"I want to know everything," said Liz Alderman, whose son, Peter, was last seen at a breakfast conference in the north tower. Peter Alderman sent out an e-mail at 9:25 a.m., reporting intense smoke on the 106th floor. What happened after that remains a mystery."The most important thing I will never know," Ms. Alderman said. "I won't know how much he suffered and I won't know how he died. I travel back into that tower a lot and I try to imagine, but there is no imagining." ("Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain", The New York Times)
Ruth Franklin has an interesting piece in The New Republic Online (available, I think, to non-subscribers) about the absence of a "significant work of fiction" addressing the events of September 11 2001. Of course, as Franklin acknowledges, several writers were guilty of "some ridiculously mannered journalism" in the days and weeks afterwards. She mentions Adam Gopnik's remark that the air in Lower Manhattan smelled like mozarella. One also recalls Jeanette Winterson wringing phrases from the catastrophe. "Touch me," Winterson implored. "Remind me what I am. Remind me that this life is the one we make together... The immensity of this event can only be mirrored in the immensity of who we are". And then there was Martin Amis's notorious description of the planes "sharking in" over Manhattan towards their prey.
There have been poems, plays, short stories about September 11, Franklin notes, but no "big, ambitious novel that deals with the terrorist attacks and their aftermath". She goes on to say what she imagines such a novel would look like:
September 11 was a world-historical event, but in New York--unlike at the Pentagon or the field in Pennsylvania--it was also a local tragedy, one that was felt on the street and in the neighborhoods, from Chinatown to Brooklyn Heights, Staten Island to the Bronx. What it demands is a New York novel, a genre that, like the city itself, has reimagined itself countless times over the last two hundred years of American literary history (and produced some of the greatest American novels) but has yet to adapt to the newly altered landscape.
It's interesting that what Franklin misses is a "big, ambitious novel" - as if more self-effacing, reticent forms of novelistic expression were somehow incapable of representing or otherwise addressing this enormity. One suspects, therefore, that she might be disappointed by the French writer Frédéric Beigbeder's novel Windows on the World, just published in translation in the UK but, unaccountably, not due to be published in the US until March 2005.
I recently wrote a review ("Towering Voices" - only available to subscribers) of Windows on the World in which I argued that it was precisely Beigbeder's tact, the smallness of his novel, that was impressive and moving. I wrote:
Beigbeder doesn't expand on the enormous spectacle of destruction. [This is, I think, what Franklin wants the 9/11 New York novel to do: as it were, to parse the symbolism of the disaster and to bring news of the "newly altered landscape".] Instead he tries to imagine his way into ... hidden places, by representing the dead as if they were speaking from beyond the grave. ... [H]alf of Windows on the World is narrated by Carthew Yorston, a Texan real estate agent and divorcé, who has brought his two sons for breakfast in the restaurant at the top of the North Tower. We know from the beginning that they have less than two hours to live... - but "so much the better", the other narrative voice, Beigbeder's own, interjects. "This isn't a thriller; it is simply an attempt - doomed, perhaps- to describe the indescribable." ... Beigbeder risk[s] unoriginality of feeling and plainness of expression here, and the novel is all the more affecting and disconcerting for it.
It's the half of the novel told in Beigbeder's own voice that is most problematic. Unfortunately, a paragraph in which I set out some of my reservations was cut:
There is too much bavardage here, too many riffs on the "smouldering ruins of materialism" [is this what Franklin is after?]. These passages, which read like off-cuts from Beigbeder's previous novel about the advertising industry, £9.99, are not just unoriginal and unilluminating, they also infringe the self-denying ordinance from which the novel derives its power. "If you want to unravel the geopolitical tangle of terrorism", he says at one point, "call the offices of Spengler, Huntington, Baudrillard, Adler, Fukyama, Revel ..." But Beigbeder has been fatally tempted by talk, as if ultimately he can't quite accept that it is better to leave the reader to imagine the "slow agonies" of the victims, than to show them or to embalm them in analysis.
Interestingly, Josh Lacey, in his Guardian review, makes precisely the opposite complaint. In fact, he goes so far as to charge Beigbeder with cowardice:
Beigbeder is a smart, sarcastic writer who likes to shock; confronted by 9/11, he is not only cowed, but cowardly. When he comes to the climax of his novel -the deaths of his characters, the collapse of the north tower - he refuses to write about it. The pages are scarred with odd unexplained interventions - "(paragraph cut)" and "(page cut)" - which look like the work of an editor, but actually seem to represent Beigbeder's choice to step away from his keyboard. But if you are going to attempt to write the unwritable, why give up at the vital moment?
That's a very serious charge, and I think it's misplaced - though Lacey's (unstated) reasons for making it are worth thinking about. He is taking for granted the right of the novelist to venture into forbidden or tabooed places. And his gloss on the novel leaves out Beigbeder's agonised wrestling with the idea that the suffering and death of the victims are the novelist's to possess. Beigbeder writes:
I have cut out the awful descriptions. I have not done so out of propriety, nor out out of respect for the victims, because I believe that describing their slow agonies, their ordeal, is a mark of respect. I cut them because, in my opinion, it is more appalling still to allow you to imagine what became of them.
Beigbeder takes seriously, as Lacey does not, what J.M Coetzee -or rather Coetzee's fictional heroine Elizabeth Costello- has called "the forbiddenness of forbidden places". It's a measure of Beigbeder's seriousness, it seems to me, that he is caught -and recognises that he is caught- between the essentially Romantic notion that the "only interesting subjects are those which are taboo" and the idea, due to Theodor Adorno among others, that some events, some enormities, simply defy representation and that it is blasphemous to try to represent them. Norman Geras has a very important piece on just this question which I commend and endorse.