by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday
272 pages
Dallas Morning News
14 October 2011
Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s fifth novel, is a beautifully
written tragi-comic cultural critique about New York, disaster and
America’s living dead.
Whitehead imagines that a plague has
scrambled the planet’s inhabitants into groups of survivors, “skels”
(voracious, flesh-eating zombies) and “stragglers” (also infected, but
stalled catatonically, as if their hard-driven neural webs needed
reloading). Encamped like pioneers, the uninfected kill off zombies
while re-establishing civil order and national governments. America’s
recalibration is managed from Buffalo, the new capital, where the
nation’s rebirth is marketed as “American Phoenix.” The survivors call
themselves “pheenies,” and they struggle with the new order and with
post-apocalyptic stress disorder, or PASD.
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| George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) |
Marines have taken lower Manhattan, walling it off from northern neighborhoods and cleansing it of free-range skels. Whitehead’s protagonist, Mark Spitz, is among the warriors enlisted from the camps to patrol the area, taking out any remaining zombies wandering the underground, locked in office buildings, trapped in basements, listless in high-rise apartments or waiting in curio shops.
“Zone One” is the area south of Houston
Street. Little Italy, Chinatown, The Lower East Side, TriBeCa, The
Bowery, Wall Street: Mark Spitz marches along the zone’s perpendicular
and incongruous pathways, all streets curving and running eventually
toward Battery Park and original Dutch foothold.
Covering three
consecutive days, Whitehead’s novel shuttles between Spitz’s past,
before and during the zombies’ rise, and his present among them. Though
he’d always been a mediocre every-dude, battling the undead enlivens
him, supercharging his survival and killer instincts. His name signals
an American Olympian masculine myth. Yet “Mark Spitz” is also a joke
about black people and swimming.
Whitehead improvises humorously
and poignantly on some favored themes — advertising and marketing
language; names and naming; reverence for the city’s machinations —
through the protagonist.
Reminding himself of New York’s prowess
for re-creating itself, Spitz exclaims, “Inevitability was mayor term
after term. … In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion
awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their
replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave
upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like
immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed
philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City.”
In
an example of Whitehead’s wordplay, it’s the survivors’ yearning for the
safe, enabling mythologies of the past, their sentimentalizing the
past, that seems to incite their PASD.
Because Zone One is both
New York’s birthplace and its original necropolis (from the African
Burial Grounds to the World Trade Center Memorial), it’s hard not to
read Whitehead’s geography and genre-play allegorically: It’s about
border fences, terrorism, war, breached levees, financial collapse and
our present zombification, accustomed as we’ve become to consuming the
status quo’s poisons.
Zone One is paean and protest.
Walton Muyumba
