Colson Whitehead - Zone One

[John Bailey]

Halfway through my first book by Colson Whitehead and I'm thinking:
damn, this has Pynchon in its veins. Some quick googling confirms that
Whitehead is avowedly a fan.
The novel is NYC post-zombie-apocalypse, following a Benny
Profane-like schlub tasked with mopping up the undead stragglers. For
all its genre roots it's very literary, to a point that irked me early
on - why say it's cloudy when you can call the sky a "solemn
nigrescence"? - but the thesaurus bashing turns out to be less
frequent and less annoying than I first thought.
And the stylistic methods Whitehead has purloined from Pynchon are
giving me greater insight into just what P was doing in GR,
especially. What actually *happens* in Zone One is very slight - the
protagonist's actions could probably be condensed to 5-10 pages - but
his temporal bandwidth is huge, so everything is echoed and refracted
by the past that still lives in the present. It's not as simple as one
thing triggering a memory, but everything in the novel's present
conjures up the past as a kind of field. We're not just given a line
of dialogue, but a bunch of lines that people used to say in those
moments. Or a handful of situations that collectively describe the
broader world, rather than merely one. It's hard to describe but it's
extremely reminiscent of Pynchon's big books.
"They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a
hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and
floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They
strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal
separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the
sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism
planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers
terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths
caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads,
in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips
and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling
things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares
and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and
franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite
glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric
shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world,
which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust.
Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette
butts. The gun smoke was sucked up into braids and curtains by the
atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those
mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed
in renewed fortified lines.
The soldiers discussed work over dinner."