Besides the endless and illuminating permutations of its central metaphor, "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" also features some of the best fiction writing yet about Sept. 11, worth celebrating for its utter lack of cant and self-regarding weepiness. Kalfus' description of Marshall's escape from the World Trade Center is harrowing without melodrama, but perhaps more daring is his willingness to tweak us for our less noble responses to the attacks. He writes about the surreptitious thrills ordinary people got out of their contact with heroic firefighters and federal investigations, and the way everyone seemed to want a piece of the big event, no matter how tenuous their connection, like the man who tells Joyce all about being stranded in Atlanta on Sept. 11:

"Joyce realized he considered himself a significant actor -- a victim -- in the September 11 tragedy. And didn't she think she was a victim too? After all, she had seen the buildings fall, with her own helplessly naked eyes. She was supposed to have been on one of the planes. But so what. Every American felt that 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? There was a difference between being killed and not being killed. Was everyone walking around America thinking they had been intimately, self-importantly, involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center?"

It sure seemed like it. We didn't seem to learn much from the experience, either, but then how much can anyone grasp about what's really going on when they're at war? "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own until the reasons for continuing it ("If we leave, my comrades will have died in vain," and so on) become entirely self-perpetuating.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:15 AM  |