Another Zombie Apocalypse in Suck City

I had a four-hour stretch in front of me, a beautiful spring day to squander beneath the sleek silver cover of Zone One. I ended up taking a three-and-a-half hour nap. Even with the concrete steps pressed against my back and the wind lashing my hair across my face, Whitehead’s words still lulled me into a near-catatonic state. It seems strange that a book imbued with suspense could have this effect. We’re dealing with zombies, after all, and though Whitehead goes to great lengths to describe “the dead” in stunning detail and to construct impenetrable sentences, still... so sleepy.

Whitehead shows his skill for poetic cadence, but because the sentences give the reader little information about the characters, they end up feeling hollow. For example: “[O]n Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing.” The slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Beautifully rendered, but what does this sentence tell us about Gary or the narrator, Mark Spitz? The dominant presence here is Whitehead, not the characters or the effect they have on one another.

Another example: “What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities.” Spitting the top-shelf profanities. Lovely, but can we hear the profanities, please? Can we see Spitz interacting with his surroundings? I kept waiting for Spitz to lose control, to dissolve into the chaos that spawned his new-found identity. Instead we get Whitehead’s measured prose, his bloated language and heartless characters.

I continued to read. Each night I would open the book and let lifeless sentence after sentence wash over me. I felt apathy toward the characters and their fate. And yet when I fell asleep, I would dream exclusively of the dead. For weeks after I finished the book, they haunted my dreams, invading my apartment, crashing into windshields, dodging shotgun bullets. I would awaken, sweat-drenched and afraid, and fall right back into the same dream. I lost hours of restful sleep in breathless flight.

At the same time that I was reading Zone One, I was finishing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn’s memoir about becoming and not becoming his father. Surprisingly, I noticed many congruences. As Spitz sweeps Manhattan’s high-rises, searching for dead to eliminate, Flynn navigates Boston’s streets, plucking the homeless from park benches. Both Spitz and Flynn work for government agencies, both voluntarily confront that which others would prefer to ignore.

I used these parallels to trace a path to the underlying cause of my nightmares. Like the protagonists in these stories, my dream-self was caught in a running loop, motivated by fear. In one of the latter nightmares, I dreamed the dead approached my apartment, and I had to make a split decision, leave or die. I wedged one cat beneath each armpit, confident of our escape, and looked down only to discover my lovelies had slipped into the realm of the undead. Heartbroken, horrified, I watched my life transform into something unrecognizable, something that I could not maneuver into a recognizable place, and so I ran.

Interview with Alicia Oltuski

by Jessica Hindman

Alicia Oltuski’s debut, Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family and a Way of Life, (Scribner, 2011) received glowing reviews from Jonathan Yardley and Gary Shteyngart. As part of ALR’s efforts to provide a literary platform for emerging Creative Nonfiction writers, Oltuski recently spoke with fellow Columbia University MFA colleague and ALR’s Creative Nonfiction Contest Coordinator, Jessica Hindman, about the craft of nonfiction writing.

ALR: You only get one first book. Why did you choose this particular topic for a debut?

Oltuski: The topic of diamonds was at once incredibly personal for me [Oltuski’s father is a diamond dealer in the Diamond District of Manhattan] but also, every writer seeks to uncover some hidden world. The diamond industry, with all its secrecy, seemed a natural place for that endeavor, to uncover its mysteries. The book was also about uncovering the mystery that was my father. I mean, I obviously knew him, but there were so many things about him that were a mystery to me. The book was an attempt to uncover both of these mysteries.

ALR: One of the things I love about Precious Objects is how fearless you are in fusing different Creative Nonfiction techniques. The chapters alternate between intimate family portraits and journalistic reportage and research that is academic in its thoroughness, if not in its style. Why did you choose this particular organizational structure for the book?

Oltuski: Structure is something I thought about a lot. And it’s something I really changed as I went; it’s probably the aspect of the book that I spent the most time thinking about…To me, structure in both fiction and nonfiction is incredibly important because it not only shapes the narrative arc but the reader’s impression of the characters. I say characters even when the “characters” are real people; I think it’s useful to think about them that way when you’re interviewing them and writing about them. So structure is the single-most influential part of the writing process in how you make a reader think about your topic and your characters.

When I was writing, it was very important to me to not write a “subject” but to write a “story” even though I was writing about a subject that I think a lot of people have some sort of inherent fascination with—diamonds—which is completely unrelated to me and my family and how I wrote the book. What I tried to do is excavate the history of the diamond industry and the diamond district but at the same time to attach all of this to characters. One of the reasons it was so important for me to let the characters emerge in shapely ways was that the diamond industry, from its inception, has really been an industry full of characters, and not just the ones that I happen to know but also this entire cast of historical characters that all seemed oddly larger than life—even before diamonds emerged as a major commodity. So what I really wanted to do was have this emerge as a story of people. I tried, even in the parts that were history-oriented or journalistically-minded, to show these people and what they were about and what made them so perfectly suited to this business. To a large extent, the reason the diamond industry has come to mean so much to so many people is because of these odd characters who almost forge a sense of importance upon this one mineral. And I think the reason for that is because the people who were involved in shaping diamond history were such idiosyncratic people, and I think that’s one thing that hasn’t really changed.

Getting back to structure, I wanted to capture this one moment in diamond history, because I do think the industry is on the cusp of transformation. Obviously, the topic of “diamonds” is overwhelmingly large, but I think we find ourselves in this strange time in this larger history where everything is about to change. I looked back at the creation of DeBeers and the whole advertising campaign that shaped the industry [i.e. the idea that diamonds are a staple for engagements] and in a weird way I felt that we are at another similar threshold of sorts. I wanted to tell the story of how we had gotten from there to here, and where we were headed in the future. And of course it was also a family story—how I came to see my father and the occupation he had chosen in a different way.

Surrounded by Water, Stories by Stefanie Freele

Congratulations to Stefanie Freele, whose new book, Surrounded by Water, was published by Press 53. Here's some information on the book from the publisher's website: 

 

     Awards for stories in Surrounded by Water include First Place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open for “While Surrounded by Water”; Second Place in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest for “Us Hungarians”; a 2010 Million Writers Notable Story award for “Buccaneers”; an Editor’s Pick in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition for “Removal of Oneself From Corporate Identity”; and a Pushcart Prize nomination for “Pozniejszy.”
    
     Visit Stefanie online at www.stefaniefreele.com