These are popular times for novels set in a dystopic near-future America. This setting has understandably become a reflection of our collective disaffection as citizens, our anxieties, our angst, the society’s hypocrisies and contradictions. In Zazen, Vanessa Veselka’s first novel, the crumbling America is as frail as the tofu scramble her twenty-seven year old protagonist Della slings at the vegan-friendly diner. The President plans numerous wars, protestors self-combust, bombs explode in our cities, and people die easily. And there’s very little Della’s tattooed, hair-dyed, vegan, sex-party-loving friends can do to stem the tide of the American corporate war machine.

Like Zazen’s America, Della is also on the verge of collapse. Deeply alienated from her friends, family, and her nation, Della faces three options. Does she flee and tour eco-friendly Honduras? Does she stay and get co-opted by her failing homeland? Does she try a third rail? Despite having good reasons to choose the first two options (including the potential of a committed relationship with her girlfriend Jimmy), Della chooses the least likely path because she has not just lost faith in America, she’s lost faith in love and the concept of rebellion itself.

With an epidemic of bombings in the city, Della decides to call in bomb threats of her own, causing panic among the population, mobilizing police forces, and causing chaos she can control. It’s this control over the powers-at-be that Della considers an effective form of rebellion. But when she calls in a bomb threat that becomes real, Della has to choose a fourth rail: to go on the lam.

The most striking aspect of Zazen is Della’s voice. Her first-person observations of the futile counterculture, which resembles a somewhat stock collage of Portlandia and Brooklyn hipster stereotypes, are dead-on. One can feel Della’s inability to find true connection and intimacy with others, even Jimmy, in every sentence. One can also feel Della’s deep affection for the other characters, despite their manufactured misfit absurdities. In the following passage, Della’s impulse is to run away with Jimmy but for some reason, she can’t commit:

“I stepped closer and put my hand against her ear. I still couldn’t hear out of mine. She relaxed. More cracks lacing the ice. We talked about Honduras and what we could do there. She grew animated but I could feel it all coming apart in my hands. Let’s get out of here, I said. Let’s take a cab across the river and go somewhere where there aren’t funerals and koi ponds, and she agreed. We went salsa dancing at a Latino bar near the old international district. We told them we were sisters so that they’d let us dance together. Then when we were leaving, I kissed her in front of all of them outside on the street with the light of the Salvation Army sign falling down all around us.

On the way home I wondered how many chances we get…That’s the problem with me. I want to believe in a world of second chances but I can’t.”

When the novel must eventually solve the mystery of who’s following through on Della’s fake bomb threats, and when Della’s voice must convey an urgency and danger to the plot, Zazen, like Veselka’s dystopic America, begins to buckle under the weight of its ambitions. A farm harboring revolutionaries with bombs feels like a hippie commune. A potential bombing at a big box retailer feels like midnight parking lot loitering. Even when Della is in heightened danger, she’s got time to visit her friends at a sex party. The end result feels less like Children of Men and more like a less carnivorous version of Dazed and Confused. Despite the failures of the plot, however, Veselka’s unique vision and lyricism are reason enough to read Zazen and look forward to the author’s next work.

Zazen
A Novel
By Vanessa Veselka
272 pages, Red Lemonade Press