![\"\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/CA-colson-whitehead.jpg\" "\\"CA-colson-whitehead\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Last month, one of my Character Approved book selections<\/a> was Colson Whitehead’s Zone One<\/i><\/i><\/a>, a novel about a foot soldier in the battle to reclaim lower Manhattan after the zombie apocalypse. It’s a great story, especially if you’re already a fan of Whitehead’s cool, detached voice, which fits this world—where everybody suffers from one form of “post apocalypse stress disorder” or another—perfectly. Like many classic zombie stories, Zone One<\/i> has its share of satirical social commentary, including some unsettling echoes of Abu Ghraib, but at its core, this is a story of existential isolation… with some kick-ass action sequences.<\/p>\n Much of the critical reaction to Zone One<\/i> centers around the “fact” that Whitehead is a “literary” author who’s decided to move into genre—which sort of ignores the weirdness of his first novel, The Intuitionist<\/i>, but Whitehead himself doesn’t care about the distinctions between literary and genre fiction: “They don’t mean anything to me,” he says in an Atlantic<\/i> interview<\/a>. “They’re useful for bookstores, obviously. They’re useful for fans. You can figure out what’s coming out in the same style of other books you like. But as a writer they have no use for me in my day-to-day work experience.” Some critics, and critical institutions, care a lot, which is how you wind up with ridiculous, insipid statements like the lead sentence of Glen Duncan’s NYTBR<\/i> review<\/a> of Zone One<\/i>: “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star.”<\/p>\n At first glance, one wonders why the New York Times<\/i> would assign a “genre” novel to somebody who is so actively resentful of genre fiction and its fans—even as he makes big money from Knopf off werewolf stories—when they’ve already got a thoughtful critic of horror fiction in Terrence Rafferty. Maybe he just didn’t want to revisit zombies after surveying the topic back in August<\/a>, or maybe the book review’s editors set out to deliberately provoke the sort of controversy that generates a lot of page views. Your guess is as good as mine. (Meanwhile, Charlie Jane Anders did a fine job of demolishing Duncan’s two-pronged cultural snobbery<\/a>.)<\/p>\n