PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksZone One is Mr. Whitehead’s fifth novel, yet excluding Colossus of New York, a nonfiction meditation on life in the Big Apple, it is the author’s first to be set explicitly in his hometown of Manhattan ... Mr. Whitehead offers the reader a portrait of post-apocalyptic America. A plague has decimated humanity, transforming the infected into the living dead ...hallmarks of (recherché) postmodernism are ever present: temporal distortion, metafiction, pastiche, paranoia ... On the odd occasion that the novel does begin to gain some momentum, the author has a tendency to embark on tiresome digressions which involve but are not limited to groceries, flossing, tog-count and yoga mats ... In a city of the undead, Spitz is the one character that should have a palpable heartbeat. Yet, he rarely appears as a flesh and bone character, rather, as a literary device utilized by Mr. Whitehead to excise and observe cross sections of urban space.
