After a Long Wait, Literary Novelists Address 9/11
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: March 7, 2005
This is a story of what happens to those who write fiction when terrible facts intrude on their world. In time, inevitably, cold truth is recast and reshaped into literature.
After three years of near silence about the attacks of Sept. 11, the literary world has begun to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack ever to happen on American soil.
A half-dozen novels that use 9/11 and its aftermath as central elements of their plot or setting, from some of the most acclaimed literary novelists and the most respected publishing houses, are being released later this year. A similar number have already made their way into bookstores in the last few months.
In ''Windows on the World'' (Miramax), Frederic Beigbeder imagines a divorced father's breakfast with his sons at the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. In ''The Good Priest's Son'' (Scribner), Reynolds Price tells of an art conservator whose flight back to the United States is diverted to Nova Scotia on the morning of Sept. 11, while his apartment in Lower Manhattan is blasted with debris.
In Ian McEwan's ''Saturday'' (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), saturated with a sense of dread that makes any calamity into a possible act of terrorism, a father and daughter debate whether Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. ''The Writing on the Wall,'' by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint), portrays a librarian whose cloistered world is ripped apart as she walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and sees a plane hit the trade center. And in ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'' (Houghton Mifflin), by Jonathan Safran Foer, an indefatigable 9-year-old searches the city for a lock that fits a key he found in the closet of his father, who died in the attack.
The events of Sept. 11 found their way into a variety of media immediately after the attacks. Country musicians released flag-waving songs within weeks, and other musical tributes, poems, plays, documentaries and nonfiction books soon followed, including Bruce Springsteen's elegy ''The Rising'' and Michael Moore's incendiary film ''Fahrenheit 9/11.''
And while the attacks have already found a place in a handful of mysteries, spy novels and other works of mass-market fiction, only now are books being published that some literary critics are saying take the substantial risks needed to give them staying power.
The delay of more than three years reflects both the logistics of producing a bound volume of a lengthy manuscript and the more subtle, complex process of creating a novel.
''Some art forms, like poems or the drawings of Art Spiegelman, lend themselves to a more immediate treatment of an event like 9/11,'' said James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University who has taught the ''great books'' curriculum there. ''But a novel really has to do more. A novelist has to sustain a story that feels right to people who actually lived through the event, who have a sense of what really happened. It has to be more than just a recounting of the event.''
By no means is that an easy task, of course. Joyce Carol Oates, the author and critic whose recent short story ''The Mutants'' dealt with a woman trapped in her Lower Manhattan apartment on 9/11, said novels might not be the art form best able to address the events of that day.
''This does seem to be about the right time for these novels to be coming out,'' Ms. Oates said. ''But the greatest art form to deal with this might be film, because it can capture the hallucinatory nature of the long hours of that siege.''
None of the literary novels related to 9/11 have yet attracted large readerships. But given the popularity of previous books by Mr. McEwan and Mr. Foer, that seems likely to change.
Mr. Foer's free-form, surreal prose style might come as close as possible to Ms. Oates's hallucinatory ideal. His coming novel includes blank pages, pages with a single sentence on them, pages of nothing but numbers and numerous photographs, including a series of doctored images made to look like a body falling from the top of the World Trade Center.
Other 9/11-related books, like ''Windows on the World'' and ''The Third Brother,'' by Nick McDonell, also attempt literal representations of scenes from Sept. 11. Some authors take a more figurative approach: Mr. McEwan's novel, which takes place long after 9/11, opens with a cataclysmic event that is assumed to be the work of terrorists.
''Windows on the World,'' coming this month, has already been a best seller in Mr. Beigbeder's home country, France, despite the tensions between France and the United States over the aftermath of 9/11.
Of the attacks, Mr. Beigbeder (pronounced big-bid-AY) recalled: ''Many people here said, 'It's their turn. They deserve it.' No one deserves something like 9/11. But if a catastrophe happens, we have to make it useful, so that we can try to make it never happen again. We have to understand it, and that is why I wrote this novel.''
Using fiction and imaginary characters can sometimes make an overwhelming event feel human. But with so many people personally connected to those who were killed on Sept. 11, taking a reader inside a World Trade Center tower, as Mr. Beigbeder has, can evoke hostile reactions.