Perhaps it's inevitable that any event of modern historic import—the death of a pope, the outbreak of war, a large-scale natural disaster—will trigger a race to fill the windows of bookstores with spins on its implications. But invariably the initial deluge of print is primarily nonfiction; serious fiction cannot be rushed.
Only in the past two years or so have novels begun to emerge that take on the terrorist attacks. Frédéric Beigbeder, in one of the first, wrote audaciously from within the conflagration; Jonathan Safran Foer, Joyce Maynard and Jay McInerney faced it from the inner circle, creating characters who survive yet suffer personal damage and loss. Michael Cunningham came at it slantwise, through science fiction. Ian McEwan, in a novel so true as to prove prophetic, wrote about the way in which the trauma of 9/11 has seeped like indelible ink into modern minds the whole world over. Ken Kalfus crafted a social satire on the metastasis of violence.
Reactions from certain critics have been curiously cynical, their praise begrudging. One can almost hear a sigh of ennui from reviewers who allude to the "tedious" number of novels that address 9/11 or its repercussions; who accuse novelists of opportunistic plotting, as if we've run dry on drama and must "resort" to current events for inspiration. Cries of "Too soon!" are also common—as if, in order to be meaningful, fiction writers' ideas (unlike those of political pundits) must lie bottled in some cerebral cellar to age for a particular length of time.
I started writing my second novel in March 2001, knowing that it would take place over the years 2000 and 2001, mostly in my neighborhood, the West Village of New York City. My aim was to write about four characters and their struggle to love and be loved, how they would come to terms with the limitations of loyalty and forgiveness, how their lives would fall under the combined influence of determination, folly, and the accidents of time and place we often refer to as fate.
Six months later I witnessed an act of both determination and fate (folly, too, if you count the role of the C.I.A.) that would profoundly influence the lives of flesh-and- blood New Yorkers, myself among them.
It would be false to claim that nothing in my life was ever the same again after that morning. Although I lived in the midst of an ongoing drama, the superficial details of my life remained mostly the same; many that seemed at first irreparably altered returned in time to the way they'd once been. Nevertheless, many things about life in the city did change for good, along with many things about my private, interior life, especially the nature and focus of my everyday anxieties as a parent, a New Yorker, an American. Suddenly, there was no way one could remain aloof from politics; even my five-year-old and his friends discussed Osama bin Laden, passionately, in the sandbox. (Could bad guys, if you caught them, be turned into good guys?) They argued over the death toll. They reenacted the Towers' collapse.
I remember hearing talk about 9/11 as a collective loss of innocence. I laughed. New Yorkers, innocent? Americans, innocent? No; what we lost was our sense of impunity. Throughout the city, egos shrank by several sizes. Indiscriminate tenderness burgeoned; tears of all kinds flowed easily. Flags, candles, prayers and anthems appeared in the most unlikely places. Babies were defiantly conceived. People who stuck around lived in a stew of fear and love, waiting for another crisis, yet certain we'd endure it. Many of those people, like me, were writers—and in the urgency of the moment we burned to use our words.
To write fiction, however, seemed all at once trivial, quaint, indulgent; worse, it seemed irrelevant. Life was what mattered now, not "literature," some porcelain facsimile of life. Many writers who'd found their purpose in creating tall tales buckled under a truth so bitter and brutal that it made their own convictions seem flimsy and cloying, cotton candy clinging to a paper cone. I shared this sense of futility, even shame.
So at first we wrote true tales instead, about what we'd seen, how we made sense of it, what we thought might happen next. There were instant anthologies, online forums, special issues of intellectual journals. I read these earnest effusions with a voyeuristic hunger. But there was an honorable motive, too: wanting to find my way back to writing about matters of the heart that loom large for everyone, no matter how safe or imperiled we believe ourselves to be.
I returned to writing my novel when I understood this: that everything I've known, felt and seen forms a foundation beneath the house that is my work, a house that is always under construction. In the weeks and months after 9/11, an addition grew swiftly on that foundation. I could have ignored it—let it fill with rain or sealed it tight as an act of postponement—but that's not how I work. And I knew that if I simply wrote forward from where I had stopped, I would reach the part where I had to confront 9/11 as a novelist in a year or two. I trusted myself to figure it out. My characters would meet the destinies I had always intended for them, though the road they would travel had been altered by events that, paradoxically, these nonexistent people share with me.
Lurking behind the notion that novelists have jumped the gun is the illusion that the dust of 9/11 will settle anytime soon; that we will, at some point in the near future, stand at a lofty peak looking down on that day as if it were a museum diorama. That's a genre called historical fiction, which no author writing today will be able to render about this event. Historical fiction is narrative set in a time predating the author's own memory, beyond the reach of conscious, personal experience. To reflect on our own times is something else entirely, and of equal value. When we write about a shared catastrophe whose pain is still raw the effect is sometimes that much more powerful. Was Going After Cacciato written too soon after the Vietnam War? The Normal Heart too soon after the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? All Quiet on the Western Front a premature creation? What of Mrs. Miniver, William Wyler's 1942 film about World War II? How about Suite Française?
Storytellers who dramatize their own era embrace its most resounding moments, moments when the spiritual compass by which we live (and write) has spun out of alignment. Realigning that compass, searching for a new magnetic north, is some of the best work fiction writers do. We seize something that everyone around us has taken for granted and, whether tenderly or violently, ironically or tragically, we upend it, dissect or shatter it. We write not about you or them or then. We write about us; we write about now. Reader, we say, the view has changed; let me show you how.
Recently, it struck me that in the fiction I've read encompassing 9/11, many of us are writing about something that the calamity itself magnified acutely: the friction between love and fear—love despite fear, love because of fear, love in the face of fear, love when it's defeated by fear. With a nod to Trollope, who wrote of his own times so shrewdly, that friction exerts a persistent influence on the way we live now. Writing about just that, even from up close, even in the dust that's so far from settling, is an act of transformation. We are translating current events into a language of the heart. How could it be "too soon" to do that?
| Author Information |
| Glass is the author of the novels Three Junes and The Whole World Over. |
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