798 The American Century: Literature since 1945strange. It shifts between the quest of the young protagonist, and main narrator, in
twenty-first-century New York and the memories of his paternal grandparents,
narrated by them, that circulate around the firebombing of Dresden during World
War II. Typesettings, spaces, and even blank pages give the book a visual dimension,
as do the photographs that intersperse the narrative. And that visual dimension is
expanded at the end of the book. Oskar imagines that his father may have jumped
from the North Tower on September 11. Identifying his father with some images of
a body falling from the World Trade Center, he turns those images around so that
the last one is first and the first one last. “I found the pictures of the falling body,”
Oskar confides. “I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order.... When I
flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.” This
redemptive gesture is then illustrated in the series of photographs concluding the
story, which show the falling man in just such a manner, not falling but “floating,”
ascending. The strategy is striking but it suggests how close to the surface the
narrative experiments of this novel are. They are, in fact, not so much disruptive as
illustrative. And what they illustrate is a deeply conventional if occasionally touching
account of a young man growing up, coming to terms with and perhaps even
transcending loss. The “worst day” becomes, as it does in The Good Priest’s Son, the
occasion for rehearsing and replaying a deeply traditional narrative: in this case, a sly
but slight variation on the classic form of the initiation novel.
What is missing in books like those of Foer and Price is not the recognition of
change, but the ability to act on that recognition. It is one thing to believe that the
crisis of 9/11 and afterwards has “changed us all forever,” making work produced
prior to it seem childlike, pathetically innocent. It is another to devise forms that
bear witness to this belief, that are an adequate reimagining of disaster. A book like
The Emperor’s Children may acknowledge the need for such a reimagining by
suggesting how “forlorn” texts written prior to the crisis appear to be. But it does not
achieve that reimagining itself; it preaches change but it does not perform it. The
irony is that, relying on a familiar romance pattern – in which couples meet, romantic
and domestic problems follow, to be concluded in reconciliation or rupture – books
like this, and, for that matter, The Good Life, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and
Falling Man, simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is,
in every sense of the word, domesticated. “All life had become public:” this
observation made by a central character in Falling Man is not underwritten by the
novel in which it occurs, or in any of these novels. On the contrary, all life here is
personal; cataclysmic public events are measured simply in terms of their impact on
the emotional entanglements of their protagonists. In another post-9/11 novel,
The Writing on the Wall (2005) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (1939–), there appears to
be a suspicion that the turn toward the domestic may have come as a result of the
perceived corruption of the public sphere in the wake of the attacks and the “war on
terror.” But that suspicion only leads to an eventual rejection of the public domain
that is unusual only in being explicit. The title of the novel refers to the walls of
homemade posters from people seeking information about missing loved ones after
9/11 that appeared in various parts of New York. At one point, the protagonist,GGray_c05.indd 798ray_c 05 .indd 798 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM