Blaine's Reviews > Zone One

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.

Reading other reviews for Zone One, it seems that the union is pretty small in the Venn diagram of “people who like zombie stories” and “people who like literary fiction.” But this novel worked for me. I had no issue with the story’s structure: a three-day stretch in which a team of sweepers works to continue clearing zombie “stragglers” out of one section of Lower Manhattan (the title’s “Zone One”). Layered within that story is a series of non-linear flashbacks that slowly tell the tale of the main character, Mark Spitz. We learn about his past, what happened to him on the “Last Night”—the night society tipped over from our present into the zombie apocalypse—and how he made his way in the new world and into his present role trying to bring our idea of civilization back. I enjoyed the story and, even if the majority of the book is viewed as a slow burn, the last forty pages are explosive.

The writing, meanwhile, is uniformly excellent. I mean, the world knows by now that Mr. Whitehead is one of our greatest living writers. There are quotable observations seemingly on every page, and the imagery is consistently vivid. As but one example, here’s the description of Mark’s trip to Atlantic City just before Last Night:

On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce.

You can feel the sadness, the judgment, just from that handful of lines. And the story in Zone One turns that critical eye on numerous aspects of American life, especially a certain type of can-do, false bravado American optimism, even after the end of the world. Recommended.