A remembrance of things blasted
In the earliest days of our new epoch, as the shock of September 11 subsided, two orders of thought emerged regarding the disaster site itself: whether to preserve it or rebuild it. The first offered contemplation; the second, commerce and promise.
In his new collection of essays and short stories, Martin Amis submits a literary model for the first way of thinking. The Second Plane is a coughing, staggering walk through the rubble of that day and what followed; Amis took the same path we all did, but he viewed the common experience with uncommon eyes, and took good notes. The question, then, is why: Why stroll through that smoking, stinking crater in our lives?
The book’s first dispatch is from September 18, 2001, as published in a London newspaper. In it, Amis reaches—as we all did—to squeeze the history of the moment through the pinhole of personal experience. Proximity took on understandable but undeserved proportion:
My wife’s sister had just taken her children to school and was standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 11th Street… She looked up to see the glistening underbelly of the 767, a few yards above her head…
Proximity seemed to matter. I felt embarrassed that I, drowsy in the Central Time Zone, had not turned on my television until after the impact of the second plane. Surely friends who had seen it—the plane that signaled terror instead of mere tragedy—held a greater authority on the horror, because they had borne witness. But no one knew the global scale of the event then, and distance would soon seem like a gift: to live in South America as Amis did then, or to live an extra hour in the untroubled world of September 10, as I did.
As time passed, Amis—and people in general—questioned how and why the attack happened. These questions find Amis unsteady, struggling in essays with what he calls a “reflexive search for the morally intelligible”: the conviction that such a terrible reaction must have come from an equal and opposite action. But to his credit Amis has cut nothing out, allowing the ash of those days to settle undisturbed on his work.
Toward the book’s middle, Amis finds his voice through fiction. I’ll confess I didn’t want to read it. I had lost faith in fiction’s ability to reveal greater truths than newspaper stories, because the new reality so outstripped imagination. But Amis restores faith in fiction by making the outsized very small. Making it quiet. Instead of allowing terrorists the respect of great distance, we see them in details so fine they become absurd. Behold the fearsome Mohamed Atta the morning of the attack, waking in his budget hotel room:
He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape—question mark, infinity symbol—but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a matchbook when he began, barely existed when he finished.
In the second half of the book, Amis gains a foothold, applying his nonfiction to Iran, radical Islam, world leaders, and the unexpected and moving subject of love. At times he overcorrects for his early quavering, allowing his anger to find an overly broad target; in “Demographics,” he laments the decline of European births in the face of rising Muslim rates. His point about culture is taken, but there’s nothing inherently wrong in productivity.
The most elegant September 11 tribute I know of is called the Chelsea Jeans Memorial. It’s the preserved storefront of a downtown clothes shop, wherein the T-shirts and bluejeans—those most American icons—are coated with the dust and ash of the fallen towers. The memorial is sealed in glass, because the dust is dangerous. And it is hallowed, because the families of many victims believe the ash contains something of their loved ones.
In his book, Martin Amis has done the same; preserved the toxic and the sacred. And with his finger he has written in that dust, “We were here.”
Matthew Teague is a staff writer at Philadelphia Magazine.