Sophisticated thriller explores power of art
At his trial in 1970, Charles Manson claimed that a message in The Beatles' White Album song Helter Skelter drove him to advocate murder.
The spooky relationship between art and the most extreme responses it sometimes provokes is the subject of Zero Zone. It's a sophisticated thriller that revolves around the work of an installation artist named Jess Shepard. She designs and constructs large pieces that viewers inhabit and interact with.
How anyone reacts is ultimately beyond her control, beyond even her ability to anticipate. But to what extent is an artist culpable when viewers react very, very badly?
Jess falls into her life's work almost accidentally while in college. She fabricates a curtained room in which humiliated college women can scream and shatter plates. Most find the experience cathartic and empowering. But one goes too far. Jess finds her lying catatonic in a pile of shards and blood. The ER doctor blames Jess and the college dean shuts down the site. Hearing Jess describe what happened, a friend tells her, “It's a risk. And I don't think the risk is just to the artist.” Until that moment, Jess hadn't realized that what she was doing was art.
We learn of this experience halfway through the novel. The plot is a kaleidoscope, frequently shattering the chronology of events and remixing the parts. That may sound baffling, but it's compellingly done — a constant process of filling in context and meaning, solving some mysteries and raising others.
Jess's most powerful work is called Zero Zone. Built near an old military base in New Mexico where atomic bombs once were tested, Zero Zone is a concrete room. There's a narrow door at one end and long slits on the other walls. As the sun rises and sets, light and darkness shift dramatically inside the room. Visitors might find the overheated space plain or transcendent.
But early in the novel, we hear of an infamous tragedy involving a small group of viewers who squat in the concrete room for eight days. A conflict with law enforcement gets out of control and someone dies in the ensuing altercation. A month later, a young woman who had been caught in the Zero Zone incident publicly attacks Jess. That controversy and trauma shatter Jess's confidence and send her into a long period of anxious isolation. “I can't control someone's reaction,” Jess says. But she can't shake a mingled sense of culpability and fear.
A yearning for escape powers the ideology of a frightening zealot named Tanner, who preaches a vague but powerful message of relief from this world. Tanner's hypnotic patter is terrifying, a demonstration of how one man might exploit a work of art to exercise his will over others.
But I wish O'connor hadn't felt it necessary to give Tanner a gruesome skin disease that covers his body. At its best, that “ugly equals evil” motif is a remnant of cheap fairy tale propaganda. At its worst, it's a pernicious moral equation that perpetuates prejudice against people with disfiguring conditions.