Coping with a Before and an After

The dead walk,but do they make great literature?

Wherever he goes these days, award-winning literary favorite Colson Whitehead, who The Chicago Tribune has labeled "one of the country's finest young writers," is asked some variant on the same question - why write a zombie novel?

"Monsters are just a rhetorical device to talk about people," Whitehead told the audience who gathered at the Politics and Prose bookstore here this afternoon to hear him discuss and read from his new novel Zone One.

The book jacket describes the story this way:

"A pandemic has devastated  the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units clearing lower Manhattan building by building, block by block. Alternating between haunting flashbacks of Spitz's desperate flight for survival during the worst of  the outbreak and his present narrative, Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go wrong ..."

Now for more on those why-zombie questions. Some come from newspaper, radio, and TV interviewers. Others come from Whitehead's own literary friends. "They say I don't like zombie stories. I don't like zombie movies. So I ask them what zombie stories have you read that you don't like?  And they say I haven't really read any.  And then I ask well, what zombie movies don't you like? And they say, well I haven't seen any."

"I think people are hung up on labels," Whitehead said. "Really, there's just shit you like and shit you don't like."

Recently, zombies have become a growing subculture (Walking Dead, anyone?) embraced by a  burgeoning legion of rabidly devout fans and purists. And how has that subculture taken to Whitehead's high-brow take?. For the most part, reaction has been positive, but there have been some aficionados of  more blood dripping and brain munching who have been somewhat lukewarm. "Some say it's so slow. All he (the main character) does is think. I  guess if you like Cormac McCarthy's The Road maybe you'll like this," Whitehead said with a laugh.

Perhaps, given his early years, the real question for Whitehead is not why a zombie novel now, but rather how come it took you so long to write a horror-plotted novel in the first place. A self-described loner who didn't ever want to go outside and play with other kids, Whitehead says he spent his formative years devouring horror movies and sci-fi  stories. There were innumerable watchings of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, countless comics, and an adoration for the master himself, Stephen King. Whitehead, who says he had extremely permissive parents, got hooked early. He remembers watching A Clockwork Orange when he was about 10 and when he asked what was happening to that (victim of extreme violence) lady, his mother telling him "oh, that's social commentary." And not every family would be comfortable sitting down at a nice restaurant for a family dinner after viewing the latest Night of the Living Dead saga.

Ever since he was a youngster, Whitehead admits to being plagued by "zombie anxiety dreams." In fact, it was one such dream that lead directly to Zone One. On July 4th, 2009, Whitehead had invited a bunch of friends to come stay at his New York home. "They were all downstairs cooking bacon and having a good time and I was upstairs by myself in a bad mood. So I willed myself back to sleep and had a dream where I was in the city, but I wasn't sure they had swept up the zombies. I guess you could say the book came out of a dream and a weekend of despair."

So, in the end, what does Whitehead hope his readers take away from their reading.

"Well, the genre allowed me to write about what's living about the dead and what's dead about the living," Whitehead said. "It's really about surviving a calamity. How do we cope with a before and an after?"

Tales, Tidbits, and Traveling Tips:
If Whitehead, who told me he has always loved joking, were not a first-class writer he would make a fine comedian. I could easily see him in standup or as a featured correspondent on The Daily Show. I can't remember ever howling so hard and literally being in danger of falling off my seat at a book talk before. Whitehead's bits on why be a writer (you don't have to wear clothes and you get to make stuff up) on how he kind of missed the writing point in college (I wore black all the time and I smoked cigarettes, but I didn't bother to write anything), his early years in the publishing world at Village Voice (he opened books submitted to the publication for review), the lack of job possibilities for slender-fingered, thin-wristed individuals like himself (pianist, hand model, surgeon, President of the United States) and his passion for Twitter (140 characters pretty much sums up how much interaction I want to have with people) were truly funny. But his capper came as he dead-panned that his early writing rejections did allow him to truly understand the elusive meaning of the song "McArthur Park." To prove his point, Whitehead produced his I-Pad and played part of the song for the audience, recounting line by line how it described his rejection years. I think he said something about leaving his cake out in the rain and something about never finding the recipe again. But I'm not sure. I was laughing too hard.