It’s odd and a bit disconcerting to see that a category of “9/11” fiction is emerging, but of course it is only right and natural, too, that this moment in our history should become part of our literature. The Writing on the Wall seemed to me a delicate, even elegant, engagement with the big issues of loss, survival, and recovery that broke over America that morning…delicate in the sense that the horror and pathos is understated, elegant in that these emotions are brought out through recurrent touches like the ‘Missing’ posters so poignantly itemized. As McEwan evokes so powerfully in Saturday as well as his essays written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most of us are bystanders at the crises of history, and yet even that witnessing creates change in our lives–perhaps most irrevocably, in our thinking about our lives. I think this sense of how we think differently is a big part of what Schwartz’s novel is about, as her characters (so distinct, so individual, with their own complex pasts) are shaken up by the visitation of terror on the once familiar streetscapes of their city. Is this really a novel “about” 9/11, in the way that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is? I’m not sure, though both novels are certainly about Renata’s favourite storyline, ‘Transformed Lives’. Twin sisters, twin towers: how far, thematically, are we supposed to pursue these parallel stories of ruin?
Author: Rohan Maitzen
Swallow-Flights: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
First of all, The Year of Magical Thinking is a strange kind of book. It is intensely personal, and thus poignant and compelling in the intimacy of its revelations about Didion’s grief, but thus also the reading experience seemed to me oddly voyeuristic–which made me puzzle over why someone would want to publish such an account. I didn’t notice that this issue is ever explicitly addressed, though I suppose we can fill in some good guesses, such as the therapeutic effects of writing it all out, the opportunity to pay a kind of literary tribute to her husband, or just the idea that writing is, after all, what a writer does.
The book is full of mundane details, those that arise because of what Didion evocatively refers to as vortices, moments that propel her into chains of memories. The very ordinariness of life becomes extraordinary when you realize, as the events of this year bring Didion to realize, that all is subject to dramatic, irrevocable change without warning: you sit down to dinner, as she says, and life as you know it ends. In such reflections lie the book’s message for its readers, the ideas about the fragility of everything and everybody we take for granted. These ideas seem commonplace themselves, and yet through the very particularity and idiosyncracy of her account Didion gives them new urgency. “I didn’t appreciate it enough” is one of her refrains.
While there is something inevitably egotistic about supposing there’s an audience for such a personal account of a year in her life, writing of all kinds always has at least a shade of such arrogance. And as the many quotations and allusions woven into her text remind us, loss has often become literary. Didion never quotes “In Memoriam,” but many moments in this book reminded me of Tennyson’s image of his own verses as “short swallow-flights of song that dip / their wings in tears and skim away.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
I did not find this novel as engaging and exhilarating as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close–not as a whole, anyway, though it was impossible to resist the Ukrainian translator’s brilliantly comic and touching narrative. I think it would help me to read some commentaries by other reviewers about the fable-like story that accompanies the fictionalized Jonathan’s quest: I became impatient with its elaborate artifice and tired of trying to grasp what it was saying about the history of Jewish communities. I did discern (I think!) that it offers a kind of allegorical account of the way a community builds meaning around tradition, myth, and relationships; and I felt that perhaps the element of disbelief it evokes in readers (or in this reader, anyway) was related to the inability of the inhabitants of the fabulous village to understand the direction of their own history and, ultimately, the fate that awaits them. Here it seemed interestingly linked to other Holocaust stories (such as Night) that similarly rely on dramatic irony to generate tension and mourning in their readers: we know, or imagine, only too well what lies in the characters’ futures. Here as in his second novel, Foer seems preoccupied with the proximity of love to grief and suffering. If there’s a redemptive message in either book, I’d say it is that the pain becomes worthwhile (if you can say that) because it is a measure of love. Suffering seems in both books to be what makes love most tangible: if this perspective is essentially a tragic one, I suppose that is the consequence of setting these books around human catastrophes.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, which seemed as generous and humane as I expected from its reviews, and from the comments of other readers I had talked to about it. On the other hand, though I have heard the term ‘Dickensian’ applied to it–perhaps because of its length, and the diversity and eccentricity of its cast of characters–White Teeth struck me as more worthy of the ‘loose baggy monster’ epithet than such genuine Dickensian candidates as Bleak House or Little Dorrit. Where was the unifying pattern, whether of plot, imagery, or idea? Compare the climactic (?) shooting incident near the end of White Teeth with Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, for example. While the former was high in drama and yet somehow comic, and while it brought elements of the story around to a kind of neat circularity, the latter (despite being entirely outrageous in realist terms, despite Dickens’s famous defense of it) is much more richly emblematic of the social and moral crises of its novel. Though I would not have expected to say quite this about Dickens, his is by far the more compelling moment aesthetically as well as intellectually.
Novel Readings 