Stephen's Reviews > Zone One

Attractive, well-dressed writing and some buxom, sexy phrase-turning make this novel’s surface shiny and pretty. However, its hollowness, lack of depth and monotone emotionlessness make the interior a soulless, vacuous fail. It’s prose porn with no emotional money shot, and like traditional porn Zone One dispenses with plot, character and any hint of deeper meaning in favor of excessive, gratuitous word humping. The language is technically proficient and has an appealing shape, but inside is shallow, detached and mechanical.

Just like an adult film star while on screen. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It’s literature with none of the heart and emotional depth that make the good stuff stick to your soul and nest inside your memory. The emperor is well-spoken but naked.

When I first started reading this, I was jazzed by the language. Whitehead can spin a sentence and has a comfortable familiarity with the English language. For example, early on in this “literary” zombie novel the reader is introduced to Mark Spitz, our narrator, who is described as the quintessential everyman always existing in the middle of the pack:

He nailed milestone after developmental milestone, as if every twitch were coached. Had they been aware of his location, child behaviorists would have cherished him, observing him through binoculars and scratching their ledgers as he confirmed their data and theories in his anonymous travails. He was their typical, he was their most, he was their average receiving hearty thumbs-up from the gents in the black van parked a discreet distance across the street.

I like that. It has a slickness to it that I found enjoyable. In addition, there’s a fun layering of pop-consumer excoriation and decrying the disconnectedness of people to their fellow man. This was easily my favorite part of the novel and I was reminded of Ellison’s American Psycho.

This was a very good start for me because I am a promiscuous word-whore and I love lyrical language. Nothing heats up my cockles more than masterful phrasing that suavely struts across the page and causes multiple eyegasms on its way into your brain. This is why I have such a massive gush on for writers like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and, more recently, Umberto Eco and Cormac McCarthy.

But here’s the thing...as much as I love lush, musical writing, the pretty packaging of masterful prose isn't, ultimately, what makes my happy rise. It’s the combination of the ability to eye-hug with fulgurant writing while ratcheting my heart up into my throat** with characters and story.

**Or, in McCarthy’s case, ripping my heart into bloody chunks of useless muscle.

Good novels should make...you...feel...something. One of literature great virtues is being able to stun us with the lyrical, wondrous descriptions while using the prose as a clandestine delivery system for revealing a truth intended to resonate within us. It doesn’t have to be happy truth filled with teddy bears. It can be deeply unpleasant and make you cringe with despair that life is an untethered, meaningless exercise in futility (yes, I’m looking at you Kafka).

Basically, I am saying that pretty words are not enough and books should have a purpose (e.g., tell an entertaining or important story, express a feeling or share a truth). I found none of that here. Nada. Zilch. This book felt more like a corpse. At times, a jaw-droppingly beautiful corpse, but still a cadaver.

Even looking at genre fiction(gasp say the literary snobs as they try to look down over their upturned noses), I can list many authors like Catherynne Valente, Guy Gavriel Kay, Don Winslow and Tim Powers who are marvelous wordsmiths and use their polished writing to entertain, enlighten and/or tell a compelling story...with characters that do things and make you care.

There were no characters to care about in this novel.

Here comes the worst knickers-twisting negative of the whole novel for me: I found the writing not only insubstantial and 100% style, but also intentionally pretentious. It felt snobbish. It didn’t feel like Whitehead was trying to dazzle and amaze (a virtue in my opinion) so much as to impress and self-aggrandize. It felt like Whitehead had decided to “slum it” in the ghetto of zombie fiction and didn’t want to get shit on his shoes.

Literary pretentiousness and elitism is a major bugaboo with me and the fastest way to turn me off of a novel. This was a classic case in point.

So, overall, while there was some terrific, enjoyable prose, I found nothing else in this novel to go gaga over. Add to that the major turn off mentioned above and I can’t bring myself to go higher than 2 stars. That said, given my love of language and prose, I may revisit this at some point down the line to see if I might have missed something over the irritating din of pompousness.

2.0 stars.