Following the Christmas day bombing plot (and the new intensified security measures for air travel), our minds have turned back to 9/11. We’ve been thinking about what’s changed and what hasn’t since 2001. . . and how 9/11 has figured in fiction. To pursue some of these questions, we turned to ASF contributor J. M. Tyree, whose poignant, probing novel Futures concerns the aftermath of the attacks. (We published an excerpt of Tyree’s novel in our Fall 2009 issue, which is available for a limited time here.)
ASF: Futures is a 9/11 novel, but it’s quite different from other 9/11 novels out there—Netherland, A Gate at the Stairs, to name two. In many ways, it’s much more direct about the experience about being in the Towers during the attacks. Can you talk about some of the decisions you made when writing this novel? How did you approach 9/11—and what did you feel like needed to be expressed or included?
JMT: What happened to me was this. I started writing an historical novel—it later became a short story—set in World War II about an American bomber crew flying missions from England to Germany in order to devastate cities. But at a certain point, I thought to myself, Why am I writing all this stuff about bombings? And the answer of course was September 11. So I wound up feeling that it would be dishonest not to write something more direct. I wanted to avoid setting any part of my story in the Towers on the day of the attacks, so I chose an unfolding moment of crisis one year later, around the anniversary of the attacks, for my main character and narrator, David Wolder. Believe me, I’ve imagined dozens of ways in which my characters could have been working in another building. . .
I find it fascinating that September 11 has repelled good fiction and actually ruined so many novels. Publishers really hate the subject, I imagine that it’s like handing their marketing departments lumps of toxic waste and saying, Tell folks how they might like to curl up with these! For myself, I wanted to write something unacceptable. Whether it’s any good or not as a work of fiction, this book was something I needed to write.
It seems fake for anyone working on a contemporary novel to write as though September 11 didn’t happen. Perhaps one reason for the increasing interest in historical fiction, futuristic fiction, and genre fiction is that many writers don’t like writing fiction about the world we’re actually living in right now. Add to all this the fact that the events and their aftermath hold such minefields of dishonesty, sentimentality, politics, and cliché. But until I completed my book I really had to avoid reading other works of fiction about September 11. Since then, I’ve read and admired many things about Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and Deborah Eisenberg’s short story “Twilight of the Superheroes.” In both DeLillo and O’Neill, the stories work best as their distance from September 11 lengthens, which is also fascinating, I think.
ASF: Two characters, David and Vanessa, connect over a Fitzgerald quote early in the novel: “You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.” What did you draw from Fitzgerald for Futures? And what were other literary influences?
JMT: Fitzgerald’s words in The Great Gatsby—about wishing “the world to be in uniform and at a kind of moral attention forever”—resonated with my own feelings about the atrocity perpetrated against the city I was living in. Gatsby also was my inspiration for a story that involves a narrator who tries to understand another character who is more directly involved in a tragedy—my Gatsby-like figure, the narrator’s boss, Astley, is directly caught up in the attacks and their aftermath, he loses someone he cares deeply for and tries to find evidence of her disappearance when none is available. An observer who wasn’t there, my narrator, David, yearns to understand, while other people around him with direct experience are too damaged to have distance and perspective.
ASF: I am so intrigued by this image of America post-9/11, the nightmare vision of convalescence that comes at the end of the novel. David thinks, “Before, I thought I had been convalescing from a long illness, slowly, but now I began to wonder if the convalescence was the thing keeping me from recovering, if that was possible.” He mentions a polluted sickroom. Could you talk about this image? How did you come upon the language of illness to talk about this moment?
JMT: After the attacks, many people I knew or encountered in New York seemed to wake up with a new-found sense of purpose. There were all these soul-searching articles in business magazines about executives spending more time with their families. There were no ads for awhile in The New York Times, you just had these outpourings of grief. It was eerie to recognize in retrospect that many people were strangely energized, like after a car accident, deluded and traumatized, to all appearances in control of themselves, but saying and doing crazy things. The long slow process of returning to “normal” was like watching the implosion of a great national epiphany that couldn’t last. All the enlightened talk and high-mindedness corroded into old habits. It hurt to feel this happening. That was the moment I wanted most to write about, what happens after the aftermath. It’s easy to ridicule the notion that “everything changed” on that day. But I think for individual people who were deeply affected there was a kind of long slow process of collapse that happened months or even years later. It’s something that rarely gets talked about or written about. Two years ago, the AP estimated that up to 70,000 people still have post-traumatic stress related to September 11. And the body count still continues to rise, if you think about the cleanup crews or the cops and firefighters with lung diseases, cancers, and other diseases related to the site.
J. M. Tyree currently works as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He is a Writer-at-Large for Film Quarterly. You can listen to him read for KQED’s The Writer’s Block here.
