...should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation 'genius,' wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about Zone One is how subtly he reanimates those old body parts for a post-9/11 world ... Readers who wouldn’t ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry ... That grim humor slithers through most of this novel, along with touches of Whitehead’s topical satire... Mark’s soul-weariness infects the tone and pace of the novel, too, which offers more eulogy than suspense ... Everything comes to life in this perfectly paced, horrific, 40-page finale shot through with grim comedy and desolate wisdom about the modern age in all its poisonous, contaminating rage.
Even looking past its Halloween-adjacent release date, Zone One comes at a time when such horrors are enjoying a pop culture renaissance that arguably began with Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in 2002 ...Whitehead's zombie universe is a much more tragic and undeniably more human place ... Whether charged with bleak sadness or bone-dry humor, sentences worth savoring pile up faster than the body count... Linguistically cryptic military diagnoses, the PR churn of the war machine and a merciless city that fed on its own long before its citizens started feeding on one another still endure in Whitehead's apocalypse, all the way to the bitter end.
Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, Zone One, features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar ... But unless they’re entirely beyond the beguilements of art they will also feel fruitfully disturbed, because Zone One will have forced them, whether they signed up for it or not, to see the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange ... A plot summary is impossible: there isn’t a plot. To make matters worse, the protagonist is a laconic introvert of self-avowed mediocrity ...once he finds his register, Whitehead writes with economy, texture and punch. He has a talent for sardonic aphorism...a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise.
...though the movement has spread across the country, there is a reason that the occupation started in New York. The city is the beating heart of the crimes under protest, as it is the heart of Colson Whitehead’s satirical zombie novel, Zone One ... The book reflects 21st-century New York: post 9/11, mid-recession, in the thick of incomprehensible wars that continue without any end in sight ... In Zone One, apocalypse is like a subway car, yet another container that throws random urbanites together ... Spitz is so emotionless that he’s almost zombielike himself ... The structure of the novel — it moves around in time — doesn’t do much to build narrative tension. There are few unanswered questions or developing relationships. Instead, Whitehead seems interested in crafting a mood, one of psychological difficulty and labor.
'New York City in death was very much like New York City in life,' writes Colson Whitehead in his apocalyptic tragicomedy Zone One ... Whitehead, whose previous novels include John Henry Days and The Intuitionist, is concerned with existential loneliness in Zone One, and lampooning contemporary society and its excesses ...the book also means to deliver the visceral satisfaction promised by Whitehead's gruesome adopted genre, the horror story ... Zone One is a smart, strange, engrossing novel about the end of metaphors and the way that, as Mark Spitz knows all too well, no barrier can hold forever against the armies of death.
Opening 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.
Zone One is a zombie novel set over the course of three days in a dystopian Manhattan ... At the center of the mess is Mark Spitz, an oddly named individual of 'unrivaled mediocrity'... Spitz’s state of fuzzy passivity might be attributable to the after-effects of such a memory if Whitehead didn’t assure us, to the contrary, that his character has always been an unexceptional, passionless type of person –– a guy 'constitutionally unaccustomed to enthusiasm' ... It’s a strangely passive character around which to organize a story, and it is with Spitz that the book’s trouble originates ... His sentences are uncommonly perfect, his similes startling and delightful... Its strengths (the sentences) and weaknesses (the underseasoned Spitz) are equally conspicuous ... But good writing needs good storytelling, and good genre fiction needs a sharp plot. Without these things, it just feels like people-watching.
The comedy of that collision has a distant echo in the talented Colson Whitehead's new work of fiction, Zone One, in which we see a reverse mashup –– the stately, near-Austenian sentences of one of our more interesting and innovative writers pressed into a worn zombie plot that, at best, seems a pale imitation of Max Brooks' much more impressive and entertaining World War Z ...Whitehead's prose bogs down the plot in similar fashion. The writing weighs the story down even in some overtly sensational moments...Alas, Whitehead's manner of telling the story creates its own sort of barricades against enjoying it.
Coming off the success of 2009's leisurely, autobiographical Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead takes a radical turn toward the macabre in his new end-of-the-world zombie thriller Zone One ... The streets of New York make up a hellscape in the aftermath of a plague that kills off much of humanity but leaves a core group of survivors... As bad as all that sounds, in Zone One we get a tale that is as cheeky as it is bleak ... The hero of the novel, who goes by the name Mark Spitz, is one of the civilian zombie sweepers, and the novel is partly a character study of him ... Whitehead, himself a New Yorker, writes about Spitz's travails in that brooding, vertical metropolis with a dark poetry, which makes this harrowing tale not just a juicy experiment in genre fiction but a brilliantly disguised meditation on a 'flatlined culture' in need of its own rejuvenating psychic jolt.
Convinced that plot, profits and parody can still be bled from the living dead, Whitehead gives us Zone One, where Mark Spitz and the rest of Omega Unit are pitted against Manhattan's zombie hordes ...Whitehead, a New Yorker with four other novels in the bag, isn't taking flesh-eating all that seriously. Even his protagonist's moniker, 'Mark Spitz,' is a punchline, albeit one that –– like so much of Zone One –– isn't quite as clever as the novelist thinks it is ... What we don't get in Zone One, unfortunately, is a lifesaving transfusion of story or suspense ... Is that Whitehead's homage to Cormac McCarthy? A swipe at his Pulitzer Prize? Or one last reminder that Whitehead can't breathe new life into a rotting genre?
Zone One lifts all the gore and gunfire and oozy bits one might expect from the genre. But this is Whitehead, so there’s also popular culture to critique and parallels to draw between zombies and contemporary society ... Cinematic in scope and nimble in its use of hard-core gore, it’s an absorbing read, crammed with thoughtful snapshots of the world the survivors have left behind ... As readers, we should be at liberty to mourn a civilization that appears to be gone for good — one with safer homes, loving families and, yes, flat screen TVs. But the book sometimes makes us feel naive, even foolish for courting these feelings...a sharp commentary on the rat race of contemporary life. Interestingly, Whitehead’s post-apocalyptic world is devoid of the racial, social and religious stereotypes that have plagued civilizations forever.
He sets Zone One a year or so after a zombie apocalypse. The disease came from nowhere and struck the entire world, spreading from the zombified to their victims via the traditional chomp ... His sentences are interesting, his plotting brisk, his descriptions lucid, and his asides clever. He favors uncommon words... But every time we start caring about Mark Spitz, some moronic zombie jumps in the way. I never wanted to stop reading –– Whitehead's writing is too entertaining –– but I could never take Zone One seriously, either.
Relying on a style differing markedly from genre fiction that treats similar subjects, Whitehead forgoes lengthy exposition that describes the source of the plague or the reasons for its seemingly instantaneous transmission ... Among recent novels in this vein, Whitehead's more resembles Cormac McCarthy's The Road than it does the social satire of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story or Tom Perrotta's elegiac description of the consequences of a Rapture-like event, The Leftovers ...he's able to bring to bear the fondness for the city –– its moods, its light and the swirling rhythms of its street life...Zone One is less a spectacular account of a clash between the living and the undead and more an intense meditation on the way we cope with disaster and the stubborn, often inexplicable, persistence of the human will to survive.
...now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One ...an indeterminate catastrophe called Last Night has created a race of zombies and changed the world from a recognizable contemporary terrain to a post-apocalyptic one in which only shards of civilized society remain ... Yet Whitehead, who has an ear for absurdist jargon second only to Don DeLillo’s, is true to his tongue-in-cheek vision ...is one of the writers who reserve their tenderness chiefly for inanimate objects, and who has imagined destruction so he can gaze lovingly at the ruins ... As the faceless Mark Spitz sifts through his generic, buzzword-laden, pre-apocalypse memories and marches passively towards his fate, the suspicion grows that, in Whitehead’s world, the human and the undead might just be two different classes of zombies.
Idea versus performance, though, can be a useful way of overcoming reading prejudices, particularly in a book as boundary-blurring as Zone One by Colson Whitehead ...Whitehead isn't your usual zombie singer. He never overburdens the zombies with allegory or omits the requisite gore, but he does what all artists do: he observes, closely, and reports back what he sees ...does have a tendency to overwrite –– sentences sometimes grow so rhythmical, you fail to take in their actual meaning as the words wash over you –– but he achieves a kind of miracle of tone. A fragile hope permeates these pages, one so painful and tender, it's heartbreaking.
...takes place after the apocalypse, but its plot is formed from puzzle, not pursuit. Even with bloodthirsty zombies lurking around every corner, Whitehead’s chosen mouthpiece for plague-ridden America dwells on the crushing inevitability of his situation ... Over the weekend in which Zone One takes place, he wrestles not with how to keep his humanity, but how to jettison it, musing over how to more fully seal himself off from that old life ... Whitehead fills out his world with the mocking jokes of society’s reassembly in the new age and the terrifying tableaux of real-life disasters...then washes it with a dreamy patina of philosophical quandary.
Zone 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.
Now, in a post-plague world, where the new capital of the reconstruction is in Buffalo, New York, and the landscape is dotted with refugee camps bearing names like Happy Acres and Bubbling Brooks, Mark Spitz is unique in the magnitude of his cynicism ... The narrative of Whitehead's novel similarly moves back and forth freely between Mark Spitz's past (including harrowing scenes from the first terrifying days and the so-called Last Night of the plague apocalypse) and his present, which, as it turns out, is as tenuous as he always imagined it to be ... In Zone One, Whitehead uses his subject matter to comment –– subtly or overtly –– not only on the thematic import of zombies, but even, perhaps, on the meaning of our contemporary culture's fascination with them ... prompts a renewed thoughtfulness toward our own actions, the many mindless daily acts that, for better or for worse, form the pattern of our days.
The zombie genre provides unlikely inspiration for the author’s creative renewal ...here he sinks his teeth into a popular format and emerges with a literary feast, producing his most compulsively readable work to date. Though there’s enough chomp-and-spurt gorefest to satiate fans of the format, Whitehead transforms the zombie novel into an allegory of contemporary Manhattan... With its savage sense of humor and thematic ambitions, the narrative is to contemporary zombie novels what the movies of George Romero are to other zombie flicks ... The latest from a generation of literary novelists who are erasing the distinction between art and pulp.
As we follow New Yorker and perpetual B-student 'Mark Spitz' over three harrowing days, Whitehead dumpster dives genre tropes, using what he wants and leaving the rest to rot, turning what could have been another zombie-pocalypse gore-fest into the kind of smart, funny, pop culture–filled tale that would make George Romero proud ...Whitehead plants his narrative firmly in New York City, penning a love letter to a Manhattan still recognizable after the event referred to only as 'Last Night' ...is filled with the kind of dark humor one imagines actual survivors adopting in order to stave off madness. The author sometimes lets the set pieces he's so good at run long, but otherwise succeeds brilliantly with a fresh take.
