Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Title: Zone One
Author: Colson Whitehead
Published: 2011
Type: Fiction
Pages: 322
“They had been young and old, natives and newcomers. No matter the hue of their skin, dark or light, no matter the names of their gods or the absences they countenanced, they had all strived, struggled, and loved in their small human fashion. Now they were mostly mouths and fingers, fingers for extracting entrails from soft cavities, and mouths to rend and devour in pieces the distinct human faces they captured, that these faces might become less distinct, de-individuated flaps of masticated flesh, rendered anonymous like them, the dead.”
In Brief:
This book tries hard to bridge being “literary” and a zombie book — not very well. I wanted to like it, but the narrative was muddled and the narrator was highly unlikable from the start.
Rating: 3.7
Synopsis
On its surface, Zone One is your typical post-apocalyptic zombie novel. There’s been a plague! Most of humanity has been turned into zombies, or “skels.” Skels are divided into two types – vicious flesh-eating predators or catatonic “stragglers” lingering at their former lives.
During the events of the book, the plague has mostly receded, and a fragile government is slowly reforming in Buffalo, New York. The Marines have mostly cleared a swath of Manhattan south of Canal Street of skels, and teams of “sweepers” are picking off any stragglers they might have missed to re-populate the city. This swath is known as... Zone One. Dun dun dun.
Enter our narrator, known as Mark Spitz.* He’s part of a three-member team of sweepers killing zombies and struggling with “Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.” Not a lot happens to Mark Spitz for most of the book’s three-day timeline, but he tells the story of the apocalypse and his own survival up to that point. He’s appropriately skeptical of this fledgling new world order, hallucinates about falling ash, trades quippy one-liners with his fellow sweepers, gorily kills a bunch of zombies, and ruminates the loss of the American Dream/innocence/etcetera.
Where I’m At
This book was a relatively quick read, which I did during a trip to New Haven to visit my friend Jose. This was amusing because the narrator had an adamant, never-totally-explained hatred of “repulsive Connecticut, “repugnant Connecticut,” “botched Connecticut,” etc, casually referenced every few pages.
I had such a wonderful time that weekend. Rose came up from DC, we met Jose’s girlfriend and other law school friends, walked around campus in the snow, ate pizza. But really it was just the togetherness that mattered, the words and laughter tumbling from our mouths, feeling almost frantic with delight. Jose became my friend during an otherwise painful time in my life, was really responsible for getting me through it. Since we moved apart, I hadn’t had much individual or small-group time with him, but being together again made everything feel the same. Easy, happy, loving.
Not at all compatible with Zone One.
Getting into it
I’ll start with the bad. My main criticism of Zone One is how preeminently discordant it felt. Colson Whitehead is a capital-L-literary writer (The Underground Railroad is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in the past few years) and that just didn’t mesh well with the bloody zombie genre. There were navel-gazing philosophical tangents in the middle of action scenes, flowery and overwritten insights in the place of an actual plot. The paradox is pushed upon the reader, unfortunately in a way that ultimately makes the book neither fun nor impactful. Zombies as a metaphor for mind-numbing consumerism and/or the hollow, alienating labor intrinsic to late-stage capitalism? Groundbreaking.
Not helping things was the extremely unlikeable narrator. Mark Spitz is a self-proclaimed average human, never rising above the mediocre in his life until the “Last Night” descended and he somehow became one of the few to survive. He has no humility about this. Spitz is decidedly pretentious, mean-spirited, bitter, and ultimately uninteresting. The story of his nickname is withheld for so long it ends up a letdown, and the few intriguing details about him (he hallucinates, has “the forbidden thought”) are never explained. He’s also (small sort-of spoiler) black, which is dramatically disclosed towards the end in a way that I suppose was meant to be a revelation, but when the book was written by Whitehead, how could he not be? I’m sure there’s some sort of commentary on race meant to be there, but to me it fell flat. Most annoyingly, there’s no character development for Mark Spitz, neither from before the apocalypse nor during the course of the narrative.
My final issue is that the book’s structure didn’t work for me. Given that the story takes place over three days but also has to explain the end of humanity and years of background, Whitehead often interrupts his own narrative to give context. The flashbacks are jarring, and so common that it’s often unclear when something is a digression or actually happening “now.” Though a relatively short book, it felt like those three days were stretched out, mostly without much actually happening, and I was ready for it to end for probably the last third.
I didn’t hate this book though, so let’s end on a high note. Throughout the novel, Whitehead satirizes the government for being out of touch, for focusing on propaganda and messaging to distract the people, rather than face the actual problem. There are moments of this that are really quite funny and resonant – rebranding the US as the “American Phoenix,” passing out buttons and hats as “swag,” a government worker flitting around in heels and pearls while zombies chomp at the gate. There are also some poignant comparisons to 9/11 – the falling ash, where were you when it happened? stories – that were handled in a way that was undeniably compelling, as well as dry, tongue-in-cheek criticisms of Manhattan (almost like it’s It’s Own Character!) that admittedly made me chuckle.
Most impressively, Whitehead creates this fragile, tender tone of hope that carries throughout the book and all its darkness. It’s a cliche to be sure – a story about apocalypse that’s really about survival. About humans coming together despite their backgrounds or color, united by tragedy but finding a way to hang on to some sort of belief that it will get better. A cliche, but I’m a sucker for a cliche in good hands, which his are. My many criticisms aside, Whitehead is undoubtedly one of the best writers of this generation, and I’d recommend his work any day (but definitely Underground Railroad or Nickel Boys before this).
* Mark Spitz is a former Olympic-champion swimmer. This appears to be something the reader is supposed to know while reading the book, but I definitely did not.
