Ground Zero, An Alternate Reality

Just as America opened its Ground Zero memorial and shifted into the second post-9/11 decade, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission appeared and was quickly hailed as the finest work to date that directly considered the attacks and their aftermath.  Since I was about to visit the Ground Zero site and meet the memorial architect, as I mentioned in the last blog, it seemed ideal to read the novel at the same time.  I did have some concern that the fiction would pale before the encountered reality.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

As many of you will already know, The Submission takes place several years after 9/11.  The New York jury selecting a memorial design from a number of anonymous submissions chooses one – a walled and treed garden quartered by shallow canals -- by a young architect with the ominous name Mohammed Khan.  The controversy that ensues, and its effect on a number of characters, together with Khan’s ultimate choice, make up the rest of the book.

Obviously, we already know the actual designer and design.  Most of us have seen it, if not in person, then in the media.  We also know that a different conflict over a nearby Muslim community center occurred during the construction of the new memorial. And unlike such subjects as “if the South had won the Civil War” or “if Germany had won World War II,” the World Trade Center story is still living history to all of us over the age of twenty.  So how can a counterfactual novel, coming so close upon the reality, help but seem either derivative or wildly implausible?

I can only share my own experience, which might best be compared to one of those “young woman at her toilette or an old crone?” or “goblet or two profiles?” optical illusions.  Despite my knowledge and actual presence at the site of the reality, my mind easily slipped between what I knew had happened and an utterly plausible alternative reality.

How did Waldman achieve in so many readers such a willing suspension of disbelief?  In part ,because she brings to bear in this first novel skills drawn from real-world reporting, and uses these to create a remarkably persuasive narrative fabric.

As a former journalist, Waldman has an ear for the public statement, whether from an interviewee or a reporter.  During the height of the controversy she give us perfectly voiced shrieking from the New York Post – “MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS: ADDING ISLAM  TO INJURY – as well as nuanced challenge from The New Yorker: “We should judge him only by his own design.  But this is where matters get tricky.  In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs.”

There is just enough direct connection between Waldman’s imagined world and actual post-9/11 events to enhance the alternate one’s reality.  The runner-up design, for example, is “A towering black granite rectangle, some twelve stories high, centered on a huge oval pool.”  Not Michael Arad’s creation, certainly, but enough like it to draw the two worlds together, especially when a leading character focuses on the most common element between the two: “The other night I dreamed about that black pool around the Void, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it.”  This parallelism later appears ironically. As I looked over the railing at the enormous dual waterfalls descending into the abyss where each tower once stood, I smiled to recall the contention made by consultants hired to critique Khan’s design that “The canals were also a safety liability.  ‘One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.’  They recommended scrapping them.”

And, although Waldman has said she had completed a draft of the novel before the beginning of the falsely-termed Ground Zero mosque controversy, these arguments from her “Save America from Islam” coalition meld immediately into our real-world consciousness: “Muslims build mosques wherever they’ve conquered.  They could never get away with putting a mosque at this site, so they’ve come up with something sneakier: an Islamic garden, this martyr’s paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis.”  (Careful readers will recall that in the book’s opening pages, the jury’s spokeswoman for the artistic community had objected to the design on the grounds that “Gardens are fetishes of the European bourgeoisie.”)

Many of Waldman’s characters are draw from obvious stock.  Her 9/11 mourners include the suburban widow of a businessman, the blue-collar brother of a deceased fireman, and the widow of a Muslim janitor hired illegally by a building subcontractor.  There is also the over-aggressive reporter, the hate-mongering talk show host (“I Slam Islam” is his credo), the manipulative state politician, and Muslim attorneys and community activists at once fearful, indignant, and self-serving.  But these characters have additional facets, and some shift roles and perspectives in surprising ways through the course of the story.  As a seasoned New Yorker, Waldman subtly gives shape to her figures.  The memorial jury’s chair, for example, thinks to himself just before opening the fateful envelope, “To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or the governor…What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed?” 

The implications  layered, especially since the  main designers of the World Trade Center memorial and site reconstruction are both Jewish and have both been the subject of antisemitic diatribes by those who persist in seeing 9/11 as a Jewish plot.  But even upon immediate reading, isn’t it strange that the Jewish Rubin is named after two of the key figures in the New Testament, including the notorious convert Paul?  Later, when we meet Rubin’s sons, Jacob and Samuel, the anomalous interweaving of assimilation and identity becomes even more obvious.

The book’s title is so clearly multivalent that few reviewers have commented on it, whether because they don’t see it (highly unlikely), or because they fear being accused of stating the obvious or of flaunting their textual skills (about equally likely).  So let’s just get it on the table:  the submission of a design by a supposed disciple of the religion whose name means submission leads to a battle in which the architect must decide whether to submit to pressure and withdraw his submission. 

Of course, Mohammed Khan stands at the center of the story, and if he were not a convincing and complex character, the novel might have failed.   Fortunately, he holds the reader’s attention from outset, when he finds himself, like so many others, stereotyped in the immediate days after 9/11, to the surprising conclusion, where we find him looking back over a long career of which his Ground Zero design was both a false start and a catalytic event.  As he embraces a heretofore peripheral identity (he is, after all, American-born and non-practicing when we first meet him), then backs away from both his opponents and his apparent partisans, he is given a strong voice, though only one of many.  One of the great virtues of the novel is that few characters are allowed to remain static figures who keep our admiration, sympathy, or disdain.  In the book’s final pages, in fact, we connect in surprising, and surprisingly satisfying, ways to many figures from the heart of the decades-old controversy

[See "Nine Years After" under "Recent Articles and Reviews" for a piece on other 9/11 writing]