It seems the height of understatement to use the word "surreal" whenever one is discussing the events of September 11, but, for me, there is just no other word. Today, September 11, 2007, I happened to be in my car listening to the audiobook version of Don Delillo's The Falling Man, a novel about 9/11, at exactly the hour when, six years ago, the towers fell. Now, I had been listening to this book for a few days, so I was well aware that there was a high probability that I would still be listening to a book about 9/11 on 9/11. Still, when the reader came to a particularly poignant and vivid passage about characters traversing their way down a staircase in one of the towers, there was nothing I could do but cry. The sky around me was the same crystalline blue I remember it had been on 9/11/01, further reinforcing my indelible memory of where I was on the day that our world changed. Suddenly it was like the intervening six years had never happened at all.
I was willing to chalk up the experience of listening to one book about 9/11 on 9/11 as coincidence when, just a few hours later, I was finishing up the last short story in Joyce Carol Oates' collection, I Am No One You Know. The title of the final story was "The Mutant," a cryptic phrase that gave me no clue as to what the story might be about. Just a few sentences in, I was hit with the proverbial lightning bolt: "The Mutant" was about 9/11.
At this point, I had pretty much thrown the coincidence theory out the window and was entertaining ideas about fate or messages from another dimension. It's like I was meant to be reading these particular stories on this particular day. If this doesn't qualify as surreal, I don't know what does.
Over the past six years, I've encountered references to 9/11 in other novels and, early on, I came to the decision that I was going to avoid any fiction that used the tragedy as a plot device. It seemed gratuitous, a cheap literary ploy. If the novel had been in progress before 9/11, then it begged the question as to what the author's original intention might have been. Did they seize upon the tragedy as a convenient way to solve a problem they were having with the flow of their storyline or what to do with a pesky character? If so, shame on them.
While I haven't changed my feelings about the indiscriminate use of 9/11 as a theme or motif in contemporary literature, I am apparently now ready to let fiction be a guide to helping me put that day in perspective. Both Delillo's novel and Oates's short story were written after 9/11 with that day's events as their specific mission. And they are anything but gratuitous. They're both thoughtful, lyrical, and deeply reflective accounts of the interior lives of people who witnessed and survived that day's horrors. I've observed the anniversary of 9/11 in quiet reflection in other years, but today, with these two exemplary authors as my guides, I cried as hard as I did on this day in 2001. Surreal or precise, literature has always had redemptive powers, especially on those occasions when our emotions are perhaps more fragile than we thought they were.
CH
As you may have heard, the literary world lost two wonderful writers recently. Many of us remember reading books by Madeleine L'Engle growing up, and as one of our librarians said, "I recently re-read A Wrinkle in Time with one of my children. I was as charmed with it now as I was 35 years ago." When news of L'Engle's passing was announced a few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a moving summary of her life and works which you can read here
And then last week fantasy lovers lost Robert Jordan, author of the wonderful Wheel of Time Series. Mr. Jordan spent most of his adult life in Charleston, South Carolina. To learn more about his inspiring life, works and valiant battle against a rare blood disease, please see this tribute to him here. Mr. Jordan's fantasy universe will be missed by his many fans.
Professor Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has been a favorite of readers and many book discussion groups since its publication in 2003. A critical analysis of RLIT is Washington University Professor of Persian Literature and chair of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Fatemeh Keshavaraz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran.