Winningly, in the midst of high-pitched cerebral dialogue, Waldman finds space for some zesty one-
liners. On the subject of why Ground Zero should be memorialized rather than simply redeveloped, she writes, “Americans seemed unlikely to accept the maximization of office space as the most eloquent rejoinder to terrorism.”
And when her politician is asked why an elite jury, rather than a public vote, should select the winning design, she replies: “We don’t want a bunch of firefighters deciding to put a giant helmet in Manhattan.”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - ‘The Submission: A Novel’ by Amy Waldman (Farrar Straus Giroux. 299 pp. $26).
Aware that her novel is built on sacred ground, Waldman rations these exuberances carefully. Counterbalancing the wit and philosophical forays is a recurring scene of genuine pathos where a child builds his own smaller, humbler memorial to a father lost in the attacks. Personal rather than political, impulsive rather than intellectualized, the scene is reprised to devastating effect in Waldman’s moving epilogue.
It is in this epilogue, set many years after the completion of the memorial, that the extent of Waldman’s literary accomplishment becomes apparent. In presenting us with a world that is recognizably our own, despite her tweaking of one of its variables, the author subverts the central dictum of alternate history: namely, that the single historical switch should precipitate multiple and major consequences.
Instead, brilliantly, Waldman gives us back our own world. In so doing, she makes the most eloquent case for the relegation of all public memorials of 9/11 — including literary ones — to their proper place: as an adjunct to the real and personal suffering that lingers, invisibly and unconsoled, in individual lives.
The lineage of post-9/11 novels is illustrious. Coming to prominence in 2003 with Frederic Beigbeder’s “
Windows on the World
,” by 2005 the form had evolved through the twin strands of
Jonathan Safran Foer
’s urgent and heartfelt “
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
” and
Ian McEwan
’s universalized and reflective “
Saturday
.”
By 2006, distance permitted the satire of Jess Walter’s “The Zero” and the subversion of Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life,” and the next year brought Don DeLillo’s definitive and artful “Falling Man.” It is by her clever shift of focus from the events of 9/11 to their commemoration that Amy Waldman takes this literary line forward, and it is through her respect for history — her own act of submission in choosing a humbler stage — that her novel stands so proudly within it.
Cleave’s most recent novel is “Little Bee.”
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