Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Going Zero
by Anthony McCarten
Harper Collins 2023

If a book’s dust jacket names half a dozen screenplays but no previous books by the author, it seems only fair for the reader to shape some expectations by those screenplays. The US dust jacket of Anthony McCarten’s new novel Going Zero doesn’t name any of his previous novels, but it reels off a bunch of his screen credits, including the Stephen Hawking novel The Theory of Everything, the Papal drama The Two Popes, and the Freddie Mercury movie Bohemian Rhapsody. The Theory of Everything is evocative but almost unbearably syrupy; The Two Popes has very effective moments but is comically reductive; and Bohemian Rhapsody, although intermittently dramatic, was, to put it mildly, over-simplified. Hence: a decidedly mixed bag when taking up Going Zero – the dust jacket can lead to trouble (and not just with its bio-note choices – the jacket’s silvered coating smudges more easily than a brand-new iPad). 

Part of the trouble is that “screen credits” can be fairly roomy. But a novel can be laid squarely at its author’s door … which isn’t as much help in the case of Going Zero, since it’s so glaringly intended to be a screenplay that at first it’s a bit surprising to find that it’s even punctuated. 

This is a promise as much as a warning, at least in the thriller genre where Going Zero sits very squarely. Modern thrillers very much want to be evocative even at the price of being syrupy, want to have effective moments even if it means being reductive, and is perfectly happy being intermittently dramatic even if it means mostly blurring over the fact that Freddie Mercury liked to warm up for big concerts by rogering men in broom closets.

So is Going Zero guilty of this kind of pre-emptive lobotomizing? Yes indeed. Will readers looking for a fun bit of fast-paced escapism (at an “ouch” price tag of $30) care? Very doubtful. 

This is the story of a tech whiz named Cy Baxter, who’s after a gigantic US defense contract to develop a piece of spyware, the Going Zero program of Fusion Initiative, a possible partnership between the US Government and Baxter’s company. Going Zero is surveillance tech, and its Beta Test is simplicity itself: Baxter chooses ten participants who’ll have two hours to “disappear” from the public world. And if they can elude Going Zero’s attempts to find them for 30 days, they get $3 million, and if Going Zero can find them all, Baxter gets his fat contract. 

The premise allows McCarten to back up a truck and dump tons and tons of exposition about private and government-sponsored, a freedom he won’t have when Going Zero moves to the screen, since it’ll entirely depend on how much memorizing Jeremy Strong is willing to do that day. But in a novel, he’s free to fill page after page with details of how surveillance programs work – and it’s lucky for the reader that he’s so good at it. When they’re talking about how to hunt down those Going Zero participants, his characters are always interesting in their elaborations:

We know GPS is nice if we want to track a smartphone to an address, see if someone is in their own home, but it’s poor for detail work … It gives at best a sixty-foot accuracy region. But in a large city, that means I don’t know if you are in Starbucks or the Dunkin’ Donuts next door. But I want to know that. And I want to know more than that. Sure, we can look at your credit card receipts, your loyalty cards to find out in retrospect. Easy. But I want to know in real time, not just where you are exactly, but if you’re buying wholegrain [sic] rice instead of your normal white variety … and I want to know if you bought this whole-grain rice only after spending thirty seconds staring at the pizza options. Because then I know you were tempted by pizza for sixteen seconds.

Passages like this – and there are quite a few of them in the book’s first half, before people start the de rigueur running and jumping of the thriller genre – naturally work on two levels: they further fill in the reader on the stakes of the novel, and they also raise the reader’s hackles about the real world where they live, a real world that’s constantly tracking them and harvesting their data in ways they’d scarcely believe (programs like the novel’s “Weeping Angel” and “Clear-Voyant” are based on very real systems being run by government-sponsored but essentially rogue corporations). And because McCarten has lots of experience at crafting these kinds of double-pronged import, these passages actually help the narrative along.

And naturally there’s the key thriller angle: one of the Going Zero participants, a seemingly ordinary Boston librarian named Kaitlyn Day, is harboring secrets no Beta Test could uncover, and she has her own increasingly-desperate reasons to hide from Baxter’s virtual dragnet. That’ll play very nicely on the screen, as it was clearly intended to do. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.