Excerpt: h/t Books Inq
Race, a topic Whitehead deals with regularly in his writing, has a muted role in Zone One. We learn on Page 231 that Mark Spitz is black, but only when he explains how he ended up nicknamed for an Olympic swimming champion. Part of it, he tells a buddy, is "the black-people-can't-swim thing."
Race "is in some of my books, not so much in other ones," says Whitehead, who is African American. "It seemed to me that if you're in an abandoned gas station with some other survivors, surrounded by 10,000 angry, hungry living dead, that the race of the person next to you there, their crazy accent, or their gender would be unimportant. What's important is getting out of there with your skin intact. We might actually be postracial one day. It will take the end of the world and the decimation of 95 percent of the population to do it."
Is there a social message in Zone One?
"The zombies in the book are just rhetorical props, and the apocalypse becomes a way for me, in my oblique way, to talk about survival. . . . Mark Spitz and the folks he works with are just trying to figure out how to live in this new world that's been so changed."
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