fact meets fiction

It has taken more than three years for the horror of the destruction of the World Trade Centre to become the subject of literary fiction.

Only now are the events of September 11 making their way into fiction. Edward Wyatt considers some of the implications of writing about real events

This is a story of what happens to those who write fiction when terrible facts intrude on their world. In time, inevitably, cold truth is recast and reshaped into literature. After three years of near silence about the attacks of September 11, the literary world has begun to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

A half-dozen novels that use September 11 and its aftermath as central elements of their plot or setting, from some of the most acclaimed literary novelists and the most respected publishing houses, are being released this year. A similar number have made their way into bookstores in the past few months.

In Windows on the World (Fourth Estate) Frederic Beigbeder imagines a divorced father's breakfast with his sons at the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Centre.

In The Good Priest's Son (Scribner, June), Reynolds Price tells of an art conservator whose flight back to the United States is diverted to Nova Scotia on the morning of September 11, while his apartment in Lower Manhattan is blasted with debris.

In Ian McEwan's Saturday (Jonathan Cape), saturated with a sense of dread that makes any calamity into a possible act of terrorism, a father and daughter debate whether Iraq had anything to do with September 11.

The Writing on the Wall by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint Press, June), portrays a librarian whose cloistered world is ripped apart as she walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and sees a plane hit the trade centre.

And in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Hamish Hamilton, July) by Jonathan Safran Foer, an indefatigable nine-year-old searches the city for a lock that fits a key he found in the closet of his father, who died in the attack.

The events of September 11 found their way into a variety of media immediately after the attacks. Country musicians released flag-waving songs within weeks, and other musical tributes, poems, plays, documentaries and non-fiction books soon followed, including Bruce Springsteen's elegy The Rising and Michael Moore's incendiary film Fahrenheit 9/11.

And while the attacks have already found a place in a handful of mysteries, spy novels and other works of mass-market fiction, only now are books being published that some literary critics are saying take the substantial risks needed to give them staying power.

The delay of more than three years reflects the logistics of producing a bound volume of a lengthy manuscript and the more subtle, complex process of creating a novel.

"Some art forms, like poems or the drawings of Art Spiegelman, lend themselves to a more immediate treatment of an event like 9/11," said James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University. "But a novel really has to do more. A novelist has to sustain a story that feels right to people who actually lived through the event, who have a sense of what really happened. It has to be more than just a recounting of the event."

By no means is that an easy task, of course. Joyce Carol Oates, the author and critic whose recent short story The Mutants (published in her collection, I am No One You Know) dealt with a woman trapped in her Lower Manhattan apartment on September 11, said novels might not be the form best able to deal with the events of that day.

"This does seem to be about the right time for these novels to be coming out," Oates said. "But the greatest art form to deal with this might be film, because it can capture the hallucinatory nature of the long hours of that siege."

None of the literary novels related to September 11 have yet attracted large readerships. But given the popularity of previous books by McEwan and Foer, that seems likely to change.

Foer's free-form, surreal prose style might come as close as possible to Oates' hallucinatory ideal. His coming novel includes blank pages, pages with a single sentence on them, pages of nothing but numbers and numerous photographs, including a series of doctored images made to look like a body falling from the top of the World Trade Centre. Other related books, such as Windows on the World and The Third Brother by Nick McDonell, also attempt literal representations of scenes from September 11.

Some authors take a more figurative approach: McEwan's novel, which takes place long after September 11, opens with a cataclysmic event that is assumed to be a terrorist act.

Windows on the World, has already been a bestseller in Beigbeder's home country, France, despite the tensions between it and the United States over the aftermath of September 11.

Of the attacks, Beigbeder recalled: "Many people here said, 'It's their turn. They deserve it'. No one deserves something like 9/11. But if a catastrophe happens, we have to make it useful, so that we can try to make it never happen again. We have to understand it, and that is why I wrote this novel."

Using fiction and imaginary characters can sometimes make an overwhelming event feel human. But with so many people personally connected to those who were killed, taking a reader inside a World Trade Centre tower, as Beigbeder has, can evoke hostile reactions.

"I've had people say it is really obscene and disgusting to do that," he said. "But that is the idea of writing fiction about history. It is always shocking. We should not be afraid of writing about what is important."

McDonell, the 21-year-old author whose acclaimed first novel, Twelve, was published when he was a teenager, said he knew almost immediately after September 11 that he would make it the subject of a book.

"I started taking notes the day after," McDonell said. "I spent a bunch of time downtown. I walked around the site, and I talked to everybody I know who'd been down there."

He also read the commission report, as did Beigbeder. And when he retreated to Hawaii for three months last year to write the novel, he found himself spending a lot of time talking to soldiers who were preparing to ship out to Iraq.

Both authors say they were warned away from the topic, by friends, editors and others. Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said that in McDonell's case, "I was a little worried about him trying to take on that subject."

"I feared it would overwhelm him a little bit," Entrekin said. "He's so young; 2001 is ages ago to him." But the resulting book, written in three parts, with the middle section set on September 11 - as the lead character speeds downtown in search of his brother - is "incredibly powerful", said Entrekin.

Oates and Shapiro say that while there is no good rule about how much time has to pass before an event such as September 11 can be properly considered in fiction, the best novels that focus on cataclysmic events have taken years to develop.

All Quiet on the Western Front appeared 11 years after the end of World War I for example, while Catch-22 took 16 years to gestate and capture the absurdities of World War II. One of the seminal novels about Vietnam, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, appeared in 1990, roughly two decades after the events it portrayed.

While Shakespeare's plays often engaged what was going on politically at the time in England and in Europe, Shapiro said, literature is also full of "forced readings" of contemporary topics, in which writers "engaged events in oblique ways that are not as relevant in retrospect as it was thought at the time".

With September 11, he said, "somebody has to come along and see something that happened at that moment in a way that is new to the people who breathed it, who felt it and who saw it again and again on television".

- New York Times