writers The LitReactor Magazine The Frontpage Lit News Columns Interviews Reviews About LitReactor About the Site Team LitReactor Advertising Information Join Our Newsletter Login Contact LitReactor Help Follow LitReactor LitReactor on FacebookLitReactor on TwitterLitReactor on TumblrLitReactor on YouTubeLitReactor on VimeoRSS Feeds © 2016 LitReactor, LLC | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service Skip to Main Content Area Hello, if this is your first time here, login with Facebook or create a free account to get started. Otherwise, Click here to log in Online Writing Classes Writers Workshop Magazine Community Take A Tour Frontpage News Columns Interviews Reviews Craft Essays Features Bookshots: 'The Zero and The One" By Ryan Ruby REVIEW BY KEITH RAWSON MARCH 10, 2017 IN: BOOKSHOTS REVIEW RYAN RUBY THE ZERO AND THE ONE 24 0 Stumble 0 Reddit 0 0 77 Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Zero and The One Who wrote it? The type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out. Essayist and Translator, Ryan Ruby. Plot in a box: Zach and Owen are philosophy students at Oxford who become bros after a night of impromptu drinking and screwing. Both become students of an obscure German philosopher and start hatching up a suicide pact. But who’s manipulating who? The wealthy Zach, or the working-class scholarship student Owen? Invent a new title for this book: Aphorisms Read this if you like(d): The Secret History By Donna Tartt Meet the book’s lead(s): Zach: Bright but easily manipulated American philosophy student studying at Oxford, who has a hankering for suicide pacts and a book of philosophical aphorisms called The Zero and The One. Owen: Pretty much a carbon copy of Zach: Literally a carbon copy with a few slightly sinister differences. Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by: Zach and his twin sister would be played by Natalie Portman, and Owen would be played by Ben Whishaw. You know, the guy with the limp in The Lobster. What was your favorite sentence/passage? Zach’s defense of suicide was perversely moral. And by no means unpersuasive. It was the best way, he said, to preserve human dignity and freedom from the implacable annihilation that awaited us all, the only way, in fact, to pick the pocket of Nature, to whom we all owed a death. The Verdict: I’m a fan of the literary, college “bromance.” I like intellectually inclined relationships that spur on petty rivalries and inevitably lead to back biting and the occasional murder. It’s why The Secret History remains one of my favorite novels after twenty some odd years. It’s a perfect literary invention because it’s a true stretching of the imagination in a genre which prizes realism above all else, despite there being very little realism in literary fiction that depicts collegiate life. With Ryan Ruby’s debut novel, The Zero and The One takes perfect advantage of the sub-genre and has created one of the more interesting and engaging first novels that I’ve read in quite some time. At first Owen and Zach seem like exact opposites, but they’re both ciphers. Neither of the bookish young men has much of a personality as the story begins, but slowly but surely, each takes on the characteristics and obsessions of the other, and eventually they become a singular, contradictory version of one another (albeit, the individual who begins as the dominating personality in the relationship is revealed throughout the narrative to be the lesser, and thus far more vulnerable to the other’s manipulations), which leads to the tragic events at the crux of the novel. As a first-time novelist, Ruby’s voice is very assured and steady. His deliberately measured passages reveal small glimpses of Zack and Owen’s skewed personalities with each sentence, demanding the reader’s attention so as not miss these minute Hitchcockian touches that are forming up the greater narrative. The Zero and The One has been receiving early comparisons to the novels of Patricia Highsmith, although I must admit I only found slight similarities between the two, because Mr. Ruby is definitely writing with his own strong, menacing voice. The Zero and The One is a rare oddity within mainstream publishing: a small, complex novel that equally entertains and challenges the reader. It’s by no means commercial fiction, but it is the type of fiction that has real psychological depth and demands to be read long into the night after all of the lights are out, and you can crawl into the clammy skins of his emotionally stunted characters. The Zero and the One: A Novel Manufacturer: Twelve Part Number: Price: Review by Keith Rawson Keith Rawson is a little-known pulp writer whose short fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published both online and in print. He is the author of the short story collection The Chaos We Know (SnubNose Press)and Co-Editor of the anthology Crime Factory: The First Shift. He lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter. You Might Also Like... Bookshots: 'Dissident Gardens' by Jonathan Lethem Bookshots: 'The Maid's Version' by Daniel Woodrell Bookshots: 'The Thicket' by Joe R. Lansdale Bookshots: 'Brewster' By Mark Slouka Bookshots: 'Carnival' by Rawi Hage More By This Author Hack Dad’s No Good Very Bad Day Bookshots: 'Tacky Goblin' By T. Sean Steele Alright Kids, We’re Gonna Talk About Race: 5 Books that Get it Right The Hack Chronicles—The Dadonauts: Time Management Hail Satan! The Return Of REAL 80's Nostalgia To leave a comment or create a free account. Editor's Picks 10 Stephen King Sequels I Want to Read Column by Max Booth III So I Heard Y'all Want to Float: The Past, Present, and Future of Stephen King's IT Column by Max Booth III The Life and Death of Richard Bachman Column by Max Booth III The Sex Scene In Stephen King's 'IT' Column by Peter Derk 13 Tips on Plowing Through 'IT' (or any long book) In A Few Days Column by Peter Derk Our Upcoming Classes What's Popular? The Top 10 Rare and Pricey Stephen King Books Column by Gabino Iglesias Six Lessons I Learned Co-Writing A Novella With James Patterson Column by Rob Hart The Sex Scene In Stephen King's 'IT' Column by Peter Derk 10 Easy Edits to Improve Your Manuscript Right Now Column by Repo Kempt Kirk Clawes, LitReactor's Co-Founder And Technical Lead, Passed Away Last Night News by Rob Hart Learn with LitReactor Online Writing Courses Craft Essays Resources for Writers The LitReactor Magazine The Frontpage Lit News Columns Interviews Reviews About LitReactor About the Site Team LitReactor Advertising Information Join Our Newsletter Login Contact LitReactor Help Follow LitReactor LitReactor on FacebookLitReactor on TwitterLitReactor on TumblrLitReactor on YouTubeLitReactor on VimeoRSS Feeds © 2016 LitReactor, LLC | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service ShareThis Copy and Paste

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