As you might expect, it didn’t take the country music industry long to react to the al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.
By July 2002, Toby Keith, known more for humorous songs like “How Do You Like Me Now” and “I Wanna Talk About Me,” came out with the belligerently flag-waving ode “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” aptly subtitled “The Angry American.” And, in the following April, newcomer Darryl Worley released the more circumspect “Have You Forgotten.”
There were several others, all reacting in their own ways to either the sorrow we all felt over the national loss or calls to arms to avenge that loss.
But what about the book world? Since the attacks, nonfiction titles have poured out about many different aspects of the attacks and their aftermath. There have been books about the Green Beret in Afghanistan, the fight at Tora Bora during which Osama Bin Laden disappeared from sight and what it was like in the towers of the World Trade Center after the airliners struck but before the towers fell.
The world of fiction is reacting now, with several new titles recently released by prominent authors. On the shelves are works by Ian McEwan, “Saturday”; Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”; French author Frederic Beigbeder’s “Windows on the World”; and S.J. Rozan’s “Absent Friends.”
Earlier novels by some big guns also have at least touched on those events, works by John Le Carre, “Absolute Friends” (2004); Lawrence Block, “Small Town” (2003); Nelson DeMille, “Night Fall” (2005); and Pete Hamill, “Forever” (2002).
And more are on the way from the likes of Reynolds Price, “The Good Priest’s Son” (June) and “Writing on the Wall” (late May) from Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
You might ask why has it taken 3 1/2 years for most novelists to come out with works centered on the 9/11 attacks. There are a couple of reasons.
Denver novelist Stephen White (“Missing Persons”) who, before he began writing novels 14 books ago was a psychologist, has a fairly pragmatic take – just do the math.
Counting back from 9/11, he says: “If they take six months to digest what they’ve just seen, six months to create an idea about how they want to handle it, a year to write it and turn it into their publishers and a year to publish it,” then you have the three years.
In addition to the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing, Cynthia Wong, an associate professor of English at CU-Denver, says authors would have to ask themselves some tough questions. “Writers may have needed time to digest and absorb the implications of the trauma before authorizing themselves to reference it in literature,” she says.
“A period of shock and contemplation would have followed. What is worth writing about? Would it be selfish or unethical to capitalize on the deaths and loss of thousands? Or, is it important to capture the immediate essence of raw pain associated with the shock?”
But the shock not only affects the authors, but also their readers, and authors must be careful not to be seen trying to exploit an awful situation.
White says he wouldn’t expect authors to go into writing a novel about 9/11 with an eye toward exploitation. “I think this is something that writers will write because they feel a need to write it. I don’t think they are going into it thinking there is some commercial way to exploit it.”
S.J. Rozan’s “Absent Friends” deals directly with the aftermath of the events at the World Trade Center. Rozan, who is a New Yorker, said, “I could not imagine, in the face of that event, writing about anything else. It seemed to me that not dealing directly with how it felt to live in those times and in New York would have been totally inauthentic. Nine/11, to me as a New Yorker especially, was so huge, I couldn’t see around it.”
Authors also must guard against the appearance of disrespect, particularly since they are dealing with a real tragedy. “I didn’t worry about being disrespectful,” says Rozan, “… I did, and do, worry about seeming disrespectful in writing about it at all: using such pain in fiction. But that’s what’s fiction’s for: transmuting pain into something of value.
“Respect, though, is why I tried to write the morally ambiguous, emotionally charged book I did, and not a ‘thriller’ or simple crime story set in those times. That would have been disrespectful.”
According to Wong, the novel is suited to writing about such events, but is not the only suitable genre. “Poems can have an equally powerful effect as fiction,” she says. “Representing a truth about any event, especially one as devastating in scope at Sept. 11, may be possible by looking at only a sliver of what happened: who died, what were the circumstances involving the seeming senselessness of their deaths, how is the collective legacy of loss associated with world politics?”
But, she says, novelists have something of a “safety net” when it comes to writing about humanist issues, “because they are not expected to offer truth, but ‘truthful’ versions of what happened,” and are not limited to simple recitation of facts. “The novel is especially conducive to making deep explorations about the human psyche and character because they are many aesthetic possibilities for venturing into how people think and feel.”
When it comes to the question of whether novels about cataclysmic events can be therapeutic to the reader, the answer is “yes” – probably.
“When an historical event is the center of focus in fiction,” says Wong, “the author’s managing of themes, characters and situations can be revelatory. … Sometimes the veil over reality provided by fiction can be very healing, indeed, because the characters are, after all, made up. Still, many readers do not divorce the reality of fictional characters from their resemblance to real people, so a particularly good novel will provide access to both the real and the fictional.”
White, wearing his psychologist’s hat, says that whether a story can be therapeutic is highly personalized. “I think it depends on what the people are struggling with … if the reader is drawn to it for the right reasons and the writer handles the material well, then it can be therapeutic.”
He adds that it is not a matter of how close a reader was to the attacks as to whether something can be therapeutic. He said, “I don’t think it has to do just with whether you have a loss history or how close you were to ground zero on that day, but as much about your own coping styles. Some people cope by getting distance; some people cope by embracing facts.
“Is reading about this sort of thing going to heighten whatever feelings you already have, or is it going to help you work through them or diminish them? It’s very individual. It has little to do with the book and more to do with the reader.”
And what about the author? Does writing such a book help him or her come to terms with what happened?
In Rozan’s case, the answer is simple – no. “I hoped it would, but it didn’t,” she said.
Staff writer Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
