Aleksandar Hemon: Always an Invasion

“Inside every talented writer is an untalented writer.” This is one of many lessons that Aleksandar Hemon imparts over the phone, one early spring day from his Chicago home. Yet Hemon is a prodigious talent. His 2009 novel The Lazarus Project juxtaposed the story of Lazarus Averbuch, an immigrant shot by the Chicago police in 1908, with a narrative about an eastern European writer set in the present day. His 2013 essay collection, The Book of My Lives, deftly covered vast topics in nations, families, and sport. Hemon is often compared to Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov: foreign-born writers with a greater command of English than most of us who grew up speaking it.

Yet the question of the untalented writer remains. Talents channeling their inner hack can lead to memorable fiction. There’s joy in watching an expert channel those whose abilities are more lacking. In the case of Hemon, that writer is Joshua Levin, the protagonist of his new novel, The Making of Zombie Wars. He is, in fact, also the author of Zombie Wars, a screenplay about a military scientist, Major Klopstock, who has dedicated his life to stopping — well, you can probably figure that out from the title. Hemon juxtaposes Joshua’s often-hapless life with excerpts from the screenplay, which delve into far pulpier territory:

Cadet retches. Major K puts the scalpel away, then plunges his hands inside the zombie, who is oblivious to his undertaking, steadily roaring and eye-rolling as his intestines slosh in his rotten abdomen.

Zombie Wars is but one of several ideas for screenplays that Joshua has had, albeit the only one to make it beyond a handful of pages. The novel opens with a pair of epigraphs, one from Baruch de Spinoza and one from George W. Bush, and it’s between these two poles that the novel’s action spins. The juxtaposition of events happening in the novel’s foreground and background, Hemon explains, emerged as the result of a fortuitous coincidence. “I just looked it up one day on a whim and I realized that Passover had coincided exactly with the first couple weeks of the invasion of Iraq, and so it was narratively convenient to set it all at that time,” he says. Hemon refers to it as “that particular time of male madness that happens to someone like Joshua and demonstrates the madness that led us to Iraq.”

The madness of which Hemon speaks is abundant. Joshua makes a number of horrendous decisions, personal and professional. The scope of The Making of Zombie Wars provides occasion for Hemon to show group dynamics at work: Joshua’s family, his screenwriting group, and the ESL class he teaches. Hemon has long been able to dynamically portray diverse groups coming together around a shared love or goal; his essay “If God Existed, He’d Be a Solid Midfielder” is perhaps the apex of this capacity.

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Hemon isn’t exactly a literary purist disdaining mass entertainment. He collaborated with director Jasmila Zbanic on the screenplay for the 2014 romantic comedy Love Island. Zombie Wars is a far cry from the film described in a Hollywood Reporter review as “a warmhearted, quietly subversive celebration of pan-sexual freedom and guilt-free pleasure.” The run-up to war in Iraq isn’t the only reason that Zombie Wars is set over a decade ago. “The thing with zombies,” says Hemon, “is you never have one zombie. It’s always an invasion. You could have a horror movie with one vampire or one killer or one dark force in the house. But the thing with zombies is they’re coming en masse.”

The research process for The Making of Zombie Wars involved Hemon taking part in a screenwriting workshop. He felt the need “to shred out pages: to move through the plot fast and not get entangled with language. So for eight weeks I would write a couple of scenes for the screenwriting workshop. And then later once I was done with that, I would convert those scenes into scenes in the book. I would kind of base them on the script and then work around it.”

The author’s connections to film go even deeper. The Wachowski siblings, of Matrix trilogy and Jupiter Ascending fame, are thanked in the book’s acknowledgements, and Hemon’s film-within-a-novel seems at times like the reverse of their movies, which often dissect genre tropes. Hemon profiled the Wachowskis in 2012 for The New Yorker, with a particular focus on their adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Hemon, the novelist writing about the beginnings of a film; Hemon, the journalist, writing about a pair of filmmakers who were themselves adapting a memorably complex narrative. If Aleksandar Hemon wasn’t already living this life, it would be the perfect subject for one of his novels.

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The tragic frequently occurs in Hemon’s work: The Lazarus Effect is built around a historical wound that refuses to heal, and Hemon’s essay “The Aquarium,” which meticulously documents a family tragedy, is one of the most wrenching pieces of nonfiction you’re likely to read. Initially, The Making of Zombie Wars initially seems like a conscious move away from that. Joshua’s inflated sense of his own abilities is largely played for laughs, as are the ways that he manages to alienate nearly everyone he encounters. “Writing the film made me realize how risky and difficult it is to write comedy,” Hemon says. “With drama or literature one can have a delayed reaction to it, a delayed understanding. So you can see a movie or read a book, and a week or two or month or three later you might realize that what seemed to be complicated earlier was in fact stimulating in a slow, moving way. And then you can go back. There’s a delay. With comedy, if it isn’t funny right away, it sucks.”

But there’s also a deeper melancholy and menace at work here. Certain events in the novel are catastrophes in waiting: health problems linger over one member of Joshua’s family, and a handful of lines towards the end of the book suggest that the looming war overseas will soon hit close to home for Joshua and his family. Hemon points out that he didn’t intend to write a comic work this time out, and notes that he “did not follow through all the way to the end.” But, he adds, “most of the time, when I was in doubt, I was erring on the funny side.”

There’s also an impressively metafictional joke part of the way through, when Joshua’s girlfriend observes that a particular scenario is comparable to a Russian novel. “The trouble is I can’t stand Russian novels,” she adds. It’s both a knowing literary reference in a book that abounds with them (Joshua and his father also debate the merits of Saul Bellow’s fiction). Note the Russian novel reference; and that Joshua’s last name is the same as that of Constantine from Anna Karenina. It’s a subtle moment, in memorable contrast to the broader comedy on display, which also features Joshua’s sword-wielding landlord, and a Chekhovian duffel bag containing the body of a cat.

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As with much of Hemon’s writing, The Making of Zombie Wars is set in Chicago; longtime soccer fan Hemon also works in a brief nod to the city’s Major League Soccer team, the Chicago Fire. (An eBook collecting Hemon’s essays on the sport, The Matters of Life, Death, and More: Writing on Soccer, was released last year to coincide with the World Cup.) Throughout, he captures the everyday rhythms of the city. It’s in that contrast between the everyday and the mighty that the book’s form emerges. While Zombie Wars‘ Major Klopstock may be a stock character, he’s also an unabashed hero. Joshua’s “heroic ability is practiced only in imaginative projects,” Hemon says.

Hemon understands contrasts well. The Making of Zombie Wars abounds with them: talents and flaws; honesty and betrayal. The balancing act between poles is necessary. With “everything in my writing life, there’s a good possibility that what I’m writing right now is not going to pan out,” he says. “It will not get finished; it will not work out.” For him, it’s an essential aspect of keeping his work interesting. “The moment I would convince myself that I’m really, really good,” he says, “I think I would become boring to myself.”