Night of the Living Bildungsroman: A Review of J.R. Angelella's Zombie

Of all the subsections and structural variants that have graced the literary landscape over the years, the bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) is perhaps the most treasured and adaptable. These pieces vary greatly in terms of intended audience, genre, and tone, and you’ve no doubt seen examples both in classic works (Great Expectations, Candide, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye) and newer fiction (The Kite Runner, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Persepolis, Harry Potter,  and yes,  even Twilight to some extent. Sorry.)

Zombie, the debut novel by J.R. Angelella, earns its place on the list easily, as its narrator (Jeremy Barker) is all too happy to discuss his jaded outlook, troublesome adolescent experiences, and quirky family, friends and enemies with superficial humor and touching emotional subtext. His is a tale we can all relate to (well, sort of. You’ll see.) In fact, Barker is clearly a spiritual successor to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield — both deal with “phony” adults, sexual inexperience, violent psychopathic fantasies, confusion about love, and anxiety about life. The chief difference here is that Barker also has to deal with snuff films, an emotionally void, drug addicted family, and plenty of psychical altercations at school. Oh, and zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

Interestingly, the book begins with Jeremy discussing his father’s penchant for and judgment of neckties:

According to my father [Ballentine], there are three types of necktie knots: the Windsor, the Half-Windsor, and the Limp Dick.

Afterward, we are privy to various subtle yet revealing discussions and interactions between them, including overly explicit details about how said knots imply masculinity, the whereabouts of Jeremy’s mother, and hypothetic zombie survival scenarios (it’s with these details that Angelella evokes Palahniuk and Ellis). It’s here that we get a strong sense of their complex relationship, as their wildly different personalities (Jeremy, a perverse, talkative kid ripe with imagination; Ballentine, a stubborn, quiet and disinterested adult who treats his son like a soldier) get in the way of their bond. There’s a love between them, but it’s masked by secrecy, cruel expectations, and unreturned affection. Jeremy spends much of the novel trying to get closer to and make sense of his father, and this struggle shows how Angelella manages to place touching human conflict underneath superficial humor, obscenity, and gore.

It’s also in this first chapter that we learn of Jeremy’s five Zombie Survival Codes for a zombie apocalypse:

ZSC #1: Avoid Eye Contact
ZSC #2: Keep Quiet
ZSC #3: Forget the Past
ZSC #4: Lock-and-Load
ZSC #5: Fight to Survive

Of course, he acknowledges that he stole these rules from the film Zombieland (in fact, the book is full of allusions and commentary on actual zombie films, which is a nice touch). As you’d expect given the context, these guidelines protect him from, well, everyone else, and the way he uses them as psychological and emotional defensive mechanisms is tragic yet relatable. If you’ve ever dealt with a broken home and/or high school bullshit, you can understand his perspective.

As for the rest of his family, well, we see a bit of his drug addicted mother, Corrine, her peaceful new man, Zeke, and Jeremy’s womanizing, avant-garde brother, Jackson. Honestly, we don’t see much interaction between them, so they serve more as archetypes than actual characters.  Nevertheless, further exemplify why Jeremy feels so bitter and disenfranchised.

Fortunately, there is a bit of hope for Jeremy, as he finds three objects of teenage attraction: Tricia, Franny, and Aimee. The former is college age and lives next door to him; she essentially offers him advice and then flashes him through her bedroom window at night (you know, the typical neighborly bond). As for Franny, she’s a bit older, and she seems to find a kindred spirit in Jeremy. Aimee proves to be the most important of the group, as she gives Jeremy the confidence and affection (eventually) that he so desperately needs (that is, when he isn’t getting nose bleeds every time she walks by). She comes from a Mean Girls background yet finds Jeremy’s awkwardness and genuine sincerity endearing. They share many charming moments, such as the following:

We stand shoulder-to-shoulder, holding hands, looking out into the abyss of the harbor. I can see Federal Hill across the way and the lights of ‘The Prince Edward.’ Sailboats and speedboats drift along, spotting the black hole with dots of light.

“I wish I could press pause right now,” I say, putting ‘Little Man’ on the floor.
“That’s sweet.” Her fingers lace further into mine.
“I want to be happy,” I say.
“That’s not asking for much,” she says.
“And I want you to be happy too.”

As for the advertised subplot about “a bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for some kind of surgical procedure” that leads Jeremy to “a world far darker and more violent,” well, it’s not as crucial or established as you’d probably expect. There are a few remarks about it, and it does put even more distance between Jeremy and his father, but overall the core of the story revolves around the aforementioned relationships. The end of the novel, however, deals with it directly, and while the resolution is a bit too quick, it’s still a satisfying exploration of cultism. Also, the irony of Jeremy loving zombie films yet being disgusted by real violence is a clear statement on how desensitized people can be to torture.

To be honest, Zombie is not without its faults; the profane and immature language Jeremy uses feels inauthentic at times (you can tell it was written by a man trying to write the voice of a teenager), and just about every one of the plot points I mentioned earlier is underdeveloped.  In other words, we have glimpses of a dozen ideas instead of a dedicated and fulfilling examination of, say, three of them.

Still, I haven’t finished a book this quickly since I first read American Psycho (in three days). There’s just something about the narration and events that suck you in and keep you reading. Despite all of these flaws and the narrator’s repetitious thoughts (how many times can we be told about the ZSCs?), Jeremy is a very likeable protagonist. You root for him, laugh at him, and most importantly, feel his pain every step of the way. In the end, Zombie isn’t an especially complex or rewarding read, but it is a vastly entertaining and charming one. It stays with you long after you’ve read it, and really, that’s the ultimate goal for any work of art.

Murder. Explosions. A city draped in rain and shadows.

Murder. Explosions. Red herrings, interrogations, car chases, Hells’  Angels, a city draped in rain and shadows. These are the things that make Detective Inspector Huss the epitome of a modern detective novel.

Christmas shopping. Judo. A gourmet chef husband. An angst-ridden tween daughter who shaves her head to be in a skinhead band at school. Swedish politics. Inter-office gender politics. Angst about an approaching fortieth birthday. These are the things that set Detective Inspector Huss apart from the modern detective novel.

Originally published in Sweden in 1998 as as Den krossade Tanghästen (The Smashed Tang Horse, an infinitely better title, in my opinion), Helene Tursten’s story of the police investigation into the murder of Richard von Knecht, one of Götenborg’s richest citizens, is by turns both a noirish police procedural, and a down-to-earth family portrait. The author deftly balances the scenes of Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues from the Violent Crimes Unit as they face danger, confusing evidence, and a veritable Gordian Knot of politics, drugs, drunkenness, and heaps of money in their murder investigation with the more domestic, but equally important scenes of Irene’s home life, detailing the arrangements that need to be made when she has to work late, the eternal patience of her supportive husband, the trials of her daughter’s first boyfriend, and the other things that make her a complete person and not just the cynical, bitter cop hardened by the years of violence and death she’s seen on the job.

Speaking of bitter and cynical, when I agreed to review this book, I decided to go back and reread The Long Goodbye, a true masterpiece of the noir genre by Raymond Chandler, who helped to create the image of the hard-nosed, tough-as-nails, sarcastic and cynical private eye. And don’t get me wrong, he did so wonderfully; I absolutely love Chandler’s work. But it is a product of the time it was written. Things have changed. Phillip Marlowe would not be able to operate the way he did in the ‘40s anymore. Tursten’s novel reflects these changes.

Huss is hardly the hard-boiled, cynical private eye that Marlowe was. But she doesn’t need to be. Where Marlowe is a loner, Irene has the entire Göteborg police force and a loving family at home to support her. The surrounding cast of characters help to flesh out the detective inspector as a character and as a fully formed, modern human being. She struggles to maintain the division of her time between an often demanding and demoralizing job and the duties of a wife and mother (of twin teenage girls no less). Where Marlowe will occasionally remind the reader that he is aging, and can no longer handle a punk the way he used to, Huss is feeling insecure about the steady approach of her fortieth birthday, and can’t help comparing herself to the other women she interacts with, feeling self-conscious around those younger or richer than she is.

This is not to say that the novel is all sentimental and soft, either. Tursten knows how to turn a phrase (on the assumption that the translator has done a halfway decent job of sticking to her original text). There are passages that feel like they could have leapt cleanly out of one of Chandler’s novels: “Nobody saw him fall through the dense November darkness. With a dull, heavy thud he hit the rain-wet pavement.” The entire novel is bursting with Atmosphere, creating scenes that are at turns terrifying, tragic, tender, and other words that start with T.

As a lover of a good mystery story, I can appreciate the way that Tursten is able to drop clues in places that seem insignificant, like the fact that the sheets had been recently washed when von Knecht was murdered. Is this an important detail that will ultimately lead Irene to the killer, or just another red herring? From reading similar stories, my brain has become attuned to these details: I was always able to identify when these clues were dropped, and make a mental note to remember them, but was never able to tell whether they were actually worth remembering or not. This is, for me, the mark of an excellent mystery as well as a sense of realism. Actual criminal investigations, from what I understand, are usually full of completely meaningless evidence that needs to be analyzed and considered because it might mean something. Unlike, say, an Agatha Christie novel, where the entire solution hinges on a single line the butler said back on page twenty-five, and everything else is just misdirection, Tursten makes every aspect of the investigation important, and the frustration and tension mounts for the reader just as it does for the police investigating the case. As Tursten puts it in chapter fourteen, “Check and double-check all the witness statements. And check again if you don’t find anything new. A routine job. But that’s the way you solve crimes.”

There Is a Book I Turn To Sometimes When I Want To Live In Desire: Rosa Shand's The Gravity of Sunlight

It’s called The Gravity of Sunlight. I often find myself rereading it almost by accident. I flip to the passage I want, and fifty pages later, I can’t put the book down until I finish it again.

I bought my copy in Prague, where I taught English for a year after college, seven years ago now. I was buying a book or two a week then, reading the first few pages and making my decisions based on how deeply the sentences took root. I knew nothing about publishers or publishing. I hadn’t published, but I was starting a novel that I am still working on now, set in Prague and following a year in the life of an American expatriate.

The Gravity of Sunlight is by an author I still know almost nothing about (though I wish I knew more), Rosa Shand. It is set in Uganda just before, and then as, Idi Imin takes power. You can feel the politics in the atmosphere like the electrical charge before a lightning storm. A storm about to the hit the small community of expats that the novel centers around.

Prague is nothing like Uganda, and the expats I knew and the characters I was writing about are hardly similar to the characters in Shand’s book, but the experience of being somewhere very different from the place you came from — an experience most of us share in one way or another — is acutely felt: both the love and fear of that place, both the possibilities and constrictions that such a difference presents.

In The Gravity of Sunlight, Agnes is married to a didactic missionary who works at the local university. He’s an “intellectual” and a bore, who believes she can “will” herself to love him. They have a family (three children), and mostly shared ideals, and at one point they needed each other to escape. But now, of course, the situation has changed. Now Agnes is full of longing for someone else, something else, and is surrounded by potential objects of affection. The novel opens with her attraction to a European man; she has dreams about an African who was once her employee and now has followed her to her new home; there is a woman she may be in love with.

About the ex-employee: “Odinga made an art of the minimum gesture that would catch her attention. . . . At the moment he would know, to the centimeter, where she was. He need only come around to where the bedroom window faced. He would never call or knock. He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent. . . . It would actually be a great release — she accepted now — when Odinga was safely away at Megan’s house. She’d be free of her absurd self-consciousness.”

I can’t remember what I felt reading the book for the first time, but as revisions of my novel spiraled out of control, I thought of The Gravity of Sunlight often. I am telling you: at points, you can hardly breathe for all the desire Agnes feels; it’s like you’re at the bottom of the ocean and you’re holding your breath because if you let it out, the world you are immersed in will crush you. I wanted my characters, and my readers, to feel that way, and I looked carefully at the dreams and reservations Agnes has, where she gives in and what she gives up, the feeling that her longing is more powerful than anything else.

And Africa. “He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent.” The longing for Africa goes beyond characters and story. It seems the book’s longing; when you put down The Gravity of Sunlight, you miss Africa and feel as if you must return there as soon as you can. Because the Uganda of The Gravity of Sunlight is the only place all that desire is possible, and at the end of the novel that Uganda is gone. That, to me, is a book, the only place where something — a feeling, a way of life, a story — is possible.