The American Century: Literature since 1945 801volume – oscillates between a young man called Nathaniel, who is drinking
champagne with his roommates in their sublet overlooking the site of the former
World Trade Center, and Nathaniel’s middle-aged uncle Lucien, in his office above
his art gallery on the other side of New York City. Nathaniel recalls witnessing the
9/11 attack from the balcony of his apartment. He also recalls what became known
as Y2K: the widespread belief that the world’s computers would malfunction at the
dawn of the new millennium, leading to disaster – with, among other things, planes
falling out of the sky. Disaster did occur, he reflects, not, however, on January 1, 2000
as anticipated but a little over eighteen months later. “You see,” he thinks, “if history
has anything to teach us, it’s that ... we poor humans cannot actually think ahead, there
are just too many variables.” So, he concludes inconclusively, “when it comes down to
it, It always turns out that no one is in charge of the things that really matter.” That
sounds the bass note of this story: the random, fragmentary nature of things is
registered in the apparently random structure of the narrative, which occupies a few
minutes in present time as it vacillates between Nathaniel looking forward to
possible futures and Nathaniel and Lucien, in their separate ways, looking backward
to a series of impossible, unbearable pasts – pasts that include 9/11 and the family
experience of oppression in Europe, world war, emigration, and exile.
Images of buildings operate ironically throughout this remarkable story – Nathaniel
is an architect – to suggest the vulnerability of human structures and plans: as the
events of 9/11 illustrate, after all, even the most evidently solid of artifacts can
suddenly melt into the air. So do images of theatricality and artifice. “It was as if
there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth ... with Lucien’s
delightful city,” Lucien thinks. “The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of
that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of
populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for
change to happen by.” Such images measure the extent to which this story reflects
the suspicion that, after 9/11, “private life shrank to nothing” because of what that
day exposed and initiated. The sense of being implicated in a larger, global politics is
there, despite the fact that, as Lucien observes, “money is flowing a bit again” and
“most of the flags have folded up.” The problem, he realizes, is that “you can’t help
knowing that what you’re seeing is only the curtain”; also, “you can’t help guessing
what might be going on behind it.” What has been going on, and what is going on
now is, the narrative indicates, easy to guess. There are “all those irrepressibly,
murderously angry people” for whom getting on with their lives in any tolerable way
is impossible. And there are “the wars in the East:” wars only partially, imperfectly
hidden “behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyalty, freedom.” I f
those words refer to anything, it is intimated, rather than being just camouflage,
“they all might refer to money.” Behind the curtain, the reader learns, behind the
thicket of political rhetoric and the glitz, glamour, and gaiety of a slowly recovering
New York City is the stark reality of oppression and consequent rage, an economic
empire (Eisenberg also plays with allusions to earlier imperial powers, such as
Rome), a series of tottering structures built on the basis of money being in certain
hands. This sense of a potentially fatal fissure between what lies in front of theGGray_c05.indd 801ray_c 05 .indd 801 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM