Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

The reason Colson Whitehead’s sixth book is being talked about so much is because it’s a genre novel from a ‘literary’ novelist – one who has previously been short listed for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. And it’s not a genre that manages to still be considered intelligent or sophisticated – it is not a high brow spy novel, for instance. It is a zombie novel, with gore, rotten bodies and the chomping, gorging on guts variety of the staggering dead. Yet somehow, it mostly manages to be both intelligent and sophisticated; its language generally strong and astute. The question is not whether that is enough to make it ‘good’ but whether it is enough to make it believable.

One thing that makes this different from the usual zombie survival story is that the protagonist is not special in any way – he doesn’t have any special skills, no special combat gear, no spectacular zombie-proof plan until he somehow survives for long enough to make it to Zone One. Mark Spitz is average all the way through – B-grade average student whether he studied or not, average office worker, average son, friend, lover, with no real strengths or characteristics to make him special. How then, has such an average man survived the end of days? It can’t just be having weaponry. Whitehead does not seem to sure: ‘He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.’

The past resonates powerfully throughout this novel – the actual plot of which takes place over just three days. There are deep, meaningful and lengthy flashbacks to the time before ‘Last Night’ when everything changed. Sometimes these flashbacks come at opportune times, sometimes they come when Mark Spitz is set to take down a zombie in a closet, which obviously seems to be an unlikely time to have a character to have a flashback, no matter how meaningful the past may be. Whitehead plays a little heavy handedly with the idea of the past bearing huge weight on the present, though, with a play on what he calls PASD – Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Most of the human race suffers from PASD, and its symptoms range from depression to elation to insomnia to excessive sleeping. This is humorous enough in itself, but perhaps does not need to be reiteratied in as many ways as it is. On finding a soldier springing ‘in and out of a fetal posture, collapsing and exploding, smearing his body through a clump of vomit’, Mark Spitz asks is he’s been bit. He’s told ‘No, it’s his past’. ‘His past?’ asks Mark Spitz, to be told ‘His P-A-S-D, man, his P-A-S-D.’ Funny, but hardly subtle.

While subtlety may well be a trait of the literary novel, it definitely isn’t one of the zombie novel. It is evident from certain nuances that Whitehead is familiar with the zombie genre. Even though Zone One never ventures into traditional zombie vocabulary, it does reference the classics of zombie films: ‘they’re all f-d up’, Whitehead writes in reference to the zombies, echoing the police chief’s ‘yeah, they’re dead – they’re all messed up’ from George Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead. But that’s as far as Whitehead goes into that territory. Here, zombies are not even called zombies – they’re called ‘skels’ and are either the standard rabid monstrous variety, or the more depressed variety Whitehead calls the ‘stragglers’ – a more abject leftover sort of zombie that seems to be stuck in a single moment of its life: scooping ice cream, sitting at a desk, gazing lifelessly at a set of tarot cards, unable to let go of its past.

The language of Zone One remains ‘literary’ – it is high brow – there are many twisty sentences, dips and dives into complicated emotions even when the sweeper team is involved in as visceral an event as killing straggler zombies in creepy abandoned apartments. While proclaiming to be average in every way, Mark Spitz seems to be very finely tuned to the secret life of stragglers: ‘he became the connoisseur of the found poetry in the abandoned barricade. The miniscule, hardscrabble wedge of space between the piled up furniture and the apartment door the departing had squeezed through.’ How likely is it that the protagonist of a zombie genre novel would be so sensitized to his surroundings, beyond making sure there was a back exit?

Therein lies the problem with Zone One – it can’t seem to decide where it lies on the genre novel/literary novel fence and this become its strongest characteristic – its inability to know its own character. There’s nothing wrong with subverting, adding to or removing even core elements from a genre – as long a reader is willing to suspend their disbelief. With Zone One, that willingness doesn’t come easily.

Zombies are visceral, gory, dirty things. They function on some undying instinct to feed and infect – they don’t think, they don’t feel, they just are. They are the absolute antithesis of the intelligent, sensitive protagonist much in the same way that a zombie novel is the absolute antithesis of the literary novel. It’s probably best not to categorise Zone One as a zombie novel, because in that case, Whitehead has clearly taken on a great challenge in having picked this particular genre to merge with a literary novel, and he hasn’t been able to rise to it entirely.