Whitehead pays witness

In Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One, a character who calls herself Quiet Storm arranges wrecked cars in a pattern visible only from the air: "Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching of an arrow aimed at--what? Tomorrow? What readers?"

The novel's protagonist, called Mark Spitz for reasons even he does not initially understand, admires the immense complex text but admits the difficulty of interpreting its meaning. "We don't know how to read it yet," he says. "All we can do right now is pay witness."

Zone One pays witness to the End of the World as we Know It, a zombie apocalypse that nods to 50s horror flicks while the drifting gray ash of incinerated bodies draws to mind the more potent horror of the Holocaust. The novel is a profound meditation on how human beings adapt to horrific circumstances--but that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun.

This is, after all, Colson Whitehead, who gave us a rolicking romp through the detritus of folklore and history in John Henry Days, a memorable deconstruction of literary theory in The Intuitionist (with its warring philosophies of elevator inspection), a summer visit to the land of adolescent angst in Sag Harbor, and, in Apex Hides the Hurt, a comedy/romance/history/critique of popular culture focusing on the rarefied world of nomenclature, after reading which you will never again look the same way at flesh-colored bandages.

Some concerns of these earlier novels reappear in Zone One, including the reliance on nomenclature specialists to sell the general public on focus-group-tested terms to rebrand the chaos. PR flacks in the new seat of power (Buffalo!) label the postapocalyptic landscape  "The American Phoenix," while massive compounds surrounded by barbed wire are called "Bubbling Brooks" and "Happy Acres" (an echo, perhaps, of Sweet Home, the horrific slave plantation in Toni Morrison's Beloved). Mark Spitz sees the return of buzzwords as an encouraging sign: "what greater proof of the rejuvenation of the world, the return to Eden, than a new buzzword emerging from the dirt to tilt its petals to the zeitgeist."


Spitz is hardly the traditional horror-movie hero; always a mediocre student, "His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life's next random obstacle." In Whitehead's version of the zombie apocalypse, Spitz's ability to muddle through without attracting attention turns out to be a vital survival skill:

This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity....Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. only in the middle was there safety. He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its uenxceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.

Zone One also departs from the horror-movie model by denying readers a happy ending--or a sad ending or, really, much of an ending at all. Whitehead rejects the tidy resolution, resists the heartwarming denouement. Moments of pleasure occur briefly when random people create temporary families on the fly, such as when Mark Spitz shacks up with Mim in an abandoned toy store or when he stumbles upon a well-barricaded rural farmhouse where a trio of survivors wait out the disaster by playing endless games of Hearts. "What were the chances of this raggedy bunch finding one another in the ruins," wonders Spitz, but he has little time to relish the luxury of human connection before the barricades fall.

In Zone One, barricades are both comforting and confining, keeping the horrors out while keeping the survivors locked inside, but even more threatening are the invisible barricades that separate individuals even while uniting them. "There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth," muses Spitz, but "it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn't know it."

This sublime isolation lies beneath all Whitehead's novels, but in Zone One it becomes tangible in the form of zombified human beings wandering through a wasteland while struggling to satisfy a hunger they cannot identify. Whitehead's funny and insightful and profoundly moving novel bears witness to the horrors to erect a barricade and keep out the chaos, if only for the span of time it takes to read from cover to cover.