RaveEsquireOpening in the wake of the inciting pandemic, Zone One casts its gaze on the weirdly named Mark Spitz, once a knowledgeable, vaguely hip, somewhat covetous New Yorker, now a civilian soldier in the post-plague recolonization of Manhattan ...marks the arrival of Whitehead's real narrative engine. He's telling a story — tumble down, mired in the wreckage of the world we currently pretend to cherish. It's a book you want to read rather than one you should read ... In Whitehead's suddenly sure hands this is a stressed nation blinking its eyes in the dim light of a train platform, or a farm, or a ruined city, working to distinguish who might be there to do us harm ... Whitehead brilliantly reformulates an old-hat genre to ask the epidemic question of a teetering history — the question about the possibility of survival.
