A balanced descent into chaotic farce
By any measure, Aleksander Hemon is a good writer. While his reputation as such was cemented by his popular essay collection, The Book of My Lives, his novels and stories have been shortlisted for major prizes and published in the most high profile of magazines. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.
(It should also be noted that while Hemon was published in Yugoslavia in his mid-20s, he learned English only as an adult, after he was stranded in the United States as a tourist by the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1992.)
In contrast, Joshua Levin — the protagonist of Hemon’s crackling new novel The Making of Zombie Wars — is not a very good writer at all. By any measure.
When readers first meet Levin, he’s writing in a coffee shop. The “Coffee Shoppe,” in fact. An aspiring screenwriter, Levin has no shortage of ideas, a few of which are almost trashy/high concept enough to be of interest to Hollywood. His latest script, inspired by a group of ROTC cadets he sees out the window, is exactly what you imagine it will be. And just as bad: the excerpts of his Zombie War script that are threaded through the novel show him to be a fairly excreable talent.
Aside from his writing dreams — which even he can see are unlikely ever to come true — Levin leads a fairly middling life. He lives in a run-down room, which he pays for by teaching ESL to a small group of recent immigrants. He’s got a girlfriend, Kimiko, who is too good for him. Even his family says so, warning him not to screw up his romantic life. With seeming inevitability, he does.
When Ana, a student in his ESL course, invites Levin to her birthday party, he is drawn into a world of Bosnian immigrants, survivors of the war, all scarred and traumatized in their own ways. Even the fact that Ana’s husband Esko is violent and abusive, prone to paranoia and fits of destruction, isn’t enough to keep Ana and Levin from each other. And once the attractive student and the schlubby teacher give in to their desires, everything starts to unravel, for everyone.
The Making of Zombie Wars is a delicately balanced descent into chaotic farce, controlled enough to keep the narrative just at the edge of realism while not surrendering any of the desired desperation and humour. It’s the sort of story that could quite easily go out of control, given to leaps of implausibility and violence, populated with over-the-top characters and barely believable situations. But Hemon manages to juggle the elements with a playful touch.
While the absurd, surreal fish-out-of-water narrative propels The Making of Zombie Wars forward, there is more at work here than mere farce. The novel is set in the world of Bosnian refugees, coloured and shaped by the lingering effects of the brutal war in the 1990s, and the events unfold in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as Operation Iraqi Freedom is gathering force. Through the stories and scars of Ana and Esko, of Bega, a screenwriting comrade and another Bosnian, and of Stagger, a Desert Storm survivor, the boggling costs of violence and conflict are brought into sharp relief — a vivid, realworld counterpoint to the violence and conflict being played for thrills and effect in the main narrative.
Similarly, as the excerpts from Levin’s screen play begin to coalesce into a whole, taking on its own narrative force, the full significance of Hemon’s achievement comes into focus. The Making of Zombie Wars is a powerful, masterful work from one of our most significant literary writers, at once madcap and thoughtful, exhilarating and devastating. As Levin muses during Ana’s birthday party early in the book, “History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke.”