Novel: Zone One

Zone One by: Colson Whitehead

Whitehead was able to peek our curiosities, prompting us to ask a dual question: what will become of New York, and what will become of Mark Spitz? What I find fascinating is just how Whitehead manages to seduce our curiosity and leave us on the edge. His methods mostly cut to the orders of the horror genre, but he also deflects any natural empathy we might feel for the novel’s two chief protagonists: Spitz and New York City. To the complaint, “I just couldn’t connect with Spitz,” and I imagine Whitehead’s response would be, “And?”

This strategy forces us to come to a disturbing realization: we want to know what will happen next, not because we are vested in a particular personality or cityscape, but because we are mesmerized by the horror itself. Even this shaky investment in the plot is made the object of authorial mockery at the very close of the novel. We aren’t told whether Spitz will make it or not because we already know survival is beside the point. It is, to intensify the cliché, “only a matter of time.”

The inevitable question arises: to what end? (No pun intended!) Why take a concept we normally assume to be playful and fantastical—the zombie—and make of it a vehicle for, “more serious pursuits?” I think we can find a clue in Kermode’s epilogue, and specifically in his discussion of the disappointment he felt because readers of Sense of an Ending did not pay much attention to his reconsideration of existence. Defensively, Kermode calls attention to the concept’s usefulness through history, and up to the present moment. He reminds us that, “…corporations…have a kind of immortality since they survive their mortal members.” It would be simplistic to suggest that Whitehead shackles the zombie trope to any such obvious and direct equivalence. Yes, zombies survive their mortal members (in multiple senses of the word) in the sense that corporations do, invested as the latter are with legally defined immortality.