E. L. Doctorow and 9/11: Negotiating Personal and National Narratives in "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" and Andrew's Brain

Often termed a historical novelist and even a philosopher of history by literary critics,¹ E. L. Doctorow sometimes puzzles over peculiar moments in American history in novels such as The Book of Daniel and Ragtime, and much of his historical fiction gestures toward the dynamic relationship between fact and fiction. As Doctorow puts it in "False Documents," "history shares with fiction a mode of mediating the world for the purpose of introducing meaning."² As a result, "there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: There is only narrative."³ Yet after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Doctorow extends his thematic focus on the relationship between fact and fiction, developing an interest in the peculiar relationship between personal and national narratives that inform and give shape to historical fiction—a relationship that manifested in particularly noteworthy ways following the attacks. On the one hand, Doctorow sees the historical significance of 9/11 to the nation and to the world, calling 9/11 "an extraordinary event" that "is just the beginning of things" and that "marks the beginning of the twenty-first century."⁴ Likewise, in discussing Andrew's Brain, a 2014 novel about the post-9/11 period, Doctorow underscores that writing about 9/11 involves writing about the nation and national history in a broader sense: "I think of myself really as a national novelist, as an American novelist writing about my country."⁵ On the other hand, Doctorow sees how local experiences and individual losses shaped—and continue to shape—the atrocity. He observes that in Lamentation 9/11, a non-fictional work about the terrorist attacks in his New York home, he sought to chronicle the "act of lamentation" that "came up spontaneously from the people."⁶ At the beginning of what he sees as a new era in American national history, he fashions himself as what Lucy Bond calls "a twenty-first-century Whitman, sowing unity among New York's disparate residents" by way of sentimental text about everyday citizens written as a complement to David Finn's post-9/11 photography of New York.⁷

This article considers the ways in which Doctorow's writing about 9/11 speaks to 9/11 novels about the politics and problems of the public/private binary.⁸ It analyzes the interplay between personal and national narratives in Doctorow's two fictional works that address 9/11 and post-9/11 America: "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," first published in 2004, and Andrew's Brain. I argue that both works expose the unreliability of narratives produced in post-9/11 America or as a result of 9/11, and they do so in order to explore new possibilities for post-9/11 personal and American national identity. Whereas "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" represents protagonist FBI special agent B.W. Molloy's attempts to unearth elusive truths amid "pattern[s] of obstruction" in the national narrative created by the U.S. government,⁹ Andrew, the narrator of Andrew's Brain, himself creates obstructive patterns in his unreliable narration of his personal post-9/11 experiences. These patterns of obstruction may emerge out of a simple desire for play, out of post-9/11 right-wing corruption or absurdity, out of madness induced by the trauma of 9/11, or out of some combination thereof, and whether they are endorsed by systems of power as dominant narratives or not, they produce noteworthy effects. In "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," they create detrimental consequences on the local or personal level that complement those that terrorism produced and produces; in Andrew's Brain, they create opportunities for personal stories to connect with the national narrative of America in potentially productive ways, but arguably, they also fracture identity, perhaps irreparably. Ultimately, however, Doctorow posits in both texts that "ordinary citizens" have opportunities to counter the negative effects of these patterns of obstruction via everyday action as opposed to negligent complacency or sustained delusion (133). By...