AUGUST 24, 2011
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Every critic, I’d venture, has written something that he or she would like to take back. For me, it’s my expression of astonishment, in a column written on the third anniversary of September 11, that no important fiction dealing with that day had yet appeared. Blame it on the fever for documentation that arose in the wake of the attacks, perhaps, or on my naïveté about the amount of time required to write a book—not to mention to sell and publish it. But somehow I failed to grasp that serious fiction takes years, if not decades.
By now, so many 9/11 novels have been published that they easily constitute a distinct genre, despite their diversity. We have novels focused on the day itself, like Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud—the most widely read of the group—and the underappreciated The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass, examine the lives of New Yorkers just before the catastrophe. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country take place in its immediate aftermath. In The Submission, published this month, Amy Waldman cleverly imagines the political circus that might have ensued if the jury chosen to select a design for the 9/11 memorial had chosen one by a Muslim architect.
If we expand the list to include all the novels in which the terrorist attacks appear but do not play a central role (such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, two of the most celebrated books of last year), as well as those that merely allude to the day itself but are dominated by its shadow (among them Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, and Open City, by Teju Cole), it becomes clear that 9/11 was the catalyst for some of the most intriguing American fiction of the last ten years. While the “9/11 novel,” narrowly defined, is an uneven and somewhat unsatisfying creation, the post-9/11 novel was the essential form of the last decade. Yet even the post-9/11 novel functions more as a window into the cultural miasma still swirling in the wake of the attacks than as a route to making sense of what happened to us.
THIS EXPLOSION of fiction wasn’t necessarily to have been expected. A few days after the attacks, the novelist Jonathan Lethem was already worrying about the propriety of writing about the fall of the World Trade Center, which he had watched from his “helpless window” in Brooklyn. “Can I bear to narrate this into normality?” he wondered publicly in The New York Times Magazine. (Lethem’s own post-9/11 novel was Chronic City, which came out two years ago and imagined a wildly fantastic Manhattan menaced by an elusive beast.) Lethem’s bewilderment is familiar: It appears in all literatures of disaster. Writers who survived various kinds of catastrophes—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Vietnam war—have been stymied by the tension between their desire to communicate accurately what they saw and their fear of obscuring the horror with phrases too nicely turned. (“Art takes the sting out of suffering,” the theologian Michael Wyschogrod once remarked regarding the Holocaust.) If the very nature of narrative imposes a false coherence upon events that by definition resist understanding, the novelist is caught in a terrible bind.
In the immediate wake of 9/11, there was something superfluous about the all-too-deliberate search by some writers for new ways to describe an event that the vast majority of Americans had already seen for themselves on television. Lethem self-consciously tried on a few different styles—modernist stream-of-consciousness, post-industrial cool—and rejected them all as unsuited to the current situation: “I’d entered—we’d all entered—a world containing a fresh category of phenomena: the unimaginable fact.” It was already obvious that the purpose of the 9/11 novel and the post-9/11 novel would not be to tell us what happened on that day: The details did not require rehearsal. Their purpose, rather, would be—or ought to be—to tell us what 9/11 means.
The first crop of novels, still reeling from the day’s immediacy, emphasized the aberrational quality of 9/11. (Never mind that the “unimaginable fact” turned out not to have been quite as unimaginable—or unpredictable—as it first appeared to be.) The disaster literally falls from the sky. In A Day at the Beach, in which Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf witness the attack from the window of their stylish Tribeca apartment, Schulman dwells on the details of the couple’s sheltered, privileged life: the duck eggs and fresh raspberries at the breakfast table, the brand-name espresso machine humming on the counter. At the moment “the world changed,” Suzannah is in the middle of taking a shower—an apt image of how vulnerable and unprepared we all were on that morning.
But was that day truly the rupture in time that it first seemed to be? Messud also presents it as such in her elegant, urbane novel, an acid depiction of New York elite society in the spring and summer of 2001. “I am living, we are all living, a complete farce,” muses one of the book’s most self-aware characters, a misfit searching for an honest route to the intellectual life. But 9/11 works mainly as a plot device, and there’s something manipulative about the way the novel uses the reader’s awareness of what is coming to build tension. As the months glide by, we await the imminent catastrophe with a mixture of dread and glee: Something will finally awaken these dreamers from their stupor! David Foster Wallace creates a similar effect in his story “The Suffering Channel,” an even more acerbic condemnation of New York media that takes place entirely in the weeks before 9/11. We all know what it means that the editorial offices of the glossy magazine Wallace parodies—where every story must have a “UBA” (upbeat angle) and the latest feature is on a man who emits excrement in the shape of artwork—happen to be located in the World Trade Center.
The event crashes down on Messud’s characters like a tsunami, irreparably altering their course. By 2006, when the novel appeared, this felt a little wishful, because it had already become clear that 9/11 had not remade the contours of American life in any important way. The consumerist excesses, the all-knowingness of the media, and the other contemporary plagues that the attacks were supposed to have swept away were back within a few years. There is no more damning evidence of this than the fact that “The Suffering Channel” still feels as fresh a parody of celebrity culture and reality television today as it did in 2004, when it first appeared in Oblivion, Wallace’s last collection of short stories. Wallace chose to leave his characters in suspended animation: The story ends shortly before the attacks. Perhaps he was acknowledging his own bewilderment in the face of the aftermath.
OUR WORLD has changed, but we don’t quite know how. This unresolved question nags at the post-9/11 novelists, whose characters are often in thrall to forces they don’t understand. In Franzen’s Freedom, Walter and Patty Berglund are tormented by the fear that they might not be as free as they think they are—a quintessentially post-9/11 confusion that stands in sharp contrast to the glibness of the Lambert family in The Corrections. In Franzen’s earlier novel—which came out (as it happens) on September 1, 2001—both the older and younger generations are spinning their wheels: the children overwhelmed by too much possibility, the parents having already used theirs up. In search of outlets for their frustration, they commit crimes that inevitably result in recrimination. But the problems of Freedom, from the corruptly managed war in Iraq to the Berglunds’ sullied marriage, are the result of a convoluted tangle of actions and reactions that have no definable origin. The novel’s catchphrase is “Mistakes were made,” the infamous apology-without-responsibility that became a mantra of the Bush years. Things are messed up, and no one knows just how they got that way.
This mood of uncertainty is even stronger in the post-9/11 novels set in New York. In O’Neill’s Netherland and Cole’s Open City, the protagonists—both immigrants to the United States, both suffering personal losses—wander the city, encountering an obscure cast of characters who flicker through the margins of both the city and the narrative. Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which weaves in and out of New York, is constructed out of a series of stories linking a group of scattered characters whose paths intersect and diverge again like lines on the subway map. Beneath their fragmentation, these books are all fundamentally elegiac—for a person, a place, or just a time gone by.
This is all quite moving and evocative; but it is not entirely satisfying as an answer to the most urgent questions of the day. Ten years later, do we still helplessly regard 9/11 as an “unimaginable fact,” a deus ex machina of indeterminable cause, rather than the product of a toxic swirl of historical, religious, and political forces? If we do, it could well be because our novelists continue stubbornly to insist on turning their gaze inward, bizarrely searching for the answer to the question of 9/11 in America rather than at its global source. (The best fictional portrait of a Muslim in post-9/11 America is to be found, unsurprisingly, not in John Updike’s Terrorist but in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid.) It’s tempting to blame the peculiar insularity of recent American fiction on the write-what-you-know philosophy of the MFA workshop. But it’s more likely just another example of the inward turn that our society has taken in the post-9/11 era.
Our writers were once more far-sighted. The two most important novels of the 1990s—Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Don DeLillo’s Underworld—both eerily prefigure the terrorist attacks. The cover of Underworld shows the Twin Towers dissolving into mist; a subplot centers around an art installation involving, of all things, airplanes. In American Pastoral, a keenly targeted bomb shatters the complacency of a family and a community, resulting in “the total vandalization of their world.” More fundamentally, both books are suffused with an existential anxiety about America and its place in the world, an anxiety that hums with an ominous note of gathering menace. Things can’t go on like this, Roth and DeLillo told us. Our arrogance and our complacency must founder. The breaking point is in sight. Unfortunately, no one believed that the sky might really be falling.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article originally ran in the September 15, 2011, issue of the magazine.
14 comments
Oh, come on. It is just as fatuous to lament in 2011 that American novels are too "inward-looking"--since when have realistic novels of the Flaubertian strain looked anywhere but in?--as it was in 2003 to lament the fact that there were no good novels about 9/11. These state-of-the-novel essays are always a mistake, mainly because works of genuine literary merit are infrequent enough and slow enough in coming that even looking back over an entire decade your sample size is too small to enable you to discern any trends. Between them the three Jonathans have written four novels since Sept 11, 2001. One of them addressed the WTC attacks directly; one was set in some bizarro, Blade Runner version of New York City and was focused on a group boy-men crippled by pop culture obsessions and high-potency cannabis; another follows a Midwestern family from the 1970s to the post-9/11 present; and the last, "written" by the same fellow who addressed 9/11 directly, if glibly, isn't a novel at all in the traditional sense but is instead a dadaist experiment in composition through erasure of another writer's words. Taken together these four works are supposed to tell us what about America and what about the novel? And the fact that neither they nor any other American novels of worth address the realities of al Qaeda and radical Islam means what exactly? Ms. Franklin, I usually find you to be a critic of discernment and rigor, but in this case you were screwed the moment you accepted the assignment to write about the effects of the 9/11 attacks on the American novel. Revisit the subject in a hundred years and maybe you'll be able to say something intelligent about it, though I suspect that you'll more likely discover that with or without 9/11 novelists in America and elsewhere will have continued to go about their lonely, idiosyncratic ways trying, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to make art out of the dross of experience, experience of both the universally shared variety and the highly personal.
- AaronW
September 3, 2011 at 7:45am
I would note, too, that a couple of spy novels have dealt with the wider world of Al Qaeda and terrorism quite well -- maybe they are just not "literary" enough for the refined taste. I'd recommend Gerald Seymour's The Unknown Soldier in particular.
- ironyroad
September 3, 2011 at 1:35pm
“…Oh, come on. It is just as fatuous to lament in 2011 that American novels are too "inward-looking"--since when have realistic novels of the Flaubertian strain looked anywhere but in?-“ I haven’t read most of the novels that deal with 9/11 and I don’t intend to, but Aaron is dead wrong about Flaubert being an inward looking writer. I suppose he means Madame Bovary, but even there it’s only partly true. Flaubert satirizes Bovary’s romantic idealism and doesn’t endorse it. The novel is also full of social satire; the country fair scene for example. Then Sentimental Educations deals with revolutionary activity in the 1840’s. This is offset by the hero’s, Frederick Moreau, private love for Madame Arnoux. Even here there is fair amount of satire. Then there are the historically inspired novels such as Salambo which deals with Cartage. Too many people follow Sartre who thought of him as an inward looking novelist because he cared more for style than for content. As usual with Sartre he is only partly right. I think the inward novel owes more to other writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (the Molly Bloom scene especially0 than to Flaubert.
- arnon
September 3, 2011 at 2:29pm
Arnon, I don't think we have any real disagreement. Many critics trace the genealogy of the realistic, psychological novel back to Flaubert, and to the degree that such works, both by Flaubert and his descendents, treat individual consciousness as their central subject, they are "inward-looking." Of course, Flaubert engaged in social satire, and of course he had a keen eye for his characters broader social circumstances. By "inward-looking" I did not in any way mean "solipsistic." At same time, I don't think Franklin meant that either. But one thing that Flaubert did NOT do, in contrast, say, to Tolstoy or, to a lesser extent, Dickens, was take on the entire social fabric of an era. I think it is the absence of such a wide-angle focus in post-9/11 American novels that Franklin is talking about when she says that they're inward looking. I'm simply suggesting that Tolstoy was a rare genius and that literary fiction has tended to follow more in a narrower, more personal Flaubertian line, and so it may simply be too much to ask that in a mere ten years even one novelist should have given us a 9/11 War and Peace. After all, War and Peace didn't appear for almost sixty years after the events it describes. On a slight side note, J Franzen's "Freedom", mentioned in Franklin's essay and reviewed by her in TNR, directly references War and Peace and, I believe, tries to draw parallels between itself and that baggy monster of a novel. In other words, though he focuses on a single family--just as Tolstoy focuses on a relatively small cast of central characters in W & P--Franzen displays an ambition to take on broader American society. He treats on environmental degradation, the Iraq war, addiction, psychotherapy, neoconservatism, political corruption and on and on. One can argue about how successful Franzen was in any of this (I didn't like "Freedom" very much), but it seems to me that the novel isn't really all that "inward."
- AaronW
September 3, 2011 at 8:06pm
Aaron last point first, Franzen may compare himself to Tolstoy, but that comparison shows him at a huge disadvantage. I read the novel Freedom (forced myself to finish it) and it was on the one hand very narrow and expansive at the same time. His irony was directed at people with whom he disagreed politically but never built a strong case against their ideology. It’s as if he assumed the reader of his books would automatically assume that neocons were the bad guys. I didn’t think it was a successful novel. About Flaubert you said: “But one thing that Flaubert did NOT do, in contrast, say, to Tolstoy or, to a lesser extent, Dickens, was take on the entire social fabric of an era.” I believe that his Sentimental Education touches on different classes in society. No, he was no Victor Hugo the writer whose narrative mode he was trying to counter. In this he was more like George Eliot who went out of her way not to write Dickensian novels but still presented different social classes in her work. I think that the one American writer who did more than anyone else to focus on the subjective lives of his characters was Henry James. It’s through his influence that we get the novels of Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford and perhaps also Virginia Woolf. “I think it is the absence of such a wide-angle focus in post-9/11 American novels that Franklin is talking about when she says that they're inward looking. I'm simply suggesting that Tolstoy was a rare genius and that literary fiction has tended to follow more in a narrower, more personal Flaubertian line, and so it may simply be too much to ask that in a mere ten years even one novelist should have given us a 9/11 War and Peace. After all, War and Peace didn't appear for almost sixty years after the events it describes.” I don’t disagree with this except that I would say that writers today have more to compete with than merely other novelists. For pure narrative we seem to go to film. (Your use of the phrase "wide angle" suggests that you are aware of this) I wish Ms. Franklin would have written about that also. (It’s as if the visual presentation of an event is more compelling and immediate than one mediated merely through words.) Look, Joseph Conrad in the Secret Agent did take an actual event and wrote about it from a subjective which is to say Jamesian point of view. He was able to do so because he didn’t have competition from social scientists tying to analyze the subject scientifically and trying to get at the subconscious of these terrorists. Before, Conrad there was Dostoevsky who also treated the social pathology of the destructive rebel. Any one taking on the subject today will have to offer us insights not available to these experts to make it interesting. There are very few writers today whom I would trust to explain to us what motivates terrorists. Don DeLillo is one of the few writers who tried but wasn’t successful. Philip Roth has been writing novels set decades in the past and in novels like American Pastoral is more successful in part because he shows that even experts in social pathology can unwittingly also cause erratic behavior.
- arnon
September 3, 2011 at 10:36pm
Since we live in a postmodern landscape of images, major historical events are hard to understand and interpret for writers. So I sympathize with your essay on the post-9/11 novels mentioned in your article. I really enjoyed The Emperor's Children. It had an acute sense of the spiritual mess we're suffering through at the moment, which was refracted through the prism of the characters. It takes time to absorb historical tragedies, decades after the actual collective experience. I am still mulling over how deeply Vietnam affected me as a medical corpsman. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone really moved me with their subjective truth and literary power. And to me the events of 9/11 are in a similar stage of development, still percolating to the surface in the consciousness for many Americans. It will take decades for the definitive literary works to find their place. We're all like foot soldiers in the midst of the battle, just trying to save our lives and sanity, yet not knowing what the actual outcome of the battle will be, able to only to see fifty feet around us in the fog of war that morphs into a fun house of mirrors distorting all the images years later.
- rewiredhogdog
September 3, 2011 at 10:58pm
"Since we live in a postmodern landscape of images, major historical events are hard to understand and interpret for writers." I'm not sure I know what that means, rewired. The ubiquity of recycled images makes events harder to interpret? Why? And isn't the ubiquity of images--for instance those of the planes crashing into the WTC--itself an important state of affairs that writers could, if they chose, comment upon. re "Freedom" Don't misunderstand me, arnon. I did not mean to imply that "Freedom" comes anywhere close to matching "War and Peace." I read "Freedom" almost exactly a year ago, and I'm presently nearing the end of the recent Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of W&P (I read the Constance Garnett fifteen years ago) and I don't think it's going to far to say that Jonathan Franzen can barely claim to scrape the dirt off of Leo Tolstoy's boots. Hemingway touched on this in a New Yorker profile of him published in 1950. He, Hemingway, thought he was punching in the same weight class as Turgenev and some other writer (Stendhal?), but humbly admitted that Tolstoy had him totally outclassed.
- AaronW
September 4, 2011 at 12:59am
Oh, please, Ms Franklin, Sabbath's Theater was a far superior novel to American Pastoral.
- MOLLYSIMON
September 4, 2011 at 2:47am
I found Ruth Franklin’s article on the way 9-11 changed the way we view the world in general and novel writers in particular, puzzling. First because she assumes that great events (undefined in the article) change the way we look at the world, and also because she assumes that great events leads to great art. In this case great novels about those events. Nowhere in her essay does she explore these assumptions. In the US the great event was was th founding of the country in the late 18th century yet one would be hard put to point any great art work that was occasioned by this event. The great American prose works came much later in the mid 19c. The same was true for the civil war. The only great novel dealing directly with the civil war The Red badge of Courage was written towards then end of 19th century by a novelist who had been born in 1871 which is to say after the event took place. (The same with the Napoleonic war of 1812,Tolstoy’s novel was written a half a century later, as was pointed out by Aaron here. I should add that Tostoy too hadn’t been born when the battle took place. WW1 did produce some good novels such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) by Jaroslav Hašek, and many others but no great novel. No War and Peace, no Illiad, not Remembrance of Things Past, no Ulysses. The great novels of the period were written after the war and while some of the novels contain scenes that deal with that war (Proust’s novel for example) they did not take on the war directly. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) which is supposed to prefigure WW1 ends when the hero Castorp goes into the army. The war itself isn’t figured in the novel. WW2 is a more complex phenomenon and since novels are still being written about it, It’s too early say if it will result in a work such as War and Peace. I could go on. It’s obvious that great events do not necessarily lead to the creation of great art or great novels. Why then should we expect great novels to issue from 9-11? Did Pearl Harbor result in great literature? The second point make by Ruth Franklin is that the reason why American writers did not produce great art is because novelists treat “inwardness” as if that would have been a barrier to producing novels about 9-11. There is no more inward novel than Henry James’s The Magic Bowl yet it manages to circumnavigate a whole class of people: bourgeois American society which turns art into commerce. Hence I don’t see “inwardness as an insurmountable impediment to the creation of novels that deal with catastrophic events. In any case Ruth Franklin does not define “inwardness in the novel” so arguing with her is like shadow boxing. The novels that treat “foreshadow” she says 9-11 are DeLillo’s Underworld and Roth’s American Pastoral, but these novels not only prefigure the event they show the context of 9-11 which is he ongoing terrorism in the world. Terrorism didn’t start with 9-11 nor did it end there. Some of us have been on the alert for terroristic incidents at least since the first bombing of the Twin Towers in the early 90’s. But terrorism was a fact of life during the cold war. In many cases they were applauded by left wing intellectuals (these is what Roth’s novel is partly about). This is also why many left wing intellectuals who had supported terrorist actions or at least didn’t condemn (during the Vietnam war, for example) had a hard time dealing with 9-11. Terrorist were supposed to be fighting for freedom and id that was the case then capitalist society was as much at fault than the terrorists. (One of the few left wing intellectuals who saw the dilemma was Chris Hitchens and he decided not to condone 9-11. This was one of the main reasons he started to condemn those intellectuals such as Chomsky who made excuses for this horrific massacre.) I think one reason why novelists haven’t been very clear or their novels dealt honestly with the subject is that many of them seem emotionally confused. I said that O haven’t read most of the novels dealing with 9=11 and I won’t. That’s because the few novels I looked into seem to void dealing with it honestly. Take Jonathan Safran Foer, I don’t believe he is mature enough or serious enough to be able to deal honestly with an event like 9-11. Other novelists decided to stay with safe subject such as multiculturalism. Another example is Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. 9-11 is but one incident in the career of terrorism after ww2. 9-11 was horrific but is anyone prepared to say that there won’t be even more horrific terrorist attacks?
- arnon
September 4, 2011 at 2:28pm
Good post, arnon. Two very minor corrections: I think you meant "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James, not "The Magic Bowl". While it was no "War and Peace", Pearl Harbor did generate "From Here to Eternity", which is remembered now mainly for the movie adaptation but which at the time was taken seriously as a work of literature.
- AaronW
September 4, 2011 at 6:00pm
Arnon. I agree with much of what you have to say. Good post. Personally I think that 9/11 would have been much less likely to have occurred at all had the left and in particular our academics been more accommodating with the likes of Reagan. At least as far as his standing four square in rhetorical opposition to the 'Evil Empire' and its contribution to the wall coming down. I never voted for the guy but if one honestly looks at the zeitgeist and his place in it one HAS to at least consider the possibility that his unaccommodating and unapologetic adversarial position may have played a significant role in that wall tumbling down. Alchemicals and all things being equal. As well I also think it less likely that we would have even had to fight the Iraqi dictatorship had the country been more unified in its resolution that this tyrant not prevail. But given the years of the nastiest kinds of political infighting probably gave Hussein and his cronies a kind of practical hope that his regime could outlast and eventually bend American resolution to his benefit. There is a lot more to say and I'm sure this will piss off those that consider themselves to be intellectuals of such a stripe. Oh well.
- jacko
September 4, 2011 at 9:03pm
And no.... I'm not confused about Al Qaeda and Iraqi connections. In fact or inventively exploited. That isn't and wasn't even a criterion for me. But to hear the adversaries of the Iraq war one would think it was THE central issue. For me that whole conversation was just a distraction from the larger and more relevant reasons. I truly wish that Bush and his buddies hadn't even bothered to try and connect those dots. They were totally beside the point.
- jacko
September 4, 2011 at 9:10pm
"I think you meant "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James, not "The Magic Bowl"." Yes, I did. Thanks for the correction. "While it was no "War and Peace", Pearl Harbor did generate "From Here to Eternity", which is remembered now mainly for the movie adaptation but which at the time was taken seriously as a work of literature." I recently read that novel and while it is considered by Random House critics as one of the 100 best and it does indeed have some excellent writing, I thought it too narrow in that it stuck too closely to military life and didn't include civilian characters not associated with the military life or soldiers.
- arnon
September 4, 2011 at 9:34pm
"There is a lot more to say and I'm sure this will piss off those that consider themselves to be intellectuals of such a stripe." Uh-oh! [ironyroad twists around worriedly to see what kind of stripe he has]
- ironyroad
September 5, 2011 at 6:11pm