The American Century: Literature since 1945 799Renata, visits “a kind of wailing wall plastered with photos of the disappeared, the
desaparecidos,” and reflects on how much more eloquent the words of these posters
are than “the public words” of politicians and “suited pundits.” The subtlety of this
reflection is that, while drawing a clear line between the words of the private sphere,
which “sear the eyes,” and the words of the public, the cant of the political
administration and the media, it recognizes, through its allusion to the contested
terrains of the Middle East (“wailing wall”) and Latin America (“desaparecidos”),
the inescapability of the public realm and the possible need therefore to engage with
that realm and change it. The recognition fades in the course of the novel, however;
by the final pages, Renata has achieved a tentative resolution of her emotional
troubles by reuniting with her boyfriend Jack. “Nothing can ever be the way it was,”
she tells Jack. “You mean the world can never be the same?” he asks. “He can be so
dense, it makes her laugh,” Renata thinks, then adds, “I wasn’t thinking on a global
scale.” That closing remark could act as an epigraph for many of these novels that
attempt to confront 9/11 and its aftermath. Such novels vacillate between larger
rhetorical gestures acknowledging trauma and a retreat into domestic detail. Even in
The Writing on the Wall the link between the two is tenuous, transforming a turning
point in national and international history into little more than a stage in a
sentimental education.
A further measure of the limitations of these texts is their encounters with
strangeness. With the collapse of communism, a sinister other that enabled
American self-definition may have disappeared. It is a truism, however, to say that it
has now been replaced by Islam. Facing the other, in all its difference and danger, is
one of the challenges now for writers, not just because of obscene acts of terrorism
committed by a small group of people but because the United States has become,
more than ever, a border territory in which different cultures meet. Some writers
respond to the bigger picture, the United States as cultural borderlands. They
include those many novelists, dramatists, and poets committed to creating new
Americas: among them, those whose origins lie in the war-torn territories of the
Middle East such as Khaled Hosseini (1965–), author of The Kite Runner (2003) and
Laila Halaby (1970–), author of Once in a Promised Land (2007). But writers as
accomplished as Don DeLillo and John Updike hardly seem to scratch the surface.
Ahmad, for example, the central character in Terrorist by John Updike, is in many
ways brilliantly conceived. Whenever Ahmad considers his sense of cultural exile – a
sense that will eventually drive him toward terrorism – Updike uses his own
undoubted distaste for the secular temper of contemporary America and a world of
commodities as a kind of bridge, a way of assuming the vision of a young Arab-
American boy. “Devils,” thinks Ahmad, as he looks at his peers in high school. “These
devils seek to take away my God.” The banality of all that Ahmad perceives, the casual
sexuality of the girls at his school, the aggressive indifference of the boys, the feeling
of everything closing in – the threat here is not in Ahmad but in the world that
seems to challenge and imprison him. Updike captures this; the sense, not merely of
not belonging but of not feeling safe, of fearing that the world he inhabits is eating
away at the very core of his belief and his self. “Islam is less a faith,” we are told inGGray_c05.indd 799ray_c 05 .indd 799 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM