SOURCE: Kirn, Walter. “Notes on the Darkest Day.” New York Times Book Review (8 September 2002): section 7, p. 7.

[In the following review, Kirn assesses various literary works about or inspired by the September 11 terrorist attacks.]

The first question, and the toughest one to answer, about the great drifts of Sept. 11 books now blowing into stores and libraries, is why do we need even one book about what happened when we saw the whole awful thing happen for ourselves, again and again, in telephoto detail, and we saw it so recently, just 12 months ago? Can the books help us remember? We haven't forgotten—and for those who wish to relive things anyhow and achieve a catharsis that wasn't possible during that lurching, dissociated morning, television has powers that print can't match. Can the books help us move on? It feels too soon for that. Can they place the disaster in context? Well, contexts change—faster than ever these days, and often violently. Before a reader can finish even one of the countless first-anniversary publications, we may be at war with Iraq, or under attack again. When the floor is still heaving, it's tough to take the long view.

Still, here they are, like flowers after a funeral. We knew they were coming, and that they'd come in quantity, because that's how the publishing industry works now: it doesn't just seize its moments, it engulfs them. And what's so wrong about doing business as usual? Post-9/11 and pre-whatever comes next, McDonald's is still frying up Big Macs and Calvin Klein is still dreaming up evening dresses. Inertia can be an expression of the life force. It's also wise to remember that there's a difference between the books about Sept. 11 and the catastrophe itself—otherwise the very act of criticism can feel a bit unseemly, if not shameful. A green chameleon is not a leaf, and literature isn't life; it only hides in it.

Before losing oneself in the thickets of their particulars, it helps to sort the books into clusters and look for general patterns. One of the themes that emerge from the first pile that comes to hand—the thoughtful literary anthologies—is the Balkanization of the American mind. Though it's said that misfortune brings people together and inspires them to forget their differences, the following string of titles may convince one that tragedy—or at least the act of writing about it—also unleashes an urgent counterdrive to retreat into cliques and clans. To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11. 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero.

Everyone needs a home team, heaven knows, but these assertions of collective identity based on gender, geography and who knows what else obscure the basic sameness of the three books. All rake together short essays, riffs and poems by writers who, rather too often, seem more affected by the singular wonders of their own beings than by external events.

Quite a few of the pieces open in the same way, with down-to-the-wallpaper-pattern re-creations of the authors' surroundings and circumstances at the instant they heard or saw the news. Here is Phillip Lopate writing in 110 Stories: “My first inkling of an attack on the Twin Towers came from the FedEx man.” Here is Judy Dworin in To Mend the World—a title I find presumptuous and rather too grand: “It is September 11, what seems like a typical Tuesday morning. I am getting ready to meet my performance ensemble for our twice-weekly rehearsals at Trinity College.” And finally Rick Moody, from Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond, a compilation by the editors of Salon.com: “Up in the Endowment offices, we convened, and we amounted to 12 or so novelists, including some people I have long admired. We were just getting organized, when. …”

Is shock the enemy of originality? The deepest impression left by these brief takes, many commissioned by newspapers or magazines within a few days or weeks of the attacks, is just how swiftly convention and cliche imprint themselves on the chaos of experience. This may be the human mind's fault, not the writers'. They say that the last words of crashing airplane pilots tend to consist of the same obscenities. What's more, in terms of literary morality, the sudden, fiery demise of thousands may not be the time for innovative prose. Who wants to write a masterpiece in fresh blood?

So much solipsism grows tiring, though. When A. M. Homes, in 110 Stories, tells us that “in the seconds after the second plane hit Tower Two, I did two things, filled the bathtub with water and pulled out my camera,” it's hard not to wonder why she feels we care. That one can be flossing one's teeth or feeding the cat when tragedy strikes and history spins sideways is a perennial human astonishment, but a couple of examples make the point, and surely these writers know that there are thousands. Why pile another speck of dirt on Everest just because it happens to be one's own speck?

The brainier of the 9/11 instant essayists don't stop at bearing witness to events; they also attempt, in the manner of art critics, to divine the disaster's semiotic mysteries—maybe because they sense that intellectualism is all that creative writers have to offer now that TV has taken over their roles as portraitists and conduits of emotion. “The Attack—what else can I call it?,” writes Moody, “is a web of narratives that buckles at the World Trade Center.” That's lofty stuff, an impressive bit of abstraction under fire, but it's jarring, too—like spotting a gentleman in tweeds on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.

Then there's Erica Jong, who, in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, grapples with the unfamiliar by falling back on Freudian fatuities: “Two hijacked planes blasted into the double phallic symbol of the World Trade Center, raped our innocence and let us know how vulnerable we really are.” Jong writes as if all this took place in our subconscious, not downtown New York. Those phallic symbols had people in them.

First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in his slim little book The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. “In terms of collective drama,” he writes, “we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.” It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.

Baudrillard and his ilk make one grateful for Harlan Ellison, the science-fiction novelist, who tells a story in September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero of being invited to appear on the TV show “Politically Incorrect” just weeks after the attacks. Ellison accepts, eager to promote his name, but then realizes shortly before the taping that he has nothing to say, and begs off. The producers go ape, but Ellison stands fast. There is such a thing as heroic modesty.

With some exceptions—Denis Johnson's simple, plain-spoken entry in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, which asks us to spare a thought for the third world, whose devastations may no longer seem so alien; Sam Lipsyte's odd short story, “The Grief Technician,” in 110 Stories, about a man who cheers up the bereaved by speaking ill of their departed relatives; Phillip Robertson's punch-drunk wartime postcard, “Panic at the Bangi Bridge,” in Afterwords—these first-response reflections on terrorism have a strained, hurry-up-and-say-something-memorable feeling. One suspects that events caught these authors napping just like almost everybody else, but, being literary professionals, they felt obliged to snap out of it immediately and hit their keyboards, like pianists on the Titanic. Play us something. Play us anything.

The books put together by working journalists, who tend to get outside more than the creative types and whose editors are freer with the red pencil, seem more likely to last for a while on the shelves. What We Saw, a production of CBS News, is an unadorned volume of transcripts from TV broadcasts, photographs and newspaper columns and articles. Its goal is to compress and organize, and it's packaged with a DVD that combines long clips from that crazy morning's breaking news with 60 Minutes pieces that came later, all of this cut with narration by Dan Rather.

Lazily, I watched the coverage first and found myself freshly overwhelmed by the dreamlike escalation of tension as a big but nevertheless conventional story (building on fire!) bulged and warped into something unrecognizable. I was frightened all over again, but it felt manageable—a nauseating thrill ride, not a car crash—because now I know what happened next, approximately, but back then I didn't know anything. Just dread. Sadly, the DVD spoiled me for the book.

A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath is a glossier, bulkier, more imposing volume. The eloquent excerpts from the paper's coverage, organized under generic headlines—“Among the Ruins,” “The Mayor Takes Charge”—hold the door for the astonishing pictures. One, a satellite view of the city taken on Sept. 12, shows what seems like a small campfire's worth of smoke rising from infinite grids of city blocks and snaking waterways. Instead of an unbearable inferno, we see a passing irritation in the mighty continuum of existence—a perspective that the emotions recoil at but the spirit welcomes. My favorite picture is tiny: a natty businessman, square-jawed, statuesque and holding a black briefcase, striding through a choking dust cloud hand in hand with a woman whom one guesses he's just met. His frown is severe, almost gargoylish, yet oddly dignified. He will not be broken. He will not run. And, damn it, someone will pay; he'll help see to it.

There are also diagrams and graphics that present, in the style of a popular science textbook, the structural fine points of the Towers' collapse, an enemy mountain bunker and the flight paths of the hijacked planes. The whole product feels rounded off and reassuring, demonstrating the triumph of common competence and established procedures over absurdity and mayhem. Its subliminal lesson is: We can handle this, too. When the book shifts to Afghanistan and the war, the tone becomes less unified and driven, though. Now that it's the United States that's doing the killing, some ambivalence naturally creeps in. Still, paging through the book brought back childhood memories of cold-war vintage Time-Life books on World War II. Despite seeing the gouged concrete and tumbling bodies, I felt a bit safer under The System's roof. That may be an illusion, but I was grateful for it.

Dean E. Murphy's September 11: An Oral History, a collection of first-person accounts by survivors, emergency workers and a few lucky souls who were late for work that day or changed their travel plans at the last minute, offers a messier version of the trauma. In one ghastly tale that puts to rest the notion that those who were first on the scene will someday find “closure,” a weary medic doing triage duty reaches a woman so profoundly maimed that only her head and one shoulder still look human. After he fits her with a black tag to indicate that she's beyond help, she roars at him in outrage “I am not dead!,” then continues to holler as he moves away.

A number of stories, some a trifle rambling, recount the decisions—to bolt or to sit tight—that spared their authors or doomed their neighbors. In general, the people who obeyed their fears made out better than those who reasoned them away, but it would be foolish to take a lesson from this. The savage god of the roulette wheel ruled the Towers that day, not providence, as the witnesses repeatedly testify. Murphy, a reporter for The New York Times who was on the scene that day, takes this preoccupation with chance too far, though, in his section “Narrow Escapes,” about people who should have been there that morning but weren't. Escape is escape. All close calls are wide enough. Replaying them for chills is a trivial amusement.

Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, another visual history—more than 800 pages long and approximately the dimensions of a VCR—is an adult-oriented art object. Its hundreds of full-page photos were shot by amateurs, many equipped with inferior equipment, and exhibited in a downtown Manhattan gallery. The spirit is democratic, egalitarian. The book cherishes haphazard, unfiltered experience.

The photos that stop one cold are not the grisly shots, though there are plenty of these—including a close-up of a severed leg that provoked in me a complicated reaction. Knowing that there are contemporary artists who work, to great fanfare and profitable controversy, in the medium of animal body parts somehow prejudiced me toward the picture and made me wonder if maybe Jesse Helms and his good-old-boy circle don't have a point. Spending one's capacity for revulsion at fashionable biennial group shows can leave it depleted when life unleashes real horrors.

The shots that slipped past my defenses were common snapshots done in the all-American tourist style, with someone standing stiffly in the foreground and, in the background, where Mount Rushmore should be, two partially demolished tall buildings in flames. History takes a moment to catch up with people, and vice versa, and here we have the evidence—terrorism as private Kodak moment. The pictures don't come off as callous, though. They document the all-too-human lag between our wooden, habit-bound old selves and our delicate, still-fluid new ones.

But for all of its virtues, the book repulsed me slightly. It's one deluxe item, a coffee-table monolith, and it calls to mind those smarmy funeral directors who equate respect for the dead with fancy coffins. The rough-edged photos inside may show humanity, but the sleek, showpiece packaging made me clench my teeth. Maybe the thing to do is cut the pages out and clip them into an ordinary ring binder.

So much for pictures—back to words. Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001, from Jihad to Ground Zero, by Richard Bernstein and the staff of The New York Times, is straight reporting with an ambitious difference. (If praising more than one publication associated with this newspaper seems to cast doubt on my critical independence, I understand, but I can't fudge my true opinions for appearance' sake.) Bernstein takes myriad stories on the attacks, their perpetrators, their victims and the rise of Islamic extremism and tries to join them in one long piece of fabric, the way a hard-working realistic novelist might. He establishes reoccurring characters, engineers plotlines, paces for suspense and cuts back and forth between action and exposition. Where there are gaps in his knowledge, he lets them show, though—he doesn't let seamlessness become a fetish. He does his best to turn what we know so far, whether we learned it months or years ago, in scattered bits or all at once, into a tale we can carry in our heads and perhaps return to when we're confused.

It works, and it feels like a necessary project. The morning papers dice up time, reacting to events as they occur and offering scant sense of what's to come, but long retrospective narratives like Bernstein's convey momentum and inevitability. He gives us Mohamed Atta in Berlin, once the obedient, disciplined good son of a somewhat taxing, ambitious father, coming into his own as a steely holy warrior. He follows airline pilots into their cockpits, secretaries to their cubicles, frequent fliers to their window seats, and then traces the longer, even more fateful journeys of certain fiery Middle Eastern clerics from their jail cells in Egypt to their new American mosques. Why couldn't we see how these vectors would converge, even approximately? We could, the book answers; we just didn't. Intelligence failure? It was certainly that, Bernstein shows, but also much more. By skipping around in the book of recent history and focusing on the chapters about ourselves, particularly the exciting, flattering ones, we missed the important part: the plot.

It would be impossible to summarize even one-tenth of the 9/11 books that we suddenly have to choose from. No matter how specialized a reader's interests, there is at least one title that addresses them. There are books about the disaster's religious dimensions, its effects on the practice of journalism and its repercussions. Quite a number of books have political axes to grind—axes that, in many cases, were already poised and quite sharp before last fall and merely use what happened as something to chop at. (I'm sure that almost any great social tragedy, as long as its victims were Americans, would have caused Monsieur Baudrillard to grab his pen and deploy it in a similar fashion.) Catastrophe may bring out the best in people (some of them) but it also brings out, with a fresh intensity, whatever was in them anyway.

One ghostly side effect of the Towers' collapse was all the paper that fell across the city. Memos, invoices, Post-it Notes and letters floated on the winds as far as Brooklyn, where they settled, some still intact and perfectly readable, on cars and stoops and sidewalks. That these documents should survive, but not their makers, seemed almost too painful to bear, yet people kept these scraps—stuck them in albums, slid them into drawers—because there wasn't much else to hang on to.

Just words on paper, falling from the sky.