Dallas Koehn's Blog: Rough Drafts, Promos, and Brilliant Insights - Posts Tagged "zod-wallop"

Zod Wallop is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s the single most engaging piece of fiction I’ve ever read, and remains so each and every time I’ve devoured it. It’s a book about loss and acceptance, innocence and broken people, and a crazy man with a monkey who believes he’s on a holy mission. It’s also about an author afraid of too much truth and withdrawn from human connection because he simply can’t take the harsh reality of personal loss.

In short, it’s one of those books I like talking about at any opportunity. The problem is, few people around me have read it. Most have never even heard of it, other than my carrying on about it. In other words, there’s no one to talk about it with.

If much of my own rhetoric is to be believed, this shouldn’t be a problem. Make your own way! March to your own drumbeat! Don’t go along with the crowd - you do you! Learn to live with who you are! Yay, individuality!

If I’m being honest, I’ve sometimes looked down a bit on folks who watch specific shows or listen to particular music or read certain books just because they’re popular. That’s what’s wrong with modern culture! You’re why the Kardashians happened! Have some dignity, people!

On the other hand, folks who do that get to talk to one another about those shows, that music, and those books. They have a shared Squid Game experience, however tragic I might find that to be. Meanwhile, I’m over here marinating in my own lofty elitism with my far superior music collection and personal library.

Alone.

So there!

Of course, part of the appeal of literature is that it IS company. The right story can be travel, or counsel, or knowledge, or inspiration. When you READ, you’re already talking about the content with at least one other person - the author (or at least the text). You often talk about it with yourself as well. A good book has a way of poking around inside you and making you think about things differently, and maybe feel things differently as well.

One of the primary justifications for including diverse literature in any school curriculum is that fiction promotes empathy. How many people alive in the United States today think and feel as they do about the Holocaust largely because of Anne Frank’s diary or that little boy in the striped pajamas? How many of our perceptions concerning right and wrong in society and government have been shaped by our connections with Boxer in Animal Farm, Piggy in Lord of the Flies, or Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games?

I’d never claim to truly know what it’s like to die from cancer just because I loved The Fault in Our Stars, but it’s given me a far better appreciation for the range of ways in which people respond to severe illnesses. I’ve never been Black or female or gay, but I’m a tiny bit closer to being able to connect with and value those who are because I’ve been allowed to become those things in a small, temporary way when I read.

But it’s not just a better understanding of others we often find between exposition and denouement. Many novels, short stories, and other texts mess with our understanding of ourselves as well.

Generations of young American boys grew up believing they could succeed even during hard times because of Horatio Alger books. Generations of high school girls grew up believing that sex with someone hundreds of years older than themselves AND a vampire couldn’t be THAT bad thanks to Twilight. Books force us to recognize ourselves not only in the heroic, but in the shameful. The broken. The desperate. The angry. They let us root for the protagonist even when relating far more closely to the supportive friend, the bewildered parent, or even the antagonist. Good stories shake up what we think, believe, and feel, leaving the solid bits reaffirmed and the shaky bits, well… shaken.

Good friends know when to encourage you, when to distract you, and when to call you out. Literature often does all three at once.

Which brings me back to Zod Wallop. I won’t try to summarize the plot here (you can look it up easily enough), but suffice it to say that it challenges with reckless abandon the distinctions we make between fantasy and reality, conviction and delusion, individuality and connection. The main characters turn out to be inextricably interwoven into one another’s stories for better or worse - and not all of them are thrilled at the realization. It’s not easy to befriend a madman with a monkey who claims to be on a holy crusade, especially when his mission is driven by your own words, feelings, and values (none of which were intended to mean what he insists they must).

And yet… maybe that’s what it takes to return to reality. Maybe we have to accept the unbearable and embrace the unbelievable to get back to living.

The past several years have not been great ones for me. We all know the externals - the pandemic and the Trump years and the disappointment of watching friends and family embrace fascism and white supremacy in the name of an unrecognizable Jesus and a mythologized American past. I haven’t had it any worse than anyone else, and I’m sure my life was and still is far easier than many. I am either blessed or lucky, depending on your point of view, and I recognize this daily.

But I haven’t handled things very well. I bailed on most social media not because of my lofty principles, but because I didn’t like who I was when handed that microphone. I’ve drifted away from most of the folks skilled at tolerating me in real life. A spot of unpleasantness a few years ago completely derailed how I thought of myself as a teacher and a colleague, which in turn forced me to realize how heavily I’d been leaning on those elements of my identity to prop up pretty much everything else.

I still believe much of the rhetoric we throw around about the impact teachers can have on students, but those kites need string and someone with a good grip and their feet firmly planted on the ground. That was no longer me.

Things have gradually gotten better, but I don’t think I’ll ever feel about teaching, or being part of a community, or the supposed “calling” behind the profession, the way I used to. At the same time, I’ve probably spent too much energy soaking in the resentment and self-loathing of it all. I don’t believe in avoiding or denying unpleasant emotions or uncomfortable realizations, but that doesn’t mean we have to marinate in darkness forever.

Just ask Wanda Maximoff, amiright?

I think it’s time for me to read Zod Wallop again. It’s not a perfect novel, and it’s certainly not a holy book or a magical cure for anything, but it is a wonderfully manic fantasy which wrestles with the road back from isolation and anger and other very dark places through faith and passion and existential leaps into uncertain possibilities. By taking readers into a world of impossible events and unlikely characters, it circumvents our usual defenses and surprises us with just how much of ourselves we find there. Spencer shakes things up enough that by the time we land at the end, there’s a good chance we’re a bit better off than we were when we started.

Maybe we’re a bit better, period.

If Zod Wallop isn’t the book that does that for you, there are other titles out there. Lots of them. Whatever madness remains to be faced, collectively or personally, none of us have to do so alone. Grab a good book and hold on tight.