Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

From the author of the National Book Award longlisted epic The Great Offshore Grounds, here is the debut novel that launched her career—a story of activism, police violence, and white guilt in a not so distant dystopian America. “An ambitious encapsulation of our modern times, Zazen tackles counterculture hipsters, geology, Buddhism, consumerism, terrorism, veganism, family drama, and, above all, love." —Judges' Citation, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize The world is on fire, and Della doesn’t know what, if anything, she should do about it. The country is poised on the brink of war. Curfews and other restrictions give the police an excuse for violence. Customers at the vaguely vegan cafe where Della is working after dropping out of grad school debate which foreign countries are the best to flee to: Costa Rica? Bali? Della’s parents—former revolutionaries—are more excited at the idea of her brother and his Black wife giving them biracial grandbabies than in engaging in any new actions; her nominally activist coworkers are mostly devoted to planning a massive sex party. Della floats between them, lost and numb. Then a bomb goes off: some shallow place of capitalistic worship demolished. Inspired, for reasons not entirely clear to herself, Della calls in a second—fake—bomb threat. But a bomb goes off there, too, and soon Della finds herself pulled in by a group of people who, for once, are promising to actually do something. No matter the consequences. Prescient when it was first published, Vanessa Veselka’s debut novel is even more revolutionary now. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

There is a bitter joy in this book. I felt it just as I was finishing, a great purging feeling, like a fire starting. “I didn't bomb those buildings,” Della says. “I just thought they looked pretty as they burned.”

This book is so relevant right now it's creepy. I don't know if it's just because these things are always relevant – terrorism, injustice, desperate hippies – or that Vanessa Veselka is just that on it. I like to think it's a little bit of both. I mean, this book is about being on it, balancing on the cusp of newness, hipness, just before absolute oblivion. Della makes her fake bomb threats, that turn into a real bombs, just as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's smoldering selfie makes it onto the cover of Rolling Stone. A young black boy is shot for brandishing a toy that Della left out in the rain just as George Zimmerman is acquitted. We all feel helpless to a world slowly burning, and we all feel responsible to some degree, just as Della does. And we think maybe we deserve it. We experience a confluence of egotistical despair and selfless love when we see the world hurting. Or at least, I hope most of us do.

Zazen is impressively accessible, considering the fact that Della's mind often wanders through memories and detached thoughts, drawing strange correlations between past and present, abstract and concrete. It's not obtuse or pretentious, it's actually kind of familiar, or at least for me it was. And the sheer hipsterdom isn't alienating either. If you've ever had your ear talked off by a vegan before, then you will get a few snickers in reading this. And if you are the crunchiest thing since granola, you'll probably see plenty that's familiar, some that feels like a rallying cry, with a touch of self-deprecation. This book is incredibly clever, without going overboard with it.

I can't say that I totally understood Della. I understood how lost and helpless she felt, and I get that she wanted to effect the world in some way. The things and people she as attracted to bewildered me at first until Veselka came clean about where she was going with it. Most of Della's friends are terribly unlikable, Tamara most of all who mostly just seems to make Della feel awful about herself. But she's drawn to her like a magnet, I suppose the same way she buys burner phones and names them after dead rats. She behaves on the instincts of a woman who doesn't know herself anymore, or maybe knows too much about herself.

You're probably gathering by now that this book is kind of difficult to talk about. In short, it's not only good, but it's important, especially now.

Someone in my writing group recommended this book since it reminded her of the book I'm working on (or maybe it was the other way around). There were definitely a lot of interesting parallels between our stories and I think this story would have been more foreign/fascinating if I didn't also live in Portland and find most of what she was describing to be pretty typical of my day-to-day interactions. I think it's very cool she went through a sustainable publishing company (Red Lemonade), and that her book is way better than mine but I wasn't blown away.