The New York Times noted its “limber, detailed prose.” The Guardian stated: “Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect, whether describing a Bangladeshi woman’s relationship with her landlady or the political manoeuvring within a jury.” In The Washington Post, Chris Cleave wrote that Waldman “excels at involving the reader in vibrant dialogues. Additionally, The Submission was named Esquire’s Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Novel for the Year, NPR’s Top Ten Novels for 2011 and the list goes on. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “gorgeously written novel” and went so far as to call it the 9/11 novel. High praise, indeed.

In an interview with The Browser, Waldman was asked to define a 9/11 novel.  She responded:

“I guess a 9/11 novel is one that grows out of the attacks in one way or another and uses literature to try to shed some new light. It seems to cover such a wide range of books – from ones that are trying to completely reinvent that day to ones where it’s only a plot device to reroute characters lives. And it includes one where 9/11 isn’t even mentioned – my novel, The Submission.”

According to that same interview 150 works of fiction and nearly 1,000 works of non-fiction have in some way, shape or form been inspired by the events of 9/11. Salon columnist Laura Miller writes that the absence of any great 9/11 literature suggests the banality of death itself. She states: “Life, not death, is the novelist’s subject.” Well, that doesn’t seem to have stopped hundreds of writers, including Waldman. However, The Submission may be a 9/11 novel, but it isn’t the 9/11 novel. It remains simply one of forgettable hundreds trying and failing to meet the strange, insatiable thirst for 9/11 literature.

The Submission tells the tale of half a dozen characters whose lives change after an American-born architect of Indian descent named Mohammed Khan wins a contest to design the  9/11 memorial, provoking widespread outrage and controversy.  (Think the Maya Lin controversy magnified a gazillionfold.) While Claire, a 9/11 widow and wealthy Manhattanite struggles to fight for Khan’s right to remain in the competition, others, like the ambitious New York governor, use the occasion as a vehicle to make political gains. The novel introduces us to a smarmy Muslim American politician, a hapless community of Bangladeshi illegals, a family of angry blue-collar workers who lost a firefighter son in the attack, a radical Islamaphobe and others whose lives have been drastically affected by 9/11.

Waldman, who was assigned to the New York metro desk as a reporter at the Times when the towers fell, likely found herself exposed to many of the factions that arose when the disaster occurred and undoubtedly possess an enormous amount of familiarity with the topic.  As one of the writers who contributed to the Portraits of Grief project, which attempted to chronicle each life lost in the September 11^th attacks, she has seen her share of 9/11 firsthand. One wishes she had been able to take that experience to humanize her characters. In an interview shortly after the book was released, she said:

 “As a novelist, I didn’t want to raid details of people’s lives for material. But also, as a reporter, I felt ambivalent about the “Portraits of Grief”. The wordcount left no room for complexity. The project made me ask, how do you avoid reducing the dead to thumbnail profiles? People are much more complicated than can be represented through daily journalism. They deserve to be portrayed and remembered in all their fullness.”    

Clicking through the Portraits of Grief project, which average 200 words apiece, one can see how tempting it would be to delve into the subject in depth and allow an individual narrative to flow on to the 300+ pages Waldman employs. Unfortunately, allowing a novelist to roam untethered poses its own risks. Waldman makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much where much less would have sufficed.

The novel first appeared as short-story excerpts in The Atlantic, a form much better suited to Waldman’s futile endeavor to encapsulate the entire post-9/11 debacle in a single book. The Submission nobly attempts to stuff the narratives of half a dozen characters into an entire book, but weaves them in a confusing, unsatisfying manner. The biggest failing, by far, are Waldman’s loosely sketched characters, who spew forth earnest, stiff dialogue that serves to stereotype, not humanize. And sadly, Waldman attempts to accomplish a neat, cyclical narrative through the use of convenient plot twists and various ironies. (Along with a heap of wishful thinking and clunky prose.)

Take for example, a passage about the architect Mohammed “Mo” Khan, as seen through the eyes of a skeptical, tabloid reporter. “He had a beard, but it was tastefully trimmed. His suit looked expensive, and his bearing, unlike the grasping, too-eager-to-please Indians in her neighborhood, was haughty. Next to him sat a dark-haired, foreign-looking woman in a cardinal red suit that suggested she was not only comfortable with attention but craved it. Men, some of them in Islamic costumes, and a few women in headscarves, stood stiffly against the wall behind them, looking like a police lineup of terrorism suspects.”

For a book that drives along on the suspense of a single question (Will Khan be allowed to design the 9/11 memorial?), any interest in an outcome dies of boredom 20 pages in.  For example, Waldman’s depiction of Asma Haque, the illegal Bangladeshi immigrant whose husband, a domestic worker, perished in the attacks, represents potential for a powerful narrative about the problems families of undocumented workers faced after 9-11. However, in Waldman’s prose, any elegance a character like Asma may have had falls flat. Seen through a narrower scope, the characters could be compelling. But as a whole, the characters are tiring.

Somewhere out there, people have come up with some fanciful checklist of the quintessential elements a 9/11 novel contains and have decided that The Submission meets this standard (however vague that may be). But the fact remains, a true 9/11 novel would delve deeper into the human complexities that drive the issues surrounding the attack. Ten years after September 11, the nation still reels with the aftereffects of the catastrophe’s reduction of humans into mere keywords. Brown? Terrorist. Muslim? Terrorist. Turban? Terrorist. Sadly, Waldman’s The Submission does much the same thing. It takes the same tired tropes and trots them out for the reader to rally over. Maybe The Great 9/11 Novel exists. Maybe it doesn’t. But either way, the list will not include The Submission.

The video was created as a DVD insert to the Asian American Literature Review Tenth Anniversary of September 11th issue.

So many of our communities have borne witness to so much over the past 10 years; it behooves us to critically consider the moment and its aftermath—the various political, legal, and civil rights repercussions, particularly for the communities most directly affected, South Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim American. But how can we do so, when so many of the voices of affected communities remain unheard? [AALR]

You can order your copy of the AALR special issue online here now.

Franz Kline's New York

I had been asleep when the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower. What woke me was the sound of my wife sobbing. A phone call had come from India, from an editor, asking me to write. So, that is how we learned about what had happened.

The piece I wrote that day had some anger in it, anger not only at the hijackers but at the Americans. This was the kind of thing that would be called “the chicken coming home to roost” argument. A few days later, in the New Yorker issue dedicated to September 11, with its famous black cover designed by Art Spiegelman, I read a piece by Amitav Ghosh. His brief essay told the story of a man, an engineer involved in the design of the Twin Towers, staying back in the building to help people escape. The man and his wife, both of whom worked in the destroyed buildings, were Ghosh’s neighbors. And Ghosh’s piece was filled with a kind of sad tenderness that made me feel ashamed about my rage. I felt as if I had arrived drunk at a funeral.

That feeling would change. It would change around the time the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan. Or maybe even before, when I read pieces by writers like Arundhati Roy, offering sympathy for the victims of the attacks but not flinching from offering critique, including of the role that the Americans had played in funding the Taliban in their strategic fight against the Soviets. The change had certainly come by the time I read another piece in the New Yorker, this one by Akhil Sharma. Titled “Bonus,” this brilliant piece only briefly invoked the attacks but so deftly did it portray their appearance and disappearance amidst financial calculations in the mind of a Wall Street executive, that it served a reminder that the necessarily sentimental piece written by Ghosh wasn’t the only way to represent September 11.

So, right from the beginning, the attacks and the question of one’s proper response to it had been a problem for me. I began teaching a class that I’d call the “literature of 9/11.” I wanted to understand the different responses to the attacks and the fateful consequences.

An important part of the impulse behind this has been my search for other voices, voices from India and Pakistan, for instance. I have used books like Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist or H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy to, well, provincialize the monumental sense of grief that Americans often have about the attacks of 9/11. We need to ask ourselves about the other lives that were destroyed by the attacks, not on that day, but through the changes that followed.

In recent years, my course has focused on linking what happened on that bright September morning to everything else that has followed, for example, the image of a man in an orange suit kneeling in a cage in Guantanamo. Last semester, when I taught this course, I included in the syllabus a reading of two excellent works of reportage from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. From this perspective, what happened on that Tuesday a decade ago seems impossibly distant. We are now stuck in the quagmire of war and intolerable suffering.

When I was an undergraduate in Delhi three decades ago the prescribed reading for us was Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. The novel wasn’t very good. I think it was in the syllabus because it hit you over the head with the image of rural suffering—poverty, flood, famine, you get the idea. I’m skeptical of middle-class people talking at great length about the lives of the lowly. I’d rather deal with their—our—calm complacency instead.

A few years ago, when I was staying in a friend’s barsati in Delhi’s Defence Colony, my host came home one evening with a painting. The canvas showed a work done in Kalighat style, but the subject was modern. It showed a bhadralok couple sitting together, drinking tea; behind them, on a table with a blue tablecloth, stood a big television set showing the World Trade Center. Smoke was coming out from one of the towers. On the edge of the screen, on the right, another plane was visible in the sky. The image spoke to me.

The artist’s name was Kalam Patua, and I can only guess at his intentions for doing the painting. But what his remarkable work communicated to me was the complexity of a world in which disaster gets consumed as easily as a cup of tea. And that wasn’t all. I was also drawn to the intact world of the Indian middle-class, to the fact that it was in touch with the daily life of the planet but not necessarily in a way that disturbed its inertia. I tried to write about that world in my first novel Home Products (which was published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing).

But, like Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve, the “literature of 9/11” draws us back to the pathos of distant suffering. In fact, I believe it represents a new low definition of bare life. We read accounts of incarcerated men in Guantanamo, or American soldiers with amputated limbs, or the death of children from drinking mud, and we see how much of life’s terrain, the realm of individual subjectivity, is subject to the brutal will of the state. Which is to say, for me, the “literature of 9/11” is an ongoing exploration of the ways in which life and liberty—or their absence—are authored by the military state.

There are several artists, including the Bangla-American Hasan Elahi, who have responded with great inventiveness to the new regimes of surveillance introduced after the attacks of September 11. Toward the beginning of the semester I ask my students to read the 9/11 Commission Report but I always follow it up, sooner or later, with a presentation of the work of the artists like Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, and Jill Magid.

In a week, my new class will meet. This time I will use an essay that I just read last night. It’s by Pico Iyer and has appeared in the latest Granta Magazine. Iyer writes of his experience of being stopped and subjected to interrogation at airports in Japan. This happened to him after the 9/11 attacks. He writes of how his American friends assured him that this was happening to them too. In other words, it wasn’t just his brownness that earned him this scrutiny. Maybe. The point that Iyer wants to make, however, is that brown folks had always found it difficult to cross borders. They were always suspect.

I’m not sure I want the tragedies of September 11 and its aftermath to be reduced to the matter of travails of travel. The airport isn’t a battlefield; nor is it a quiet village suddenly erupting in fire because of a drone strike. Nevertheless, the conclusion that Iyer offers is stark and eloquent, and I’d like my students to consider what he is saying: “I understand why my friends feel aggrieved to be treated as if they came from Nigeria or Mexico or India. But I can’t really mourn too much that airports, since 9/11, have become places where everyone may be taken to be guilty until proven innocent. The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity. On 12 September 2001, Le Monde ran its now famous headline: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. On 12 September 2011, it might more usefully announce: WE ARE ALL INDIANS.”