Zone One

Zone One is what happens when a literary author tries his hand at writing a genre piece. The book tries to be a good post-plague zombie story, but turns into a beautifully written commentary on modern life.
Zone One is not a bad novel; it is a bad zombie novel. I had a hard time buying the post-plague, zombie vibe. Maybe it was just that it was unoriginal in its presentation of the zombies. There were zombies; they were sometimes hungry for human flesh; the world, as humanity, knows it was at an end. It had all the right pieces. For me, however, it just never gelled into a good zombie story.
That does not mean that I thought it was a bad novel. In fact, I enjoyed the social commentary. The author's prose is lush. The characters are well drawn in their damaged and mediocre ways.
The main character is the perfect embodiment of the new human condition. He is an everyman. His only standout trait is that he survives. He believes in the goodness of people while accepting that they are all a mess. He cannot stop surviving even though he sense the game may be up and humanity has lost.
Isn't that just real life. We all trudge through day by day knowing that we have lost. We just keep going because we aren't ready to give up the small bits of joy we find along the way?