9/11 Reading: "The Submission" by Amy Waldman

After my recent foray into "urban fantasy", something meatier, picked up, like so much else lately, from the podcast "Inside the New York Times Book Review" - this episode. (Fear not, by the way, I didn't read this book in one day, I was just very slow producing the last review.) The NYT touted Amy Waldman's book as perhaps - finally - being the "definitive" 9/11 book, the literary response to an event now ten years old which would somehow put a finger on what that event meant for New York and America more widely. 

In the eyes of the Times literati, no literary author had yet managed really to grasp and encompass 9/11 in fiction. De Lillo's 2007 Falling Man was a contender, apparently, though was viewed by many as too sprawling and flawed to do the job. (Can't comment, haven't read it.) Waldman's novel - her first, by the way - is definitely not sprawling, 299 pages long and very readable. I'm afraid, however, that at least this reviewer is not going to answer the question as to whether this is the "definitive" 9/11 book; that's too ambitious for me. What I will say is that Amy Waldman has found a way to say something important about the cultural impact of 9/11.

The story of The Submission centres on a architectural competition to design a memorial for the site of the destroyed Twin Towers in Manhattan. As the book opens, the jury - a mix of experts, architects, arts establishment and, crucially, the widow of a 9/11 victim representing the families - are approaching a difficult final decision. The choice has come down to a memorial garden, supported notably by the widow, Claire, and a stark monolith, favoured by her cultural elite antagonist in the jury, Ariana. In the course of chapter one, Claire swings the jury behind the garden, at which point the envelope containing the name of the submitter, hitherto anonymous, is opened. 

And that's where it really starts. The name revealed is Mohammed Khan, Mo, the son of Indian immigrants, up-and-coming architect, fully integrated American and, of course, Muslim. 

What Waldman does, essentially for most of the rest of the book, is to play out the scenario in the febrile, highly sensitised atmosphere of the period following 9/11. How will ordinary Americans react to the fact the winning design being submitted by a Muslim, who are ordinary Americans anyway, what about the cultural, liberal elite, what about the media, politicians, other Muslims? With her rich mix of characters, their high and low motivations, their prejudices and better instincts, their interests and opportunism, Waldman puts her finger on contemporary American public culture with almost painful verisimiliude. It is frustrating; you know how right she is about all the crazed, democratic, demagogic, free-speech, politically-correct, bigoted, hyper-sensitive sound and fury which is going to come out of this. The gutter press, the highbrow elite, the politicians, the pressure groups, the chattering classes, the self-appointed representatives of "middle America", the chat show hosts and all manner of opinionistas serious and frivolous all have their role to play. 

This is no facile liberal morality tale, Waldman is too smart for that, showing genuine concerns, ambivalences and ambiguities in the minds of characters who resolutely fail, for the most part, fully to correspond to stereotype or even our slightly more sophisticated expectations of them. At the centre of the tale, two key figures: Claire the bereaved family member, whose enlightened support of the garden (and thus of its designer) comes under sustained pressure and whose doubts grow, and Mo himself, whose entirely secular, ambitious, all-American self-view is progressively challenged by the myriad views and interpretations of him by others, as well as by his own questionably stubborn refusal to gratify expectations of him. 

It would be all too easy to find this novel depressing, and indeed, it is hard to see, through all the deaf and intolerant posturing and the very real damage done, what good can possibly come of all this. However, the novel ends with a double twist, one dramatic - a development which delivers the plausible and apparently straightforward morality tale you feel the public debate shouldn't, but does, need - and one delivering the perspective of distance of time, when we glimpse the world years later and see how, somehow, things have moved on, how the 24-hour-news-cycle excitement can translate into longer term shifts and change. 

So, "definitive" or not, The Submission is a book about 9/11, or perhaps more about America in the wake of 9/11, which has something to say. The underlying theme, how our societies deal in reality with multiculturalism and religious plurality in an atmosphere of heightened anxiety, is one which has not gone away. Waldman's take on all this perhaps reflects a peculiarly American reality, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies, but these are questions we would all do well to address with similar clear-sightedness.

Seeing through the sound and fury: The Submission