Article: On a bright September morning...
On a bright September morning, I was at my desk trying to write a scene about two anxious guys talking on a platform when the phone rang. What were they so anxious about? I don't know. It could've been fear of losing their jobs, their hair or just plain middle-aged angst. Whatever it was, it didn't quite justify the overwhelming sense of dread.
"Go turn on your television," said the voice on the phone. "You won't believe what's happening."
But I didn't need to turn on the TV. All I had to do was look out my bedroom window, to see the front end of the twenty-first century getting torn off.
The next morning, I sat down at my desk to make a decision. What was I going to do with this manuscript? Was I going to deal with the fact that I could still see smoke rising from Ground Zero, or was I going to turn away and try to write an escapist book?
It turned out the answer was already on the page. I'd been working on The Last Good Day for almost a year, and as I began to re-read the draft I'd completed I was struck not only by the unsettling mood, but also by the number of specific references to the World Trade Center. Early on, one of the main characters flashed back on being offered the job he was about to lose at the Windows on the World restaurant. In another scene, a murder victim was remembered for sailing a hot air balloon between the Twin Towers. And so on. It was as if the book was already about the aftermath of what happened. There are probably a few explanations. My wife Peg Tyre had co-authored a nonfiction book about the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. And my previous novel, Man of the Hour, published in 1999, had concerned a suicide bomber driven by fanatical belief. Maybe some of that had drifted into The Last Good Day, which was supposed to be a very different kind of story about a woman returning to her suburban hometown and finding her old boyfriend was still obsessed with her.
But as soon as I made just a small indirect fleeting reference to 9/11, the whole book's DNA changed. I went back to the scene with two guys talking on the platform. There was already a reference to a Honda Civic sitting by itself in the parking lot. That morning, a friend of mine described a sight just like that at his station, where clearly someone had never come back from the trade center the night before. The connection was there, waiting to be made.
But do you go ahead and make it? This was after all still a raw wound. No one wants to be accused of exploitation, especially not in a neighborhood where the local firehouse lost nearly half its men. And of course, you can make the argument that fiction shouldn't move too quickly. It needs to time to settle in, to find tiny cracks and holes in history to seep in through. But I kept writing anyway, because not writing would have seemed like a kind of retreat.
Naturally, I might have faced more of a stumbling block if I'd been trying to write directly about people involved in the tragedy. That would've felt exploitive, or at the very least closer to journalism. The firefighters, police officers, and victims' families had the right to tell their own stories. Writing in that same vein would've been like staring into the sun. Instead, I just tried to write about the shadows on the ground. The empty seat on the commuter train. The missing parent on the soccer sidelines. The sudden run on antibiotics at the pharmacy and guns at the sporting goods store. A certain amount of distance was built into the setting. So I tried to write about the way their lives had been affected in the same way that someone writing a novel set in 1943 would acknowledge World War II without necessarily having characters on the front lines.
In the end, though, it comes down to believing there are people still interested in reading about the real world. I'm not saying that every contemporary novel should have social relevance. God knows that would be like living in a town with a protest singer on every street corner. I'm saying there's special connection that comes from a writer being able to come down from a high shelf once in a while to nudge the reader and say, "hey, did you see what I just saw?"
Copyright © Peter Blauner