The American Century: Literature since 1945 797religion, falling prey to the will to believe. “She didn’t believe this, the transubstan-
tiation,” we are told, “but believed something, half fearing it would take her over,” a
compulsion that seems almost openly to recall Wallace Stevens’s claim that the “final
belief ” is to believe in a fiction “which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing
else.” The allusiveness is not a problem in itself. What is, however, is that this – the
game as sanctuary, the willing suspension of disbelief – adds little to any
understanding of the trauma at the heart of the action. In fact, it evades that trauma,
it suppresses its urgency and disguises its difference by inserting it in a series of
familiar tropes.
Toward the end of another recent novel set in Manhattan in the early years of the
twenty-first century, The Emperor’s Children (2006) by Claire Messud (1966–), a
character looks at the cover of a new magazine that was his brainchild. It is the
projected first issue, now scuppered, as in fact the whole project is, by the events of
September 11. “Already with its vermilion, orange, and yellow graphic, a sunburst, a
remarkable photograph of a sunburst,” the narrator observes, “the idea of having
been that they were exploding on the scene, illuminating truths, ... already it looked
out of date and faintly forlorn, like some child’s abandoned artwork.” It does not
take a particularly intensive reading of this to see it as an act of recognition: that the
old world has been turned upside down, altered ineradicably and the old literary
forms and compulsions consequently made to look “forlorn,” immature and
obsolete. New events generate new forms of consciousness requiring new structures
of ideology and the imagination to assimilate and express them: that is the intellectual
equation at work here. And it begs the question of just how new, or at least different,
the structures of these books are. The answer is, very often, not at all. “This week has
changed all of us forever in ways we can’t yet begin to feel,” observes a character,
shortly after 9/11, in The Good Priest’s Son (2005) by Reynolds Price (1933–2011),
and that seems to be the feeling in much of this writing after the fall, including the
novel in which this observation is made. In The Good Priest’s Son the trauma of the
terrorist attack on America is absorbed into a gently reflective narrative about a man
called Mabry Kincaid coming to terms with his past. Compelled to leave New York
City when he learns that his downtown loft has been devastated by the World Trade
Center attacks, he journeys back to his native North Carolina, where he encounters
and eventually lays to rest some ghosts from his familial and regional past. Perhaps,
Kincaid speculates, September 11 was “the most disastrous day since the bloodiest
day of the Civil War” but, in this novel, it is merely the occasion for a journey back
home, a return to the father that is one of the great commonplaces of Southern
writing. The strange is effectively familiarized; an eruptive moment is rendered safe
by being reinserted in a conventional narrative pattern.
The pattern is different in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan
Safran Foer (1977–), but the process of familiarization is the same. Here “the worst
day,” as it is called, becomes the occasion for a quest, in which the 9-year-old
protagonist called Oskar Schell, two years after his father died in 9/11, discovers a
key which, he believes, might unlock the secret of his life and take him closer to his
lost father. At first sight, the novel seems experimental, disruptive, responsive to theGGray_c05.indd 797ray_c 05 .indd 797 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM