The War at Home

Illustration by Sam Weber.

The comedy of Ken Kalfus’s acerbic new novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, isn’t just dark, it’s pitch black. Marshall and Joyce Harriman, a Brooklyn couple in their 30s, are deep in the sludge of a divorce so toxic that they “have been instructed to communicate with each other only through their lawyers, an injunction impossible to obey since Joyce and Marshall still shared a two-bedroom apartment with their two small children and a yapping, emotionally needy, razor-nailed springer spaniel.”

But in the book’s soul-rattling opening pages, the reader is not aware of any of these peculiar-to-the-New-York-
housing-market domestic troubles. Just this: early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Joyce leaves to catch United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco. Marshall will shortly follow her out of the house, dropping off their kids at nursery school, before heading into his office on the 86th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower.

Everyone knows what comes next. As Joyce watches from her Manhattan office rooftop — she cancelled her flight at the last minute, unknowingly saving her life — the World Trade Center is destroyed by two other hijacked planes. As her colleagues shriek and wail around her, witnessing the south tower fall “in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage,” Joyce finds herself enveloped in “a giddiness, an elation… a great gladness.” Marshall, she assumes, is dead. He’s not, as Kalfus soon reveals. A flirtation with his son’s teacher made him late for work; he was in the elevator when the building was hit and had his own narrow escape from death. Dazed, grimy and wounded, Marshall nearly skips home after he hears a report of United 93’s hijacking and crash in Pennsylvania. He, too, is thrilled to think that his spouse is dead. 

Even with five years’ distance from the attacks, to imagine New Yorkers experiencing happiness on that terrible day still seems like an act of minor treason. In the collective soul-searching among writers and critics in the months following 9/11, there was, for a time, a prevailing sense that the attacks defied explanation or examination aside from the most literal — newspaper accounts and the 9/11 Commission Report. There was the official censure of criticism — comedian and Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher was fired by ABC after he questioned the bravery of the U.S. administration, for “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” But even worse, there was a kind of glum suspicion that art might be altogether irrelevant. Novels and films were considered frivolous diversions in the face of the attacks and the wars that followed them. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter was quick to pronounce irony dead. In his 2003 memoir-like novel, Windows on the World, French author Frédéric Beigbeder, wrote, “Since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it.”

Author Ken Kalfus. (Michael Ahearn/HarperCollins Canada)

Now, all this handwringing over “the end of art” and singularity of 9/11 seems arrogantly out of touch with history. Just as novelists tackled previous global horrors like the First World War and the holocaust, so did they in the months following 9/11 find ways to fictionalize aspects of that, too. Two notable offerings were Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, both published in early 2005 to great critical approval.

Still, of the many literary treatments of 9/11 that have followed, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country might be the first to approach it through the lens of satire. Kalfus, a native New Yorker who currently resides in Philadelphia with his family, began writing the novel as a short story a few weeks after the attacks. It came out of his need to deflect “the overwhelming force of 9/11 culture. [The only way] to understand things better was to look at them differently,” he says over the phone from his home.

“The first week after 9/11, editors were calling writers like myself and asking us, ‘Can you write something about this?’ I felt that I didn’t have a single thought in my head that I hadn’t heard on TV, or on the radio, or had read in newspapers. It took me a couple of weeks before I could think on my own clearly.”

And what came to Kalfus, author of the acclaimed 2003 novel The Commissariat of Enlightenment, were a series of stories he’d been hearing from friends about bitter divorces. “I’d been interested in how public events and private lives connect with each other, particularly in contemporary history,” he says. “One of the aspects of human existence is that our individual day-to-day lives are bigger to us than events we read about in the newspapers. If you’re having a fight with your spouse, it might take up a good deal more of your attention than the crisis in Darfur. This is not meant to call people selfish, but it’s the basis of human existence. We’re animals who are very individualistic and only tenuously social.”

That’s an apt description for Joyce and Marshall, both so consumed with their enmity and bitterness, they are blind to everything else — war, anthrax scares and the Enron scandal can’t distract them. Joyce wants to “ruin [Marshall], not only financially, but personally, and not just for now, but forever.” As for Marshall: “he could have written sonnets of hatred.” Caught in the middle are their children, “products of their former love, their marriage’s fatal complication, their divorce’s civilian casualties.” The kids’ playtime consists of drawing pictures of burning buildings and jumping off porches holding hands in a game called “9/11.”

(HarperCollins Canada)

While other artists have pulled their focus back, searching for a broader meaning in the attacks, Kalfus zooms right in to the day-to-day, consuming battle between this rather unlikeable couple. Here, one of the prevailing themes is not war as a metaphor for divorce, but divorce as a metaphor for war: “feelings between Joyce and Marshall acquired the intensity of something historic, tribal, and ethnic, and when they watched news of wars on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think, yes, yes, yes, that’s how I feel about you.” For Joyce and Marshall, there is not a single international crisis that can’t be reduced to the level of their break-up. At a bachelor party, Marshall goes on at length about Israel, delivering a questioning, and at times, anti-Semitic challenge to America’s support of the nation. But he does it for his own narrow ends — he’s trying to drive a wedge between Joyce’s sister and her Jewish fiancé as revenge against Joyce’s family.

If Kalfus has a larger mission it lies in his insistent, surgical evisceration of his country’s blinders-on patriotism and lock-step sentimentality that has made every citizen a heroic victim. He doesn’t short-change the tumult of genuine shock, horror, fear, anger and generosity in the days that followed the attack. Joyce’s co-workers volunteer in soup kitchens, feeding rescue workers, and in the evenings engage in passionate, end-of-the-world “terror sex.” But Kalfus also takes a jab at the self-important, intoxicating thrill of claiming victimhood. A friend dramatically recounts to Joyce his experience of being grounded in Florida when all U.S. flights were cancelled, as though he was “a significant actor — a victim — in the September 11 tragedy”; and she wonders, “Was everyone walking around America thinking he had been personally attacked by the terrorists, and that was the patriotic thing of course, but patriotic metaphors aside, wasn’t the belief a bit delusional?”

Yet, as grim as all this sounds, there is a wonderful kind of compassion, affection even, in Kalfus’s rendering of 9/11’s survivors. His description of Marshall’s escape from the World Trade Center is written with economy and control, and it beautifully, devastatingly, captures the scale of the carnage: “Ashy flakes fell on a carpet of ash inches deep, covering fleeing footprints. Objects burned in the ash, pieces of industrial-like machinery, pieces of concrete that had fallen from the towers, and some other things that required another moment to be identified. They were human body parts, yes, and with them whole bodies scattered on the slate pavement blocks.” At the scene, Marshall tries to help another man who is near-immobile with shock. It’s a selfless, heroic act — but it doesn’t, thank goodness, redeem Marshall. He pretty much remains a jerk — bankrupting Joyce’s retirement fund and even constructing a suicide bomb with an eye to killing them both. Kalfus never lets his characters be anything less than hopelessly human — flawed, greedy, stupid and, sometimes, generous and loving. Mostly, they are lost and achingly aware of it — which is, oddly, uplifting. 

“Responding to this whole media frenzy about all the heroes of 9/11, everyone who was killed was supposedly a perfect spouse, a perfect father, mother, colleague,” Kalfus says. “This whole glorification of people was at odds with how people really are and it disturbed me. People live complicated, messy lives. A tragedy like this defines the victims not by the way they lived, but by the way they died.”

And the great danger in doing so, he says, is that it plays into the same impulse that made the al-Qaeda attacks possible: that dying has more meaning than living. “You end up creating a culture of death. The honoured dead [become] superior to the living who schlep along. And that’s exactly the kind of culture that breeds suicide bombers and plane hijackers.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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