Ever since H.G. Wells published his speculative sci-fi telegram The Shape of Things to Come in 1933, numerous artists have adapted his title to suit their own prophecies. Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come demanded that the genre evolve or face irrelevance. Swedish band Refused did the same for underground rock with The Shape of Punk to Come. Ornette and Refused don’t sound particularly alike, but they both purported that music, and art in general, loses all power and urgency once it has become fashionable, marketable, a commodity of mass culture. They were onto something––––after all, this is a world in which Che Guevara t-shirts are sold at shopping malls.
In this vein, Vanessa Veselka’s addictive debut novel Zazen tackles modern counterculture (though without the Shape of the previous titles). A firestorm of rage, dark humor, and so-real-it’s-surreal observation, Zazen poses difficult questions on the future of the First World. Don’t expect easy answers.
Della Mylinak, an educated paleontologist from a leftist family, is one of many witnesses to the bombs exploding in her unnamed (though certainly Portland-esque) city. A vague but threatening war looms over the horizon. Capitalist culture, embodied by the city’s Wal-Mart and industrial infrastructure, carries on untroubled. Della works with several friends at a vegan restaurant and muses over fortune cookies, travel agencies, and pregnant women. Everywhere, Veselka seems to insist, are promises of a future, though Della, whose literate but jaded voice propels the narrative with intellectual grit, cannot be convinced.
Less careful readers will mistake Zazen as a book written strictly by and for a young, hip, alternative crowd. But if consumer culture is deeply problematic, Veselka pleads, then so is the counterculture that fights it. With a philosopher’s eye, Veselka cleverly points out the stagnation and hypocrisy of the people who pass for modern radicals. They are a crowd of contrivances––––all attitude, hair-dye, punk name-changes––––and have mistaken aesthetics for ethics. In one of the hilarious and sad heights of the book, Della’s friends and their associated social complex engage in a tabouli-fueled, color-coded sex party––––surely the passionless distortion of optimistic 60s free love. It is far from sexy, more a time-killer and cliquey fashion show, and Della’s moody, detailed voice ensures that every drop of alienation is squeezed from the apathy of her surroundings.
Veselka’s critique is not just incisive, lyrical, and laced with layered, realistic, often hilarious dialogue––––it is also brave and necessary. Like Ornette, she believes that change is only possible through conscious evolution. People must express themselves in ways that are creative, fearless, and compassionate. Communication must escape contemporary culture’s vacuum of denial and self-obsession. But Veselka knows that this is a lot to ask and, reading her novel, we ask ourselves which is worse: that a city has been bombed, or that no one can be convinced that anything is wrong? As Della faces a collapse into hopelessness and the book spirals into its disquieting third act, Veselka raises her most vital question: is violence an acceptable form of expression in a world that won’t listen?
I admit freely that I had the pleasure of reading Zazen while working as an unpaid intern for Cursor/Red Lemonade, the publishing house that released the book and currently hosts it for free online. But this review is biased only in that I had the opportunity to read Veselka’s novel twice. More-so than Jonathan Safran Foer (sweet), George Saunders (sour), or Chuck Palahniuk (MSG), Veselka’s approach avoids sensationalism and remains firmly documentarian. Decades from now, when the shape of things has gotten better––––or worse––––Zazen may stand as one of the great time capsules of American life at the start of the twenty-first century, a moment when we teetered on an edge of our own making.