Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Zombie narratives tend to fall into two camps:  depressing and ironically funny.  Some are both.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One is both, at times, but it is also beautiful and rich and occasionally profound.  

Zombies tend to be fairly transparent metaphors -- they began as the enslaved workers of Haitian sugar plantations, but then came to be stand-ins for any and all disempowered worked drones.  For Whitehead, though, they reflect all of us.  There are two varieties of "skels" to be fought: the active, hungering type, lumbering around and tearing off hunks of the flesh of the temporarily-still-living; and the "stragglers," who are frozen in a moment, arrested in inscrutable trances.  They stand at copy machines, or gaze blankly at shuttered boutique windows, as apparently oblivious to the ruin within the shops and to the ruin within themselves:  

Why this particular juice joint and not another, why this neighborhood greasy spoon, synagogue, bookstore, 99 cent store? … The window-shopper bewitched before a boarded up department-store window, taking in a long-removed display that nonetheless unfurled its exquisitely arranged baubles behind the plywood.

The protagonist, ironically dubbed "Mark Spitz," after the great Olympic Swimmer, reflects on the stragglers:

They were safe in their houses.  In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped.  All the time in the world.  Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment...

And later, on the plague's impact on his own emotional state:

The world stalled out at his edges.  Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.  He was not alone. 'Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,' or so the latest diagnosis droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.

"Mark Spitz" succeeds in this impossible situation.  He is a survivor not because he is exceptional -- he isn't -- not because is he particularly brave or strong or smart or noble.  He succeeds because the zombie plague reduces everyone to total mediocrity.  The skels staggering around are pathetic.  They are weak and slow and dumb, only dangerous because they are so infectious and so very, very numerous.

There are moments of gore, but they are not the point.  This is not disaster-porn, not horror for the sake of conjuring disgust and revulsion.  It is a cerebral novel, with a great deal to say about us and our condition.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Over the summer, I was sitting on the roof of a friend's apartment in Jersey City, chatting about novels as the sun set, and he recommend Neuromancer by William Gibson (thanks Josh).  It had been ages -- years and years -- since I read some good, straight-up sci-fi.  This genre was a staple of my teen years (Last week, I was surprised to see that there is a new film coming out of Ender's Game, which was my favorite sic-fi novel at the time, staring a kid named Asa!).

Neuromancer was published in that greatest of science fiction years, 1984, and it depicts a dystopic future in which the rich live lives apart from the rest of society, encapsulated in bubbles of pleasure, and the rest live in squalor, in which everyone is connected by a computer network, and hackers are the elite of the criminal class, in which computer viruses made in China are used by criminals to hack into the world of the rich.  Sound familiar?  What was certainly wild fantasy and speculation thirty years ago is, well, the world we live in.  Ok, I exaggerate.  The rich don't live on space stations, so this world is nothing like ours.

The main character is a fairly unlikeable down-and-out everyman named Case, a former master hacker whose nervous system was altered by an angry former associate in order to stop him from being able to plug himself directly into the Matrix.  Case is hired (somewhat coercively) by a shady individual who wants him to pull off an impossible hack, with the help of a biotechnologically augmented samurai with razor claws named, surprisingly, Molly.  They are also helped by a ROM of Case's old mentor, now dead but kept conscious within a computer.

There is a bit of sex and a lot of drugs, but the most compelling passages are the descriptions of Case's work within the Matrix, a sort-of immersive visualization of the codes within computers.  No, not like Neo and his pals, not really, though certainly the Wachowski Brothers must had been influenced by Neuromancer.  Gibson gives us beautiful descriptions of the architecture of the virus, as it merges with its host, and Case's movements as he soars through it.  There is, even in their pain and panic and in the general breakdown of society, beauty.

Edward Docx, The Calligrapher

The Calligrapher, by the seemingly pseudonymous "Edward Docx," is a book I don't think I'd have picked up in a shop, since -- like all of us -- I judge books by their covers.  This one has the look of a literary romance, with the pen, the bed, and the pairs of shoes.  Hardly my style.  No monsters, no grim settings, no apparent darkness at all.  But the book was recommended (and given) by a friend whose taste is impeccable, so I gave it a try.

It is brilliant.  And there are monsters.  They are just shaped like beautiful people.

The novel is centered on Jasper Jackson, a talented calligrapher and therefore a living anachronism.  He was raised by his grandmother, who is a scholar of medieval manuscripts, and as a child he was punished by being made to copy out Latin texts in various formal scripts.  He has grown into a rather finicky playboy.  Perhaps as a result of his careful study of the painstaking art of calligraphy -- an art form with very little tolerance for error -- he has become a perfectionist in many quarters of his life.  There is a proper way to make a cup of tea (loose leaves, never bags), of coffee (espresso only), a proper way to prepare a dinner, and, most importantly, a proper way to carry on multiple affairs, while deluding one's loving, faithful girlfriend.

Jasper excels at all of these things.  He is something of a professional.  Until he slips, and makes the grandest of rookie mistakes:  he falls in love.

Throughout the novel, Jasper is working on a private commission of the love poems of John Donne, and each chapter takes its title and framing structure from one of Donne's complex, fraught poems of love.  This might have been merely a clever trick, but Docx turns many of these poems into rich points of contemplation, poignant reflection, and, increasingly, menace, sorrow, and loss.

The Calligrapher is bitingly funny, compelling, and beautiful.  And damn, I didn't see that ending coming.  Well worth the read.  And thank you, Suzanne!