Amy Waldman's Reading List

"Soon after 9/11, no more than a year, I heard Kinnell read this poem and it was an experience I will not forget. “When the Towers Fell” really demonstrates what poetry can do that other art forms can’t – provide catharsis by finding the right words to describe the otherwise unspeakable. Making art of tragedy is tricky. How do you do it? Is it unseemly? In what I have read of the literature connected to 9/11, I’ve observed that passages describing the day just don’t work for me. “When the Towers Fell” is as powerful a record of what happened as anything I’ve read. As I heard him read his poem I was struck by the idea that poetry was truer to the experience of 9/11 than non-fiction. The disjuncture. In “When the Towers Fell”, the dissonance and unexpected juxtapositions of images and details allows us to see more clearly and feel more deeply what occurred on September 11. To quote the poem, the air “too foul to take in but we take it in”. Even though this is the only poem that is explicitly about the events of 9/11, there are echoes throughout the whole collection. Many of the poems are about mortality and mourning more broadly. The question of how we live on interested me deeply. We all pay so much attention to the memorial. But, in life, how are the lost remembered? How do we deal with death when it seems premature or unexpected? These are questions I explored through my reporting and my characters’ plight."

"The reason why I have trouble with some of the fiction about 9/11 is a lot of it seems to be about people very peripherally affected: New Yorkers of a certain class whose lives were interrupted but who readjusted. Marian Fontana is not one of those people. Her life was completely rewritten. She writes, with great eloquence, about the very human wake of 9/11, the difficulty of balancing public and private grief when you lose someone, and the challenge of mourning while caring for a toddler. You asked me to pick five works of fiction, but I insisted on a memoir because in this case it’s particularly difficult for novels to compete with reality. I didn’t read a lot of 9/11 fiction but in the ostensible 9/11 novels I did read, their attempt to muster emotion couldn’t begin to compete with Fontana’s reality. But then again, I don’t think fiction about this event or period should consider it sufficient to try to replicate that emotion – it needs to recast it, or twist it back on itself, or examine, which is partly what I was trying to do, where it leads, what its meaning is for our society or democracy. Fontana, because of her position, could be more honest than most fiction writers dared to be. I loved lines like, “It has been interesting to watch each politician adopt a family member like a pet.” Or after dinner with another activist family member: “We accomplished little tonight, because while we are trying to operate like a business, the fact is we are nothing like one, as encumbered by our grief as we are fuelled by it.” On some level, I was probably inspired by her honesty in trying to etch the experience of my characters."

"Harbor is a beautifully written book about a group of illegal Algerian immigrants in the US, indelible characters. It cuts back and forth between Algeria and the US, telling the story of what their lives are like as they come under suspicion of being part of a terror plot. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I consider it a 9/11 novel for a few reasons. It’s a great portrayal of how we often look for terror in the wrong places. Its plot shows how its characters get caught up in the terror dragnet. Partway through, the perspective shifts to the federal agents investigating them. Suddenly seeing things through their eyes allows us to understand how we misread others. What enabled both of us to be reporters is this driving desire to get inside a culture or a community or a person’s mind. Fiction allowed us to go deeper."

"You’re right – the protagonist has a completely different profile from the humble one in Harbor . Changez is from a prestigious Pakistani family, but one without a lot of money. He comes to the United States to attend Princeton on a scholarship and then is recruited into the corporate world. The whole novel is a monologue. This character, in a café in Lahore, is talking to an unidentified American, telling his story about the life he led in the United States. How he was enamoured of New York, yet smiled as the Towers fell and grew even more embittered toward America in the wake of the attacks. The structure is original and well executed. It’s a window on the conflicted feelings that I encountered in reporting about America, at home and aboard – and what they grow out of. At the same time, it raises questions in the reader’s mind about who should be suspicious of whom and why. Definitely. A lot of political discourse is designed to force simple answers where there are none, or force people to take stark positions. In The Submission I wanted to re-complicate reactions to 9/11 so that even if you think you know what you think you still might find yourself switching your point of view."

"It’s a very beautiful novel and very unusual in its construction. Open City is about a solitary narrator who for most of the story is just going on walks through New York. There’s no conventional plot. It’s filled with substance about the city and snapshots of characters he encounters along the way. It is almost like a musical variation, returning to the same themes and places over and over again in slightly different ways. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On one walk the narrator ends up near the [Ground Zero] site. On another occasion, he goes to view the miniature model of the city at the Queens Museum of Art and notes the twin beams of light on the southern tip of Manhattan, which represent the World Trade Center. 9/11 keeps resurfacing, indirectly and almost allusively, in really interesting ways. Unlike some of the fiction that is explicitly about 9/11, Cole is grappling with issues related to 9/11 on a pretty profound level. 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 ."