In the Zone
Every so often you find an author whose book tells you that you now must acquire and read every last one of his or her other books. Colson Whitehead is my latest of those authors, after reading his Zone One.
I had previously read The Nickel Boys a while ago and was awestruck by the plot twist at the end, and of course I won’t be giving it away. The entire story is absorbing enough, but the writing in Zone One is leagues deeper. I also have a good word to say about Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, though I have only seen the television version. Even so, it is like nothing else.
Zone One is about a zombie apocalypse. It’s more interesting than most, since it depicts a society struggling to survive with some success. Most zombie stories begin after an utter collapse.
The striking thing about Zone One is not the plot, but the sentences. They describe a society after a plague that is indistinguishable from what existed before. At times between readings I was feeling that I was living in the apocalypse myself. It could be exhausting. Fortunately, the book is mercifully short.
The book takes off like moments in the great George Romero films, who started it all with the epic Night of the Living Dead. A zombie devotee, I came to own all three VHS tapes of the original three movies. I feel the second, Dawn of the Dead, was the best. It was later remade, starring Ving Rhames, though not necessarily improved.
In the first of Romero’s trio, there is a point where the rural Pennsylvania militia is abusing hapless, captured zombies. A woman observing notes, “They’re us.” Similarly, in the second movie, which takes place in a shopping mall, a character explains the incoming zombie horde as reliving their old consumerist lives. Zone One takes this idea as far as possible. At some points, it was hard (for me, at least) to tell if the story was about the Before times or the present.
I’ve always felt the interesting thing about apocalypse stories is how the question of cooperation is treated. There are two kinds of people in the apocalypse — those disposed to trust and work with others, and those determined to look out for number one. The latter type always sabotage things for everyone else.
In Zone One there is a functioning government, which suggests cooperation has won out, though there is no lack of anarchy and vicious banditry as well. People who exalt anarchy are clueless, in light of the very thin line — Government — between moderate security and Hell-on-Earth-chaos.
That first sentence brings a plethora of authors to my memory, although in some of the cases I recall, I only read _almost_ all of their books, finding some tedious. In the latter case, I ran onto BACK by Henry Green. I liked the publisher, New Directions, and then I started reading others of his novels. As it happens, that was the last produced of his astonishing works that I read with pleasure, having given up on the later ones and never managing the first, BLINDNESS, which he considered juvenalia. Evidently the Woolfs didn't, though, as Hogarth Press published it and hia other novels. John Ashbery's master's thesis was on Henry Green.
Back before I turned pretty much exclusively to great literature, I read all the Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammet novels, and as much by the elegant stylist Jack Vance (sci-fi and fantasy) as I could find.
I might have read all of Brecht's plays except the adaptations. His poetry is equally great although obviously not as famed, although "The Solution" is well known in Europe:
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After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
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Paul Bowles: all four novels and many of the stories, as well as all the tales he translated from Moroccan story-tellers.
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders Including 49 Tales -- that's all of a genre rather than a single author, but there is a fair amount of stylistic and thematic similarity despite their varying quality. They're all anonymous anyway, although Egil's Saga is presumed to be from Snorri Sturluson, whose Heimskringla (History of the Norse Kings) is equally pithy and action-packed.
After this, there are writers whom I favor but haven't read everything (Boswell's journals, Chekhov's stories, Celine's novels, al-Tabari's history, Casanova's memoirs, Byron epics & narratives, Plutarch's biographies, lots of poetry from Szymborska / Nicanor Parra / Hikmet / Frank O'Hara & Ted Berrigan and many others, etc etc).
But unfortunately my bookish leanings are much diminished. Too seductive, in this Internet Age, to get hung up, for instance writing in the morning, such as this response to your post. Ugh!