by Ryan Ruby
Your novel grapples with the place where seemingly abstract ideas tip over into action and consequence. What interests you about this intersection?
I admit to having a soft spot for all the visionaries, dreamers, utopians, cranks, idealists, self-appointed prophets, spiritual revolutionaries, and monomaniacs in history and literature, the people who, in the words of William Blake, “must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” For if we believe that our perceptions of reality are constructed by ideas, we are individuals to the extent that we construct those ideas ourselves, to the extent that we literally see things in ways that are unique to us. There is, as a result, an inherent conflict between such people and all the social institutions—legislative, educational, religious, medical, and familial—that have arrogated to themselves the power and responsibility of forming persons and personalities, ways of being and seeing, by dictating what is healthy and sick, natural and unnatural, rational and irrational, real and unreal, permissible and impermissible.
And in this conflict there is great potential for drama, usually of the tragic variety. If an individual is not successful in persuading the rest of his society to adopt his own system, for which future generations will consider him a genius, hero, and martyr, he can be crushed by the resistance of the very system whose power he is trying to usurp; he can isolate himself from the shared consensus of what constitutes reality to such an extent that his individualism is indistinguishable from madness or solipsism; or he can be the agent of his own self-destruction by violating or upholding social norms whose rationality and legitimacy he has underrated or overrated and which existed for his own protection.
Of course, individualism is itself a powerful social norm; that’s precisely what makes true individuals tragic figures. Our officially individualistic society attempts to resolve this paradox by introducing a meta-norm: never take social norms too seriously. This attitude is rather neatly summed up by Kant’s formula for enlightenment: “Think what you like, but obey!” Be yourself in theory, not in practice. Zach is the very sort of person who chafes under the hypocrisy and cynicism of such an attitude and rightly feels that an ideal that cannot be put into practice is a hollow ideal. Like his rebellious predecessors from Antigone and Milton’s Satan to Captain Ahab and Humbert Humbert, Zach’s single-minded pursuit of his own ideas does in the end cause great harm to himself, his friends, and his family. But in my view this doesn’t validate Kant’s position so much as it shows that the contradictions between theory and practice are intractable. As one of Zach’s favorite poets puts it, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.”This shadow zone, between the zero and the one, as it were, is precisely the space where life takes place and that art ought to explore.
Zach and Owen are very much products of their nations of origin. As an American living and writing abroad, what is your relationship to your nation of origin?
Like Zach, I spent my junior year abroad at Pembroke College, Oxford (though I set The Zero and the One a few years before I actually arrived). While I was there, I became acutely aware of my position as both an interloper and a representative of a certain kind of American elite. Oxford is the oldest English-speaking university in the world, an institution that, for a thousand years, has educated and produced the ruling class, not just of the United Kingdom, but also of the vast, far-flung British Empire. When I was at Pembroke, for example, Tony Blair (St. John’s) was prime minister and a dinner was held in honor of Chris Patten (Balliol), the last British governor of Hong Kong; the previous president of the United States was the first Rhodes Scholar to hold the office.
In some respects, as I write in the book, we Americans were there to help offset the rising costs of tuition at relatively poor colleges like Pembroke for people like Owen, members of the rising lower middle class, the first members of their families to go to Oxford. Owen has dutifully climbed the ladders of the English meritocracy, only to arrive at an educational promised land that has instead rolled out the red carpet for the wealthier citizens of its most powerful former colony. Like the Bush-instigated and Blair-certified war that was then raging in Iraq, the outsized presence of Americans like me at Oxford struck me as a sign that the “special relationship” between Britain and United States had definitively tipped in favor of the junior partner. At the very place where the governors and administrators of the British Empire were educated, we were being trained to take their place.
This is why it no longer seemed possible to me to tell the kind of story that Henry James tells, in which the role of the “innocent abroad” is played by an American. After the Cold War, during the period variously known as “the end of history,” “globalization,” or, most dubiously of all, “Pax Americana,” the United States became world’s most powerful nation and undisputed global center. Because the roles that were played by America and Britain in James’ time have today been reversed, in The Zero and the One, I had to invert the premise of James’ “international theme”: Owen, the innocent Brit, falls under the influence of the worldly Zach, whose America is the abroad to which he travels and where he is seduced and corrupted. Zach remains the protagonist, but in order to tell his story truthfully, it has to be told from the outside, by an outsider like Owen, someone who sees in the confidence, power, and freedoms of Zach’s country of origin not only something to aspire to, but also thingsthat he believes, perhaps unconsciously, ought, by right, to be his.
Reading group guide copyright © 2017 by Ryan Ruby and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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