Narrating 9/11: Crisis and Community in American Fiction

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Ten years later, the September 11, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, still cloud over the American imagination. The resonant images—the exhaust-black sky over the cindering, collapsing Twin Towers, or the plume of flame jetting from the Pentagon’s side, or the ash pit in Shanksville where the plane crashed—have metamorphosed into cultural touchstones, vividly re-evoking the tragedies. Pundits and politicians have analyzed and capitalized on the attacks, while America’s fiction writers, essayists, and poets have shouldered the Atlas-like task of re-witnessing these events and guiding us, as readers and human beings, through the devastation.

The news media instilled an unsettling reality—a sense of helpless paralysis—in those distanced from the sites. CNN, and other news agencies streamed the footage of the Towers disintegrating on a disturbing loop; newspapers were hardly better, centering the destruction of the iconic Towers on their front pages. In Elizabeth Strout’s novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge (2008), the eponymous character prepares to visit her son in New York and trembles from the psychological shock of observing—from a safe distance in Portland, Maine—the devastation:

. . . back when those planes ripped through the towers, Olive had sat in her bedroom and wept like a baby, not so much for this country but for the city itself, which had seemed to her to become suddenly no longer a foreign, hardened place, but as fragile as a class of kindergarten children, brave in their terror.

Strout’s effortless glide into Olive’s subconscious demonstrates a key intent of 9/11 writing as a genre: 9/11 narratives do not re-create the tragedy but process its vast scope into something that shapes a community of similarly spirited readers. Olive, a former teacher, likens New York’s inhabitants to kindergarten students valiantly grappling with something beyond their understandings. This pings a rare dent of sentiment into Strout’s ornery protagonist, and 9/11 transforms into a metaphor for how Olive might repair her relationship with her son.

Re-building families from the ground up recurs throughout 9/11 narratives, including novels such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). A portion of DeLillo’s novel was published as a short story entitled “Still-Life” in the April 9, 2007, edition of The New Yorker; the excerpt tracks Keith and Lianne, an estranged couple, as they resume their domestic routine after Keith narrowly escapes the carnage at Ground Zero. We learn, as Keith rekindles a relationship with his and Lianne’s son Justin, that the collapse has founded in Keith a desire to better understand his world, even as terrible possibilities lurk in the unknown:

Keith as well was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection . . . drawing things out of time and memory into some dim space that bears his collected experience. . . . Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand awhile and look.

DeLillo reminds us, though, that this vigilance is meant to counteract paranoia, to re-forge those ties that matter most. Notably, the section of “Still-Life” containing the above quotation concludes with Justin snapping Keith from his reverie with the statement, “We go home now.”

9/11 narratives shift readers from cataclysm to fostering communities by propelling us from terrified stasis into tentative yet meaningful activity. This often occurs through fragmented narratives moving between multiple points of view. Strout displaces Olive’s reaction by placing her trip to New York after the attacks, and DeLillo’s work exhibits these tendencies as the novel reacts to 9/11 in the following days. Perhaps one of the most splintered 9/11 stories, Deborah Eisenberg’s “Twilight of the Superheroes” ping-pongs between a post-9/11 New York, the pointless paranoia of Y2K, and an array of homes and art galleries. This frequently reminds the reader of art’s import in coping with any suffering. Eisenberg’s story generates momentum, urging her characters forward and reminding her readers in the concluding clause—“and then the children turned the page”—that better futures await the next generation.

9/11 writings—a genre too broad to fully describe in this brief piece—do not commemorate disaster, but memorialize how to persevere. If the genre possesses a shortcoming, it is that the lessons of 9/11 fiction extend beyond New York’s city limits. (I write this as a long-time resident of central Pennsylvania, one who was astutely aware of how the crash in Shanksville transformed the region overnight.) Regardless, no guides were better suited to the task of re-imagining America than our favorite stories of the past decade. Fiction, particularly in catastrophe’s wake, brings us together as thinking and emoting human beings in a way that nothing else does.

Jessica Treadway on What's Uplifting About "Depressing" Fiction

In the 47th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jessica Treadway, author of Please Come Back to Me (University of Georgia Press), discusses why books that seem grim to some readers can yield an exhilerating experience for others.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out why a lot of novels and stories some readers find “depressing” (which is the the word people always seem to use) are ones that fill other readers (like me) up – books that exhilarate us, take us over, and make us feel less alone in an often confusing and complex world.

Take Olive Kitteridge, for example. That book took my breath away, quite literally, when I first read it – having received the lucky assignment to review it for The Boston Globe – and it still does. (I checked before sitting down to write this, just in case something had changed in the meantime. Not only had nothing changed, but even knowing what was going to happen in each story didn’t blunt the way Elizabeth Strout’s characters and images made me have to close the book on my finger and look up, in order to absorb the power and the poignancy of what I had just read.)

But the reason I felt the need to look at the book again was a Facebook post by my old friend Jane who said she was “halfway through Olive Kitteridge… so far I’ve found it well-written but distressing, depressing about the human condition.” I wrote to ask her why. She didn’t see any hope in the book, she wrote back. It made her feel that the book’s message was that “it’s pointless – life is hard, and then you die."

“This isn’t my worldview,” she added.

Well, it isn’t my worldview, either. So why did I feel roused by Strout’s book, and stimulated to feel energetic empathy for the characters, instead of emotionally depleted by the losses and pain they suffered along the way? I asked another friend of Jane’s and mine, who’d also loved the book, and she said she had been “comforted by reading another person’s truth.”

That summed it up for me, I realized. When I read a book like Olive Kitteridge or like Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade -- which warns away, in its first line (“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life”) people who want to avoid being “depressed” by the book they’ve just opened -- I feel gratified by the privilege of bearing witness to those characters’ pain, as well as to their moments of triumph and joy, fleeting though they may be. It’s like being honored and entrusted with the most private confidence, being able to inhabit characters as they experience their deepest feelings, including distress.

In college I read Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir, whose heroine, Gervaise, wants only two things from life: not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. At the end (spoiler alert!) she doesn’t get either of those things. The final lines belong to the undertaker as he carries her out from under the stairwell where her body has been discovered: “There, there, you’re all right now. Night-night, my lovely!” More than 25 years later, I still remember the electric surge of emotion I felt when I read those words – and it was positive emotion, not negative. Of course I felt grief for Gervaise. I wouldn’t wish her life on anyone I cared about. But I think what I relished was being there at that final moment, along with every other reader who’d made the journey with her; somehow, our presence gave meaning to her life – and her death. (And though I’m not sure I care to spend much time exploring my own psychology in this regard, it’s possible that by extension, I’m hoping that if Olive and Gervaise and the Grimes sisters have sympathetic company in whatever suffering life holds for them, then so will I.)

In my new collection, Please Come Back to Me -- spoiler alert again -- some people die. Most if not all of the characters have ended up with lives other than the ones they expected and wanted for themselves. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone how to feel after reading my stories, and I won’t be surprised if my friend Jane finds them “depressing.”

But I hope others will understand that this wasn’t my intention. I’m pretty sure I have no interest, either conscious or hidden from myself, in inflicting misery on anyone under the guise of writing stories I hope will hold some meaning. I only want to write what feels true, and maybe touch a few readers who, like me, find resonance – even, sometimes, radiance -- in the dark.

Strout's Kitteredge Is a Finalist for the NBCC Book Award for Fiction

Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose story collection, Olive Kitteridge, is among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards. (Of course, we're pulling for it to win.) The other four books are novels: Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Marilynne Robinson's Home, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, and M. Glenn Taylor's The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. It's good to see that a university press is also in the mix (the publisher of Taylor's novel is West Virginia University Press).

Olive Kitteridge is an excellent collection and one of The Story Prize's other notable books of the year. It also made a lot of 2008 best books lists, second only to Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, according to our unscientific tally of mentions.