It's a subject that had us talking recently, how the upswing of tragedy so often begets great art. Who hasn't been touched by a book that came out of the World Wars or Vietnam? Naturally, being still so close to that horrible day, we wondered about the lasting literature of 9/11. Mostly it's been non-fiction. The truth of that compacted event was such that fiction could not dare compare to the facts leading up and sliding away from those few hours that turned the world.
But what about fiction? We read a lot of it around here, and more often we're seeing fiction that confronts 9/11 and — as that signifier ("9/11") does the further we get from it — all that has followed in its wake. This summer we passed around two novels — Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, in which a London man is stranded in New York after 9/11 and finds solace in a melting pot community of immigrants in the outer boroughs, and Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, about a bed-ridden writer recovering from a car accident who, among other contemplations, imagines an America in which the Twin Towers never fell but the country divided and went to war over the disputed 2000 presidential election. These are two of the year's best-reviewed literary novels, and, while not necessarily our favorites of the year, prompted us to wonder if enough time had passed to generate some strong 9/11 literature.
We came up with some of our favorite books that deal with 9/11, if not directly then thematically.
Another great book, and staff favorite, that came out this year is Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, which approaches 9/11 from the days before the tragedy. Told from various perspectives, the novel's main action unfolds during one night in a Florida strip club. The most controversial narrator is one of the 19 hijackers, who is submerging himself in the sins of the West in preparation for his holy mission. Some readers found it hard to spend time in the mind of a mass murderer, and such is the power and thoughtfulness of this depiction, but Dubus wisely does not rely on the hijacker to carry his story. There is much here about the preoccupations of pre-9/11 America, as well as a powerful story about the calamity that results when people foist their moral standards onto others.
Two more favorites address the immediacy of that day. Ben, our number one poetry reader, told us about a new book-length poem called Bikeman by Thomas Flynn, a CBS journalist who, upon hearing word of an event at the World Trade Center, jumped on his bike to cover the breaking news. The world watched on television only a fraction of the events in which Flynn would find himself entangled, but, like many New Yorkers that day, he continued to perform his duties despite impending danger. It is from this poetic-journalistic perspective that Bikeman takes shape, leading readers into a Dante-inspired story of a Hell which unfortunately was all too real.
Tad remains a tireless champion for Don DeLillo's Falling Man, which, along with Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is frequently considered one of the best 9/11 novels. The book opens with the main character escaping one of the towers, stumbling into a forever-changed world, and after a riveting description of the day's events, DeLillo follows his character and a handful of others through the aimless, paranoid, frustrating days that follow. One of the great qualities of DeLillo's work is his trenchant, and often entertaining, analysis of deep-seated social anxieties, and in the post-traumatic fall of 2001 he has found an incredibly rich landscape to work. And in these characters he is able to reveal the strange, interesting ways in which people cope with tragedy.
Another book that has stayed with us, and makes a profound statement about the aftermath of 9/11, is The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan. This literary thriller is set in Sydney, Australia, and, like Dubus' book, features a stripper in the starring role. ("It's good to have a character about whom people will arrive at an immediate judgment and that allows you then to take the reader to a different place," Flanagan explains in a great interview at The Guardian's website. "You can make them realise that perhaps their judgment was wrong, and perhaps the other judgments they live with are also as ill-based.") After a sudden, unwitting association with a Muslim terror suspect, the stripper finds herself in the crosshairs of a harrowing national manhunt fed by paranoia and rash supposition. Sometimes angry, often fast-paced, and always thoughtful, this is a spectacular social novel by one of the most intriguing writers at work today. Like DeLillo, Flanagan has found an illuminating way to demonstrate, albeit on a wider scale, how people respond to — and often, in that response, exacerbate — tragedy.
