2023 read #110: Zone One by Colson Whitehead.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

322 pages

Published 2011

Read from September 30 to October 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I detest the artificial distinction between mundane “literary” fiction and speculative, fantastical elements. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror — these are just different tools in the storytelling toolkit. Incorporating them into highbrow fiction is no stranger, no less literary, than utilizing romance, mystery, suspense, or fancy prose in your literary book. Yet the publishing industry (and book critics) shun anything that smacks of “genre.” Except when a mainstream highbrow writer dabbles in it, of course.

I haven’t read much of Whitehead’s work — just The Intuitionist so far — but from what I’ve seen, he never shies away from genre elements. (What are The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad if not contemporary fabulism?) Yet the critic blurbs at the front of Zone One grab your sleeve to exclaim that it “is not the work of a serious novelist slumming it with some genre-novel cash-in…” Note the disdain, the monocle-shifting assumption that no one serious would sully their hands with genre work. Also the odd implication that SFFH somehow makes more money than mainstream mundane fiction.

It’s attitudes like this that cause lit critics to fall over themselves praising the originality of any literary author who uses a genre trope that’s been a cliché for fifty years. (I loved Never Let Me Go, but let’s be real here.) 

Anyway. Zone One is excellent, despite centering on a genre trope — zombies — that’s been a cliché for well over fifty years. Like so many others, I got burnt out on zombies back in the ’00s. I read World War Z, played lots of Left 4 Dead, and felt that Shaun of the Dead put a nice little bow on the subject. As expected, Whitehead is talented enough to find life left in the subgenre (pun intended). “We ignore the monstrous surrounding us in modern life” isn't the freshest take (again, see Shaun of the Dead), but what Whitehead does with it feels worthwhile.

If the zombie fad was borne of white Americans processing 9/11 and their vulnerability in the face of the Other, Zone One is a satire of how George W. Bush encouraged everyone to go shopping to defeat the terrorists. Survivor camps sell their own branded merchandise. Various corporate conglomerates offer “sponsorships” to survivors, permitting them to loot their brands, so long as the items cost less than $30. In exchange, the companies get hush-hush boons from the provisional government. Apocalypse celebrities — those whose exploits evading the living dead exuded true Final Girl energy — get appointed to cabinet positions.

While there are bursts of action, of grisly tableaux, ambushes of concise heartbreak, and the final seeping weight of tragedy, the bulk of the narrative spirals in desultory rounds musing about the suburban past and the hypothetical future. Our viewpoint character Mark Spitz, like so many other survivors, is distinguished by his mediocrity, his inconspicuous ability to fail upward. “A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse.”

If Station Eleven was my personal harbinger of our current plague, painting December 2019 and January 2020 with prescient anxiety, Zone One feels like a suitable companion piece to the pandemic’s current stage, its ongoing horror and dislocation, its unaddressed traumas all conveniently punted out of sight in order for us to get on with tendering our bodies to capitalism, our cynicism seasoned with almost four years of officially acceptable cataclysm. Whitehead coins Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, a concept we need to grapple with here in the shambles of our world: “In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.”