When Aleksandar Hemon started expanding an unpublished short story into his latest novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, he decided that he should keep it a secret from his agent and his editor. They kept asking him about his next book, and he’d respond, “Well, I have some ideas.”
In the Chicago-set The Making of Zombie Wars, misfortune befalls protagonist Joshua Levin, but only because of his misguided decision making—he’s like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, without the financial security. Unlike David, Joshua is a screenwriter only in the abstract: he has a constant supply of movie ideas but fails to develop them into fully formed scripts. He struggles with Zombie Wars, a project he manages to focus on during a screenwriting workshop, and pays some of his bills and rent by teaching ESL (the rest is fronted by his divorced parents). In among this not-yet-midlife crisis is a gonzo cast of characters: a batshit landlord and neighbor who wields a samurai sword and plays Guns N’ Roses at maximum volume, a Bosnian veteran with barbed wire tattooed around his neck, and a bartender who claims he keeps his “spare head” in his massive goiter. The Making of Zombie Wars takes place during the onset of the Iraq war, which seems like an insignificant choice of period until Joshua’s actions begin to have deathly serious consequences.
I exposed myself to movies to an enormous degree in the 90s. And I developed a habit when I was a film reviewer to read film reviews, even for the movies that I didn’t watch or would never watch, so I always knew what was going on, what was being released.
The way I was—and there’s a certain romantic quality to it—was sort of the knowledgeable dilettante. But at the same time, it’s easy for such discourse not to lead to any conclusions, this sort of flat knowledge of knowing facts. When I was young—and this is before the Internet, and without access to books and encyclopedias in Sarajevo—I would memorize credits. I would make these connections—”Oh, there’s this producer here and this producer there”—and by just memorizing these things I could project this sort of false knowledge, as though I knew how things worked in American film or Hollywood.
Well, I’m glad you say that. Someone asked me—how did she put it? “You deliberately use stereotypes,” she said. I said, “Well, what stereotypes?” She goes, “Oh, with Bernie driving the Cadillac.” And I was taken aback because she wasn’t hostile. She suggested that it was an act of cliche. And I had no response because I did not think of that as being any indication of secular Jewishness. After the interview I realized what I should have said: my father drove the Cadillac. He’s not as short as Bernie is, but depending how lost he is, he could lean over and look at the signs and ask, “Where are we?”
Let’s go back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Did the idea for this book come then or later?
By Aleksandar Hemon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
