The American Century: Literature since 1945 795before the arrival of Columbus, these are people turning their American world
into their own American words. This is a new song perhaps, but it echoes an
ancient one.After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11
Writing the crisis in prose
After the terrorist attacks on the United States there was a widespread sense of living
at a turning point in history. Many Americans, and in particular American writers,
went further: for them, the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City was also a fall
from innocence into experience. This linking of a critical moment in American
history to legends of the fall is one that echoes throughout American thought and
writing. Adamic myth, the narrative trope of a descent into a darker knowledge was,
for instance, invoked by many Americans after the Civil War and the two world wars.
The fact that it is not new, however, does not make it any less significant. Almost
compulsively, American writers along with many other Americans, seem to believe
that they are living in a strange afterwards. There is an acute awareness of rupture,
the sense of a gap between “then,” before the destruction of the World Trade Center,
and “now,” its aftermath – or not so much a gap, really, as an abyss that it seems
almost impossible to bridge.
“These three years past since that day in September, all life had become public,”
observes a character in Falling Man by Don DeLillo. Another character, in the lead
story in Twilight of the Superheroes (2006) by Deborah Eisenberg (1945–), echoes
that observation: “Private life shrank to nothing,” he reflects, “all one’s feelings had
been absorbed by an arid wasteland ... one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty
curios on a shelf.” “Cataclysmic events, whatever their outcome, are as rare and
transporting as a great love,” goes one of the epigraphs in The Good Life (2006) by
Jay McInerney, “... anyone who has passed through one and lived, if they are honest,
will tell you that even in the depths of their fear there was an exhilaration such as
had been missing from their lives until then.” That strange, almost unspeakable
confusion of fear and exhilaration, resistance to and immersion in the extreme is
what McInerney then tries to capture in his story of two Manhattan couples teetering
on the brink of change when 9/11 happens. It is also what Ken Kalfus (1954–) tries
to catch in A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), particularly in his registering
of the odd – almost obscene, on the face of it – response of one of his characters,
Joyce, to the destruction of the Twin Towers, both during and after the event.
“She covered the lower part of her face,” when she is told about the collapse of the
South Tower. What she feels “erupt inside her,” is “something warm, very much like,
yes it was, a pang of pleasure, so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger.
It was a giddiness, an elation.” This elation has a partial if humanly speaking
unacceptable explanation in the fact that her husband has an office in the South
Tower and they are at marital war with each other. But the explanation is partial.GGray_c05.indd 795ray_c 05 .indd 795 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM