The New York Times - USA - Book Review (2020-07-26)

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19

WHAT A DIFFERENCEa few months make.
Paul Tremblay’s “Survivor Song” isn’t just
a zombie novel; it’s a viralzombie novel,
the tale of a supercharged strain of rabies
that turns its victims, both human and ani-
mal, into crazed, biting killers before they
succumb to it. City shutdowns, overrun
hospitals, a bungled government re-
sponse, public disorder, roving wing-nut
militias, conspiracy theories — it’s all here,
right down to long lines at Star Market. Be-
fore this winter, the whole thing might’ve
looked like escapist fancy. Now it looks like
your Twitter feed.
The focus of the novel is a pair of women,
former roommates at Brown, who are try-
ing very hard to keep ahead of the mad-

ness. Ramola, who goes by Rams, is an An-
glo-Indian pediatrician in suburban Bos-
ton; Natalie works in development at
Stonehill College. She’s also nine months
pregnant. By Page 20, Natalie has been bit-
ten by an infected man who has killed her
husband. She now has an hour or so to get a
vaccine, which may or may not forestall
the infection. She races to Rams’s town-
house, and together they begin an odyssey
through the chaos — first to get Natalie
vaccinated and then, when this fails to
work, to locate an obstetrician who can
perform a cesarean to save the life of her
unborn child.
Tremblay is an undeniably skillful writ-
er. The sentences are lean where they need
to be, decorative where they need to be.
He’s especially good at the creepy stuff — a
dark forest’s “conspiratorial canopy,” a ra-
bid coyote’s “dripping stalactite canines.”
He knows how to drive the story forward,
while affording it a layer of linguistic color
that makes the whole affair feel vastly
more engaging, despite the fact that the vi-
ral-zombie conceit is hardly original. (It’s
basically been running on AMC for 10 sea-
sons.) At 300 high-velocity pages, the tale
whizzes along, taking barely more time to
read than the events it describes.
The author has also made an astute
choice in terms of scale. As Massachusetts
descends into anarchy — the infection is,
for now, confined to New England — the
story maintains a rigid focus on the fate of
these two women and their race against
the clock. Rarely does Tremblay lift an eye
to take in the wider goings-on; the crisis is
viewed almost entirely through the per-
sonal periscopes of two people on a singu-
lar mission. One thing we’ve all learned
since March: A pandemic is a public event

affecting millions, but as individuals we ex-

perience it, for the most part, in private.

Even death tolls can feel distant and ab-

stract; more than 130,000 Americans (and

counting) have lost their lives, but more

painful than any number is the tale of a sin-

gle struggle and defeat.

Still, any book that sits so squarely

within the parameters of a well-estab-

lished subgenre — especially when that

subgenre has received so much airtime —

is pushing against the wind. No question,

Tremblay will please the zombie-virus

crowd, and I happen to be among them. To

quote Miss Jean Brodie (perhaps a curious

source in the discussion of a zombie novel,

but never mind): “For those who like that

sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they

like.”

Yet one has the feeling that Tremblay is

reaching for a bigger audience, and in this

regard, he has uneven success. Though ap-

pealing, the characters Rams and Natalie

are thin and familiar, their friendship lack-

ing much complexity or depth. They come

across less as actual people than as cate-

gorical deployments in a fiction — heroic

doctor friend, plucky dying woman — act-

ing as agents of plot. And a plot without hu-

man complexity is a thin gruel. Lacking the

unpredictable forces of personality, the

story can go only so many ways, and many

readers will see the end of Tremblay’s nov-

el coming a mile off. (I did.)

The bigger stumble, though, is the

“song” of the title, coupled with the au-

thor’s efforts to apply a mythic dimension

to his tale. “This is not a fairy tale,” the nar-

rator tells us. “This is a song.” The conceit

is all words, all air; it never touches down

on the story, which is neither fairy tale nor

song. Grasping for the epochal, Tremblay

ends up undercutting the novel’s most sa-

lient strength: its modest refusal to be

grand.

That said, Tremblay still manages to

seize a broader prescience, given our cur-

rent state of affairs. “In the coming days,”

the narrator tells us, “conditions will con-

tinue to deteriorate. Emergency services

and other public safety nets will be

stretched to their breaking points, exacer-

bated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic,

misinformation; a myopic, sluggish fed-

eral bureaucracy further hamstrung by a

president unwilling and woefully un-

equipped to make the rational, science-

based decisions necessary; and exacer-

bated, of course, by plain old individual ev-

eryday evil.”

Sound familiar?

Yeah, it did to me, too. 0

Rabid Transit

A novel follows a pregnant woman navigating an anarchic Massachusetts stricken by a deadly virus.

By JUSTIN CRONIN

SURVIVOR SONG
By Paul Tremblay
303 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publish-
ers. $27.99.

THE HEADS OF STATE

City shutdowns, overrun hospitals, a

bungled government response,

public disorder — it’s all here.

JUSTIN CRONINis the author of the Passage
trilogy.

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