Ken Kalfus pens the first satirical 9/11 novel

[tuvor]

The comedy of Ken Kalfus’s acerbic new novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, isn’t just dark, it’s pitch black. Marshall and Joyce Harriman, a Brooklyn couple in their 30s, are deep in the sludge of a divorce so toxic that they “have been instructed to communicate with each other only through their lawyers, an injunction impossible to obey since Joyce and Marshall still shared a two-bedroom apartment with their two small children and a yapping, emotionally needy, razor-nailed springer spaniel.”

But in the book’s soul-rattling opening pages, the reader is not aware of any of these peculiar-to-the-New-York-
housing-market domestic troubles. Just this: early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Joyce leaves to catch United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco. Marshall will shortly follow her out of the house, dropping off their kids at nursery school, before heading into his office on the 86th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower.

Everyone knows what comes next. As Joyce watches from her Manhattan office rooftop — she cancelled her flight at the last minute, unknowingly saving her life — the World Trade Center is destroyed by two other hijacked planes. As her colleagues shriek and wail around her, witnessing the south tower fall “in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage,” Joyce finds herself enveloped in “a giddiness, an elation… a great gladness.” Marshall, she assumes, is dead. He’s not, as Kalfus soon reveals. A flirtation with his son’s teacher made him late for work; he was in the elevator when the building was hit and had his own narrow escape from death. Dazed, grimy and wounded, Marshall nearly skips home after he hears a report of United 93’s hijacking and crash in Pennsylvania. He, too, is thrilled to think that his spouse is dead.

Even with five years’ distance from the attacks, to imagine New Yorkers experiencing happiness on that terrible day still seems like an act of minor treason. In the collective soul-searching among writers and critics in the months following 9/11, there was, for a time, a prevailing sense that the attacks defied explanation or examination aside from the most literal — newspaper accounts and the 9/11 Commission Report. There was the official censure of criticism — comedian and Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher was fired by ABC after he questioned the bravery of the U.S. administration, for “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” But even worse, there was a kind of glum suspicion that art might be altogether irrelevant. Novels and films were considered frivolous diversions in the face of the attacks and the wars that followed them. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter was quick to pronounce irony dead. In his 2003 memoir-like novel, Windows on the World, French author Frédéric Beigbeder, wrote, “Since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it.”

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/kenkalfus.html

[leveymg]

1. Read Heller's Catch-22 and tell me that 9/11 is beyond satire

30 million people died in World War Two. Yet, Catch-22 is a classic comedy, complete with Americans bombing their own troops for profit.

So, what's changed, or is the public just expected to be stupider than they were thirty or forty years ago.

[tuvor]

2. Are you sure anything's "changed"?

Catch-22 came 16 years after WWII ended, the better part of a generation.

[A Simple Game]

3. 5 years now, 16 years then, probably about equal.

It's a novel, don't let it bother you.

Certainly don't read it if you feel it is too soon.

[tuvor]

4. I'm hardly bothered.

Thanks for the advice.