The Way We Live Now

In September 1945, on the eve of the United States’ victory over Japan, the architect Philip Johnston suggested an unlikely war memorial that would not only commemorate the fallen but also usher in an era of reconstruction – a mound of dirt. Johnson’s nomination, which appeared in Art News, was neither facetious nor ironic: the mound of dirt, according to him, would capture the social attitude of the post-war reconstruction decades, the endlessly renewing hope and the very American possibility of starting anew after tragedy. As Johnson claimed, this monument ‘offers an unique opportunity for that most American of modern tools, the bulldozer, which could build mounds many times the size of the prehistoric ones in considerably less time’.¹

Interestingly, this medium of remembrance, when viewed today, is ironic and darkly portentous, considering how writers write about twenty-first-century tragedies – 9/11, most prominently and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Memory work following war and catastrophe in our current age, it seems, takes an unplanned, improvised course, in contrast to the careful planning that went into war memorials following the Second World War in the United States. In an article in Harper’s Magazine written six months after the World Trade Center attacks, Don DeLillo describes the physical and psychological detritus of 9/11 as the ‘ruins of the future’, as a narrative that ‘ends in rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative’.²

Similarly, writing of Katrina and the reconstruction of New Orleans in a 2005 essay in the New York Times, Richard Ford grappled with the lack of words and the absence of a narrative of loss: ‘It’s not like anything. It’s what it is.’ ‘All memory resolves itself in a gaze’, Ford quotes the poet Richard Hugo, but now the only gaze that makes sense (as if sense could ever help heal, he adds) is that of ‘a woman standing waist-deep in a glistening toxic current with a whole city’s possessions all floating about, her own belongings in a white plastic bag, and who has no particular reason for hope, and so is just staring up’.³

‘Something will be there when the water recedes’, Ford writes, reminding us of DeLillo’s version of remembrance – that people’s narratives will be salvaged from the rubble, and it seems that the bulldozer that Johnson envisioned as a symbol of optimism and endeavour is again needed. However, it is not to pave over the past and plant in the mound a new future, but to excavate the remains, dig up a suppressed history of trauma, and piece together from fragments a revised narrative.

Literature’s response to September 11, 2001 is the subject of Kathy Knapp’s intelligent and timely book American Unexceptionalism. Knapp’s argument is that, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, writers of the suburban literary tradition manifested deeper engagement with the wider world by responding to the aftershocks of the attacks within what had previously been thought of as a politically and historically disengaged space – the American suburb. This engagement is through the birth of a new breed of suburban, white, middle-aged everyman.

A reworked archetype of the heroic American male emerges in post-9/11 suburban fiction, except now, in this new age of insecurity, precariousness, and fear of terror, the all-American hero is not an alienated individual, confronted by existential qualms and a sense of his own exceptionalism. He is very much connected to an anxious society – a society gripped by a sense of precariousness following the catastrophe. This new everyman, faced with his own redundancy and an awareness that his privileged existence has blinded him to the struggles of the marginal and the disenfranchised, learns to care about what happens beyond his suburban borders and also...