Nicky's Reviews > Zone One

After reading this article in the New York Times, I had to try reading this. I mean, I love genre fiction and I have a degree in English Literature, so you'd better hope I've got the intellectual side down since that's about all my degree seems to be good for demonstrating... Surely I'd get the best of both worlds out of this.

And, you know, apparently that degree doesn't say a damn thing, because I just found Zone One boring. I read the first twenty-five pages rather hopefully; something about the prose style did sweep me up and keep me turning pages. But as I got further into the book and nothing happened, and nothing happened, and nothing happened, I began to lose my patience. Literary fiction is great, even when it spools out slowly -- Kazuo Ishiguro's work is slow and good, in that way -- but this just bored me. I felt nothing about the words on the page but apathy. The back promises a 'punchy cocktail of horror, comedy and social critique', but I didn't really find anything but the latter, and I'd heard all that before...

This bit from the article sums it up all too well:

A plot summary is impossible: there isn’t a plot. To make matters worse, the protagonist is a laconic introvert of self-avowed mediocrity. The only ostensibly interesting things about him are his nickname, Mark Spitz (the explanation for which is withheld so long that the payoff stakes rise perilously high), his tendency to hallucinate falling ash and his ominous flirtation with the mysterious “forbidden thought.” Spitz is a sweeper and, for the novel’s three-day, flashback-filled present, our guide to the new (and hence the old) reality.

And then the bits of the article about the supposed pay-off never -- for me, anyway -- materialised.