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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
From Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" to Stephen King's "From a Buick 8" to Haruki Murakami's "After the Quake," post 9/11 fiction offers readers consolation, harsh truths and a glimpse of the great mystery.
Sep 9, 2002 | Innocent, decent people sometimes die terrible deaths, by chance and also at the hands of the wicked and the stupid, and where they go afterward, if they go anywhere at all, is an unsolvable mystery. This reality has always been part of the human condition, but in America at least the people who encounter it do so individually. One reason the Sept. 11 attack harrowed the nation so deeply is that it forced us to experience this cruelty and loss collectively. Some cultures know how to do this as if it were second nature -- Russians and Sicilians come to mind, as of course do Jews -- but they are old societies and well acquainted with grief. It's part of the wonder of America that it refuses to accept as inevitable so many of the world's ancient evils, but in this case the matter's not open to negotiation; we can make life safer, but not entirely safe and to many of our most urgent questions we will get no answers.
Art is one of the ways people come to terms with this, so it's understandable that, when seeking an articulation of our trauma, we turned to artists. Shortly after the attacks, some of the nation's most respected novelists were hit up by publications (including this one) for written responses. At first it was surprising how often those writings seemed indistinguishable from the observations of everyone else. It shouldn't have been, though. Fiction, especially great fiction, is a long time in the gestation; it will probably take years for the shock of Sept. 11 to work its way through the imagination of an author and emerge as a book that finally does justice to how it felt and what it meant. (And then it will take some publisher a year to put the thing out.)
In the meantime, though, during this uneasy intermediary period after the shock has worn off but before perspective gives us a clear view, we have some strangely appropriate offerings. These are books conceived, started and in some cases finished before Sept. 11, and yet they seem to speak directly to our loss.
One, Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," is a first novel published in July that has gone on to sell nearly a million copies. (Warning, I'm going to discuss the plot and ending of this book and others, so grown-ups only from here on.) It describes the aftermath of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon, as told by the victim herself, from her vantage in heaven. The parallels between the novel's premise and the disappearances of several young girls this summer is the most obviously prescient thing about it, but more than one commentator (especially in the U.K., where "The Lovely Bones" has been less warmly received than it has been in the states) has observed that the book's success feels like it has something to do with Sept. 11 as well.
The response to "The Lovely Bones" has been like a big, collective sigh of "That's just what we needed." A book can take on a peculiar life of its own once it's let loose on the world and finds its way into the hands of a wide assortment of readers. This book in particular walks a razor-thin line between schmaltz and honesty, and as Katharine Viner noted in the British newspaper the Guardian, some critics praise its "unsentimentality" while others dismiss it as "candy floss" -- that's Brit for cotton candy -- and "very, very sugary." The more popular it becomes, the more those annoying people who pride themselves on bucking every trend feel obliged to rip into it.
For me, Sebold manages to strike a balance that works, though I do think the book goes awry at the end. In the middle, there's the convincing estrangement and separation of her parents that, at the book's conclusion, seems to be on the way to a much less convincing reconciliation. Even worse, Sebold stoops to Hollywood-style corn when she allows Susie's spirit to take over the body of another girl so that she can consummate her first and only romance.
This last scene violated my idea of Sebold's contract with her readers; the rule the author had set up, I felt, was that, being dead, Susie could not in any real way touch the world of the living, and that the only growth available to her character is to let go of the traces of her life. "You have to give up on earth," she's told by her celestial "intake counselor." The same person tells her, on Page 8, "You're dead and you have to accept it." To then allow Susie to return to life, however briefly, seemed like a failure of nerve on the part of an author who was afraid her readers couldn't handle what is, after all, the very nature of death. Still, I liked the blend of delicacy and tartness in Sebold's observations about ordinary, happy suburban life and how it warps in the face of tragedy, and in the final reckoning, the mawkish ending didn't irretrievably ruin that.
Other readers, though, found a different book between the covers of "The Lovely Bones." Instead of a parable about the adamantine wall between the living and the dead and the necessity for those on both sides to acknowledge it, they found confirmation of their own attraction to various versions of today's popular, quasi-secular "angel" mania. Jan Jarboe of the San Antonio Express-News spoke for this audience when she wrote, "What I liked best about the novel was the idea that Susie may have been dead but her spirit was not gone. In fact, she hovered from the other side, struggling to help her loved ones cope with their loss." Musing on friends who have lost children and yet who feel there's still some ongoing connection, she writes, "Listening to them, I am aware of how murky and mysterious the line is between the living and the dead."
Mysterious, maybe, but definitely not permeable -- at least not as seen from across the Atlantic, where this sort of thing is seen as typical American softness and hoodoo. (A 1987 poll by American Health magazine found that 42 percent of respondants said they'd been contact by someone from beyond the grave.) Viner reports that critics there "put the book's success down to September 11 and the consolation that, even if nearly 3,000 people were vaporised at their desks, they're alive and well upstairs somewhere," making a link to the attacks that, interestingly enough, Jarboe does too. There may not be a real epidemic of child abductions, she writes, but "there is an epidemic of grief ... I've come to think that there are two separate wars on terrorism: the one across the world against foreigners who threaten our homeland, and the one taking place at home against the sickest of the sick -- those who terrorize our children."
But if pretending that death isn't really the end may rob it of its sting, it also leaches death, and by extension life and grief, of its importance. It's both cowardly and dishonest to insist, simply because we want to believe it, that human existence is mostly a string of Hallmark moments, occasionally tarnished by something nasty, but all resolving into an eternal, wholesome Norman Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving dinner in the end.
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