Another 'What If?'

The 'what if' that Amy Waldman poses in her novel The Submission is a provocative one – what if architects were invited to anonymously submit plans for a memorial to be located at the site of the World Trade Center, dedicated to the memory of those who died on 9/11. And what if the selection jury - artists, academics, a representative of the New York governor, and a 9/11 widow representing all the grieving families – chose a winner who turned out to be an American-born Muslim named Mohammed Khan?

Inevitably a furor ensues, fueled in part by Khan's aloofness and refusal to explain the influences on his design, which his enemies describe as an Islamic garden meant to glorify the Muslim martyrs who attacked the towers. Waldman creates a host of characters - the radio talk show host interested in stirring controversy, the tabloid reporter intent on building her reputation, the undocumented Bangladeshi widow whose husband worked as a janitor at the towers, the governor whose position is based solely on her desire for higher office, the ne'er-do-well brother of a fallen fireman who relishes his time in the spotlight. At the center of the controversy is Claire Burwell, the rich widow on the jury who initially champions Khan's design but wavers as he resists her pressure to mollify his critics.

Waldman manages to give each of her characters a distinctive voice, and even as the volume rises on their arguments she resists turning them into caricatures. I found it a compelling story that mirrored the real-life emotional and political atmosphere that still exists ten years after 9/11.

An Interesting Recipe

The Cookbook Collector is the story of two sisters – one brainy and analytical, one free-spirited and passionate – and the choices they make in men and in life. Does that sound like something Jane Austen might have written? Actually I think she did. 

But Allegra Goodman isn't just copying an old formula. Her two sisters are very much grounded in the recent past – specifically, between 1999 and 2002, a time of several historic events which are smoothly woven into the story. Older sister Emily, an MIT grad, is an executive at a Silicon Valley start-up in the time of NASDAQ euphoria. Younger sister Jessamyn is a grad student in philosophy at Cal, works at a sort of vanity rare book store in Berkeley run by a Microsoft millionaire, and devotes her passions to a Save The Redwoods group and its charismatic leader. There are lots of ways to get trite and predictable with material like this, and Goodman avoids them all.

Just as she did in her previous book “Intuition” (see my blog), Goodman takes us inside disparate worlds. The constant scrambling in tech companies to attract funding for their latest ideas felt authentic, and as someone who has spent hours debugging code, I can attest that her description of an all-night code-crunching session rang true. She makes the esoteric world of antique book restoration and collecting seem fascinating, especially the amusing sub-plot about an unusual collection of cookbooks.

But the book is essentially about relationships, between friends, lovers, parents, children, and siblings. Goodman juggles a lot of plot lines, and some are better fleshed out than others, but once again I admired her ability to amuse and entertain me with a page-turning story.

PS Goodman should have done a little more research on Bay Area geography.  Heading north to Arcata from Berkeley does not involve crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, but one of her characters does just that.

A Master at Work

I just read another Post-9/11 novel. (Is it possible that all contemporary fiction published last year falls into that category?) I didn't purposely select a book in that genre. I was drawn to read John le Carré's latest novel A Most Wanted Man because... well, because it's John le Carré. He's the master. Nobody writes spy novels like he does - the twisting plots, the flawed heroes, the divided loyalties. You're off balance the whole time, trying to figure out who can be trusted. Nothing is ever black and white, and sometimes characters with the best intentions do the most damage.

The story takes place in Hamburg, so the Post-9/11 connection is apparent. Three of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Hamburg, including the mastermind Mohammed Atta. And if you think that US intelligence organizations missed some important clues in the months leading up to the event, apparently the fragmented German intelligence groups were even worse. So now they're stepping all over each other to try to make up for it And they're not the only ones. The Brits and the Americans are both eager to prove their talents in the war on terror. So when a 'most wanted man' surfaces in Hamburg all the agencies are scrambling to grab him.

I won't attempt to give you details of the plot, or even describe the characters. With John le Carré I find it best to just strap yourself in and go along for the ride. But as I approached the end of the book I was a nervous wreck. I had to keep reading to find out what happened to these people I had grown to like, but knowing Le Carré, I was pretty certain it wouldn't be a happily-ever-after ending for all of them. That's the mark of a great storyteller.

New York Thrills

I had seen author Colin Harrison described as an 'atmospheric' writer whose novels were dark thrillers full of violence and suspense, often set in New York. He sounded kind of like Richard Price, whose “Lush Life” I had liked so much (Neighborhood Crime), and a little like Raymond Chandler, so I decided to read his latest – The Finder. I didn't have to wait long for the violence. By page 4 you know that something bad is going to happen and by page 10 it has - a really gruesome murder of two innocent victims. Not everyone's cup of tea. But I like gritty crime stories; “The Wire” was one of my favorite TV shows. So I waded in.

Harrison hurls you into a series of New York worlds that have little in common. There's the 'rainmaking' corporate executive at a drug company wooing investors, an aging hedge fund billionaire with a trophy wife and a prostate problem, a young Chinese entrepreneur who manipulates the global markets using stolen information, a twisted Brooklyn 'waste management' thug who's right out of the Sopranos. Of course there's also a damsel in distress and a handsome young hero who is haunted by a mysterious past. Their paths all cross, and bad things happen.

If I'd had time to think about it, I'm sure I would have realized how implausible some of the plot twists were. But I didn't have time, because Harrison had his pedal to the metal the entire time. He whips from one tense situation to the next, and all I could do was hang on for dear life. Occasionally I thought that hero Ray Grant had a few too many McGyver-like tricks up his sleeve, and the descriptions of the global market manipulations sometimes bogged down the action, but I'm nit-picking. It's a well-told thriller – try it for your next long plane trip.

A New Category?

What exactly is 'Post-9/11 fiction'? I've seen this term used to describe several recent books, including “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer and “Falling Man” by Don DeLillo. Does it mean that the characters experienced 9/11 themselves, or that they were affected by it, or that the author's point of view was influenced by it?

Joseph O'Neill's book Netherland also falls into this category. The title refers to the country where Hans Van den Broek, a Dutch banker living in New York, was born and raised. But it also seems to refer to his state of mind. He lives in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, where his family relocated after 9/11 made their Lower Manhattan loft uninhabitable. And in this unsettled atmosphere his marriage begins to unravel: “We were trying to understand...whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the '30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow." His English wife Rachel returns with their son to London, and Hans is left alone with the odd cast of characters who inhabit the hotel. He seems to drift along in a kind of nether world, uninterested in his job, unsure about the future of his marriage. The only activity that engages him is the cricket he plays each weekend with a team of immigrants. By chance he encounters a charming and mysterious Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck introduces Hans to New York as seen through the eyes of an immigrant, where the American Dream involves building a world class cricket field on an abandoned airfield in Brooklyn.

“Netherland” has been compared to “The Great Gatsby”. Like Jay Gatsby, Chuck is a mysterious outsider attempting to succeed in America. Like Gatsby his efforts cost him his life. Unlike in Gatsby, we learn this fact in the very first pages of the book rather than the last, as Hans, now reunited with his wife in London, looks back on his time in New York. I loved O'Neill's writing style, fragmented and almost dream-like but also frank and unsparing. It seemed to reflect Van den Broek's state of mind. And his descriptions of the cricket games, which Hans experiences with an intensity unmatched in the rest of his life, actually made me want to watch one.

O'Neill's book seems to fit my understanding of 'Post-9/11 fiction'. It deals peripherally with the events of that day, but more importantly it presents characters whose ways of thinking and acting have been changed by those events.