While journalists and critics of the literary world sat up in rapt attention and questioned the boundaries and limits of truth in response to revelations regarding the veracity of James Frey's memoirs, an equally relevant question about the relationship between fact and fiction has grown out of new literature chronicling September 11th. The venerable voices of V.S. Naipaul and Norman Mailer declared that it was either too early or too difficult to write fiction about the attacks. In the words of a less venerable cultural critic, the Harvard-bred Ross Gregory Douthat: "September 11 didn't kill irony, as was famously and fatuously suggested, but it defied literary art and broke metaphor and simile."

Douthat's observation argues for a singular designation for September 11th, declaring it an event so unlike all others that it "defies" literature. For Douthat, it is not necessarily forbidden to write about such an event, but just not possible. The fallen towers loom always, casting a shadow that is too complicated, too close, and too delicate for fictional portrayal.

With the publication of his first novel, Indecision, Benjamin Kunkel, a member of New York 's next generation of public intellectuals, steps into the fray. Told in a faux-memoir style with the requisite flashbacks and remembrances, the novel's action is split between the jungles of both New York City and Ecuador. Kunkel's hero, Dwight B. Wilmerding, goes off to the latter to visit Natasha, a what-might-have-been romantic interest from Dwight's days at St. Jerome 's, a New Hampshire prep school.

On the evening of September 10th, Dwight participates in an Ecstasy-fueled orgy with his new girlfriend, Vaneetha, and his roommates. Dwight recalls the comic, pathetic thoughts of the moment:

So then we all sat around holding hands, with boys kissing girls, and girls kissing girls, and boys occasionally kissing boys, and everyone saying there was going to be more tenderness in the world starting right now and spreading out from this room.

From this blissful jumble, Dwight and his roommates untangle and see "a huge gout of smoke...pouring from a lateral tear in one of the towers, six blocks away."

Feeling "obscene and small, like a fly batting at the bottom of a TV screen," Dwight celebrates that there are not one but two towers and shouts, "'Hey! Another plane!'" He is "delighted," thinking that "'they've sent it to rescue the other—or it must be coming to help all the..." The chapter and Dwight's remembrances end here at the ellipsis, and the reader again experiences the utter confusion of that brilliant blue Tuesday morning.

Defying Douthat's advice, Kunkel tries his hand at both metaphor and simile to encapsulate the times before September 11th and give a sense of what it was like to experience that morning in Lower Manhattan. What preceded the planes, sirens, and rubble now seems part innocence and part perversion—like a drug-inspired orgy, Kunkel might suggest. Leading up to September 11th, the nation was infatuated with shark attacks, Michael Jackson, and missing Washington interns. Dwight and his friends are actually men and women—not "girls" and "boys"—but looking backwards from that morning, their past selves seem naïve and childish.

While the attempt at description is admirable, it feels slightly flat, though this flatness does not vindicate Douthat. Dwight begins the narrative by saying that he feels "abstract." And abstract is how September 11th remains, its impact unclear and left unexplored by Kunkel. The abstraction is appropriate, though. Kunkel doesn't avoid proselytizing or politics; the book in fact ends with a meditation on the virtues of democratic socialism. He does, however, shy away from addressing the attacks or their legacy. This circumspection allows the event to permeate the novel but not to oppress it. If Kunkel's use of metaphor and simile is heavy-handed, his light treatment of September 11th exhibits the right touch.

It is not the September 11th shouldn't be fictionalized. It should. It must. Kunkel's deft treatment—in a way, his refusal to toy with the day beyond its initial description—hints at the great literary reservoir that lies beneath September 11th.

 

Samuel Jacobs wishes Professor James Wood would read him bedtime stories.