The Gravest Generation

We stopped watching Walking Dead a few seasons into the series not because it wasn't good — at least for me — but rather because it was so fatiguing: week after week of watching characters under a constant threat of zombie annihilation without the slightest glimmer of hope just wears you down after a while. Max Brooks' World War Z overcomes this by telling the story of the great world war against zombiedom in a series of post-war debrief interviews. I think — and maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's entirely just me — that you have to write a zombie story like this. There's no living alongside of zombies in some kind of brokered detente — no one will rest easy until they're eradicated, and stories like that are going to be unsettling.

Instead of a narrative Z is structured as series of oral history transcripts — first person accounts. To Brooks' credit, he is super ambitious about the number of interviews and different voices he includes — people from every continent and both sexes. Writing these characters in the first person is totally audacious, bordering on arrogant. Which is to say, a criticism that the voices tend to sound the same is slightly misplaced — you try making all these people sound individual! Also, I think it's stylistically plausible that the veterans of the great zombie war to save civilization speak a similar language . . . to an extent.

At some point — OK, why not now? — it will have to be talked about (preferably in the passive voice) why we're in such a zombie moment. Z was published in 2006 (the original Walking Dead comic debuted in 2003, and the show in 2010). Part of the fantasy of Z is how at peace the world is following the great zombie war — nothing unifies humanity like an inhuman existential threat. And there's a great glow in like a clear and convincing win against it. And for a while there after 2001 there was that sort of cartoonish existential threat that a lot of people, maybe even some sci-fi and comic enthusiasts, maybe responded to in a visceral sort of way — you know, it's easy to feel good about mowing down Zeke (World War Z slang for zombie) like it maybe/might feel good to dispatch some zombie-like terries ("Draxx them sklounst" all around!). At any rate, it makes sense to me.

(A parenthetical about the film version of the book, or what was ostensibly the film version: as audacious as it was for Books to try to write a gazillion different characters in the first person it was equally so to think you could make this book a film: a faithful adaption would cost a billion dollars. So I don't expect lavish on-location scenes, or whatnot. And even though the film happens contemporaneously — as opposed to the oral history of the book — I suppose it works in that respect. I don't even mind that all of humanity is saved by one gorgeous Brad Pitt of a character [though that hair is not great] in a way that diverges 1000 percent from the book. No, what really makes my blood run black is that the zombies in the film travel faster than the speed of light. Kind of like those super speedy True Blood vampires, but with face eating. It's dumb because the one organizing principle of zombies is that they're slow as shit. And I don't believe that humanity can win a war against fast zombies. It's ridiculous. Absurd even. That said, the thing made half a billion dollars, so what do I know?)

The Most Entertaining Chapters Of The Worst Chapters Of Human History

If you don't have or know children there's this cloying kids' show from the Jim Henson empire called Dinosaur Train which basically combines the top two things kids are obsessed with: dinosaurs and trains. It's about a group of animated dinosaurs that either work on or like to ride trains. It's about as crass as can be. The only thing worse would be if they took trains to other planets.

Similarly, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad combines the best parts of slavery — graphic violence and psychological torment — with actual trains. It's like Ken Burns meets the Lionel-Industrial Complex. Here's hoping that Railroad is never taught to high schoolers, lest they starting thinking the Underground Railroad was a literal subway from Georgia to the North.

It's not that magical realism should be unwelcome when depicting brutal chapters of human history, but it can seem a little wrong. Once, back in the 1990s, I remember cheerfully asking an older colleague if she had seen the quirky, heartwarming Life Is Beautiful. "I didn't need to see it," she tersely answered. At the time, I hadn't realized she was a Holocaust survivor.

Of course you can argue that if you took the choo-choo parts out of Underground, it'd be a straight-up tale of an escaped slave. Sure, but then you start to think about why it's a piece of fiction in the first place. Which is why I think there's a reason 12 Years a Slave exists — same brutal imagery, but being an adaptation of a first-person account it's insulated from this criticism.

At this point I would like to take a minute to humbly announce that I have read Moby Dick — as an adult, in fact — and in proving so, note the similarity between the slavecatcher character in Railroad and Melville's iconic Ahab. In Dick the obsessive was tracking a whale. In Underground, a human. It's provocative. Also weird.

Speaking of ridiculously, unaccountably obvious statements to make, Whitehead has a habit of beating a point to death. Or at least underscoring it twenty times and referring back to it later on, just to make sure you realized it. Kind of like Scorsese's Rat. In Whitehead's case, the line "Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America" — because they're in a darkened tunnel, get it? No seriously, do you get it?

Look, I know people are dim. I didn't really think about the line the first time I read it. But why not just let it be? Maybe if it comes up again, or someone smarter mentions it, or a TA blows minds with all manner deep cuts then it could be a nice little moment. Instead it becomes THE FUCKING BIG SYMBOLIC STATEMENT YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOUT THIS UNDERGROUND — NO, LITERALLY UNDERGROUND — TRAIN SYSTEM.

Which is sort of when you start to see Underground as a giant spec script or something. Because, after all, the only thing people love more than human misery is trains, and this thing could have a lot of legs, if only . . . oh wait.

And so when we read Railroad in book club, you know how many people this bothered? Exactly no one. Which goes to show, I suppose . . . but people, really? (I'm saying this to 12 really brilliant, interested readers . . .) No one? Not one of you thinks it's a little weird? And no one does.

So it's clearly just my own hangup. I'll get over it.

Stoppard In Under 200 Words

I got ready to read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia thinking it was going to be a slog, but it was actually pretty entertaining. It's funny, for one — the opening scene between the tutor and the young woman sets the tone and pulls you in. It's also kind of poignant, what with the young woman set ablaze at the end. Even though it dives deep into random intellectual shit that so much Stoppard material tends to do, Arcadia feels like it has heart.

At some point you start to wonder who the audience is for Stoppard's work — who is this consumer who lives life in such proximity to the author's mental space? I want to meet this person, because as textured and multi-facted and intelligent as the milieus Stoppard creates may be, I only pick up on a fraction of whatever it's supposed to be about. At one point I may not have admitted as much, but life is too short to feign like you truly got the full meaning of The Coast of Utopia. All of which may explain Shakespeare In Love — maybe it's his diffusion brand or like Philippe Starck's Target line or something.