The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby
The debut novel by Ryan Ruby might be called a ‘philosophical thriller’. What begins as a sentimental journey of a university friendship develops into a gothic, transgressive tale where the boundary between trust and morality is questioned. We see this world from the perspective of Owen Whiting, an intelligent, impressionable student who is out of place after he arrives at Oxford. He’s a quiet introvert who keeps to his books rather than engaging with the world. Yet this promptly shifts after he encounters Zachary Foedern, a charismatic, seductive and brilliant student from New York, who draws Owen forever into his orbit.
From the opening pages it is clear that this is a wonderfully constructed story. An underlying element of the book is a fictional twentieth-century German classicist and philosopher, Hans Abendroth, whose nearly lost work (also titled The Zero and the One) is a collection of aphoristic insights clearly reminiscent of a thinker somewhere between Nietzsche and Heidegger. Each chapter of the novel begins with one such aphorism, and entices both the reader and the two Oxford students to obsessively uncover the cryptic, hidden meaning behind Abendroth’s nihilistic utterances.
Furthermore, Ruby effectively plays with time by employing a double narrative. Half of the book is set in New York as Owen attends Zach’s funeral following his ‘philosophical’ suicide. Whilst the other is the story of the beginning of their friendship at Oxford; two outcasts from different walks of life bonding over girls, books, and ideas – all the clichés of adolescent academia. The present and the past are only reconciled at the end of the novel, as the events that lead to the friends’ suicide pact and its ramifications are revealed.
Ruby is obviously a gifted young writer who easily handles the adaptation of the complexities of a particular philosophical tradition into fiction. The Bolaño-esque book within a book cleverly sets up the story, yet the plot ultimately takes an unusually dark turn into both the conventional and the quixotic, an inconsistent ending in the realm of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, though not quite as satisfying as either. Yet The Zero and the One is nonetheless an informed, intellectual crime hybrid concerning the sorrows of youth, and the vain search for truth.