The Making of Zombie Wars

February 9, 2015
Spinozan philosophy meets screwball comedy in this eccentric, subtly experimental novel by Hemon (The Book of My Lives). Thirtysomething Chicagoan Josh Levin is an ESL teacher and aspiring screenwriter hard at work on a script about a zombie apocalypse. But over the course of a few days, his life takes on twists and turns that far exceed, in sheer weirdness, those of any dystopian screenplay. After Joshua discovers his landlord, a post-traumatic-stressed Desert Storm vet named Stagger, sniffing his American-flag underwear, Josh moves in with his girlfriend, Kimmy, who expresses a wish to take their romance to “a new level.” But Joshua’s chance to form his first real adult relationship is quickly spoiled when he embarks on an affair with one of his students, an older woman named Ana. When Ana’s husband—another,
possibly more disturbed war vet named Esko—exacts revenge by murdering Kimmy’s cat, Joshua begins to lose his grasp on the line between fiction and reality. While the novel has some of the improvisational wackiness of a stoner flick, Hemon’s more serious concerns are ever present. A story line involving Josh’s father’s cancer diagnosis forces our hero to consider his own mortality. And Joshua’s complicated feelings about narrative—parceled out in the form Spinoza quotations and screenplay excerpts—give the story the feel of a bold, searching künstlerroman. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Agency.

February 1, 2015
One of America's finest authors of somber novels about alienation brings a newbie's enthusiasm to a comic novel-about alienation, of course. Since the war in his native Bosnia left him exiled in Chicago in 1992, Hemon (The Lazarus Project, 2008; Love and Obstacles, 2009, etc.) has used his fiction to ruminate on the expat experience in ways that, though not humorless, emphasize distance and disconnection. (His 2013 essay collection, The Book of My Lives, closes with a devastating essay on the death of his infant daughter.) This madcap detour centers on Joshua, a Chicago wannabe screenwriter who has a laptop stuffed with bad movie ideas, an ill-advised crush on Ana, a married Bosnian immigrant in the ESL class he teaches, and an ex-Marine landlord who's overeager for swordplay. Hemon has a knack, it turns out, for raucous, Shteyngart-ian lines that highlight his hero's absurdist despair. ("Oh Lord, don't chasten me and make me a disposable character in your spec script!" he thinks.) Joshua's ill-advised fling with Ana gets him tossed out of his girlfriend's apartment, threatened by Ana's husband, and generally despairing for his well-being, a feeling he sublimates into his script about post-apocalyptic zombie hordes. Hemon has arranged all the right pieces for a laugh-out-loud novel-chatty Jewish relatives, impossibly nerdy writers, immigrants with old-school and illegal notions about preserving loyalty. And zombies are a great theme for Hemon; what better symbol is there for an uncertain life than the undead? The novel lags on the level of characterization, though: Joshua is persistently passive and self-effacing, lost in his lame movie ideas. This is partly by design: "[N]either his will or his talent was ever strong enough," as Hemon writes. But it reduces the thrust of the novel, whose great lines need a plot to match. Fun, though, for Hemon fans who want to see him work in a different mode.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2015

Joshua Levin is a thirtysomething boy in search of his manhood. An ESL teacher by day, he instructs an unruly class of Russian and Bosnian immigrants who feign little interest in the raison d'etre of the pluperfect tense. At night, Josh drags his laptop, devoid of viable scripts, to a screenwriting class led by Graham, a hilarious send-up of every pretentious teacher who ever stood in front of a group of wannabe writers. Josh's personal life is a mess. Stalked by the aptly named Stagger, a veteran afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder, who happens to be his landlord, Josh convinces his girlfriend, Kimmy, to take him in, then blows the relationship wide open by succumbing to the charms of one of his students. Using the play-within-a-play technique, Hemon (The Lazarus Project) poses the age-old conundrum: Does life imitate art, or vice versa? In late-night, alcohol-fueled conversations between Josh and Bega, an eastern European ex-pat, Hemon reveals a recurring theme in all of his work: the plight of the outsider in America. VERDICT A past finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Hemon has written a boldly irreverent, wildly imaginative novel. Rife with over-the-top violence, it reads like a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. You've been warned. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2015
Droll humor has always been one weapon in MacArthur fellow and PEN/Sebald Award winner Hemon's (The Book of My Lives, 2013) mighty literary arsenal, but he hasn't unleashed the full magnitude of his comedic powers until now. Joshua Levin, a Spinoza-quoting grandchild of Holocaust survivors and an ESL teacher in Chicago, is allergic to adulthood; catastrophically intimidated by his erotically adventurous child psychologist girlfriend, Kimiko; worried about his ailing father; and utterly obsessed with writing screenplays. He funnels his exponentially increasing anxieties into boisterously imaginative and surreptitiously poignant script ideas, including one about a man who is a superhero in one universe and helpless in another. Joshua's movie synopses play in hilarious counterpoint to the ludicrous crises he haplessly precipitates involving Stagger, his PTSD-stricken Desert Storm veteran landlord, and a quartet of war-haunted immigrant Bosnians, including one of his students, sexy Ana with her heartbroken English. As Joshua's life veers violently out of control, he starts writing a promising, if unrelentingly gory and grim, screenplay titledwhat else Zombie Wars. Hemon's language is positively weaponized with mocking rage against tyranny and resounding empathy for survivors of bloodshed and exile. Zestfully funny in his skewering of hypocrisy and pretension and warmly insightful regarding family, friendship, lust, and love, Hemon astutely ties it all together in his gauging of our cathartic response to tales of the zombie apocalypse: when you kill zombies, you kill death. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)