Bennett Sims, _A Questionable Shape_

BENNETT SIMS HAS published a couple of short things in Conjunctions that I enjoyed so much that I decided to see whether he has a book out. He does--this one--and it is excellent.

I saw a couple of disgruntled online reviews complaining that A Questionable Shape is a failure as a zombie novel. Well, maybe. I have no idea what the genre expectations for zombie novels are, though I can easily imagine how this one might disappoint. The zombies are not much of a threat by the time the action opens, for instance. The authorities have the zombies largely under control, and only have to decide what to do with them. Not much impending-apocalypse mood in the novel, no looming threat to civilization--a lack which might disappoint.

But A Questionable Shape might be better described as literary fiction that draws on genre tropes. For instance, Paul Auster's City of Glass is literary fiction  that draws on noir tropes. I can imagine a hard-core noir fan throwing City of Glass across the room, feeling  thwarted and cheated, particularly by its ending.

Sims's title alone hints that the novel is not an ordinary zomb-ocalypse. When Hamlet first sees his father's ghost, he addresses it thus:

Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.

Hamlet wants nothing more in this life than to see and speak with his father again--an impossible desire, since his father is dead. But his father, he sees at this moment, is not utterly dead. He is a ghost. He is not exactly alive, either--but he can be seen, in a way, and heard, And, it will turn out, he has desires, things he wants. At this point, though, Hamlet cannot be entirely confident that the father has the son's best interests at heart: its intents might be wicked or charitable. But he has to interact with it, come what may--the  ghost is a shape that has to be questioned.

So with Matt Mazoch. His father is dead, but a zombie--that is, not utterly dead, but not exactly alive. Matt, like Hamlet, wants to see, possibly hear from his father one more time, even though the father might not have the son's best interests in mind, even though his father can only moan and stumble around. So, like Hamlet, he puts his life on hold to try and figure out where he can find his not-exactly-dead father.

Fortunately, Matt has an articulate Horatio, Mike Vermaelen (sometimes "Versmallen" for some reason). Mike narrates. Horatio-like, Mike is a bit in awe of Matt, has committed to helping him, and has apparently taken on the responsibility of in this harsh world drawing his breath in pain to tell Matt's story, not that Matt has asked him to. Fortunately for Mike, he has not only a brilliant but obsessive friend but also a smart, loyal, and wise girlfriend, Rachel, who can ask some hard questions, set some boundaries, and help him save Matt...or so it looks to me. (Is this why Horatio couldn't save Hamlet?)

There is more than enough suspense for an ordinary novel here. Will Matt find his father? Will  his father be capable of recognizing him, or will he just want to eat him? Or does Matt just want to destroy his father before the authorities do?

Sims has any number of great narrative ploys going, but I will mention only one: constant footnotes. We could read this as a David Foster Wallace homage (speaking of the illustrious dead), but it's more than that. A footnote both is and is not part of the text--a neat analogue for zombies or for ghosts, who are not exactly part of the living just as the footnote is not exactly part of the text. Yet both are present, perhaps important, impossible to ignore. (Cf. Derrida on the supplement.)

Or we might think of Agamben and Homo Sacer, a connection Sims explicitly makes for us. Both Matt and Mike are readers.

One more thing: Mike's discussion of one's relationship to one's reading (pp. 147-59) is the most spot-on treatment of that subject I have ever come across.