A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel

Hostile heights of Brooklyn

Ken Kalfus's second novel is the most original to be written about America's moral climate in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jay McInerney and, more recently, Claire Messud and Deborah Eisenberg have employed the attacks as a new metonymy of conventional anxiety -- the inevitable death's-head figure for any fiction set in the present. Kalfus, however, is the first to take on the cliched idea that the terrorists really did inaugurate a new order and that the world, or at least our minds, changed the morning after.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country begins by dismantling such consoling fictions with speed and deadpan humour. Marshall Harriman works for an unnamed company in the World Trade Center. His wife, Joyce, does business in California. They are also in the middle of one of those epic divorces that one hopes only exist in novels. Both are out to "win", so, acting on lawyers' instructions, neither will make any concession to even the simplest human decency. The chief prize is a small apartment in the now fancy Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood, purchased at the beginning of the boom in New York's housing market. Since they both know they could never afford a similar place individually, and since neither can stand the thought of the other enjoying anything ever again, neither will leave. Thus they remain, waiting for an ever-receding court date, condemned by their enmity to live with each other. On September 11, 2001, Marshall is late for work and so arrives in time to attempt to pull a less lucky soul from the rubble. Joyce is supposed to fly to San Francisco on United 93, but her client cancels at the last minute. She watches the second plane crash into her husband's tower from the safety of her office. While everyone around them stares in horrified disbelief, the unhappy couple experience the aftermath of the attack as a moment of breathless freedom. Each will be disappointed to discover the other is still alive.

Already at war with each other on September 10, Joyce and Marshall begin to treat global events as grand expressions of their domestic unhappiness. Joyce fantasizes about "terror sex" with firemen and FBI agents, although she laments that she's only managed to have "terror Cherry Garcia"; when the first war in Afghanistan starts, she begins to take an interest in tribal culture and discovers a local Afghan restaurant where she will later seduce Marshall's best friend. Marshall, meanwhile, purchases surveillance equipment and, in imitation of Enron, tampers with Joyce's pension fund.

After several such scenes, Joyce's and Marshall's historical hysteria begins to feel like an authorial imposition. Only too-thoroughly fictional characters can so utterly fool themselves into incarnating the spirit of the age. Yet Kalfus is on to something: Americans really did learn to speak "history" after September 11, often in the most appalling and ludicrous ways. Perhaps because ordinary citizens were not asked to do anything out of the ordinary to help win the war, everyday life became imbued with a mythical metaphorical relevance to America's struggle against evil. Both drivers of pickup trucks and war protesters were accused of being enemy agents.

Various "idiot watches", conspiracy theories, and juvenile name-calling passed for public debate in the mass media. Kalfus has tracked the process by which annoying neighbours become enemies of the State before, in PU-239, his collection of short stories about ordinary people in the former Soviet Union -the state that made "History" both a religion and all-purpose excuse for unjustifiable actions. That post-9/11 America so readily presented itself as a topic to him suggests disturbing affinities between triumphant, anti-Bolshevik neo-conservatives and their vanquished adversaries.

But Kalfus stays close enough to his characters not to get carried away. His style allows glimmers of a more old-fashioned, non- historical morality that might redeem Joyce and Marshall from the loveless fate his plot has prepared for them. Presented in alternating points of view, the chapters are made up of opportunities for kindness consistently suppressed. Will she let him use the bathroom? Will he reconsider his plot to ruin Joyce's sister's wedding? Will either of them think about the welfare of their two young children? With little dramatic tension to sustain, after the perfectly plotted wickedness of the opening, the novel takes on a certain manic energy. An odd and much-needed moment of relief occurs when Kalfus switches to the viewpoint of six-year-old Viola to recount how the couple briefly unite to pick up the pieces of a long fluted "princess" vase shattered by two-year-old Victor. But this illusory reconciliation also fuels the suspense. The scene recalls the brief moment after 9/11 when Americans put aside their political differences to clean up the mess at Ground Zero, one of the few missions thoroughly accomplished during the six years of the Bush administration. For all its allegorical weight, however, the scene is also one of the most conventionally realistic in the novel, a brief escape from history. After all, Ken Kalfus has set up the novel so that his two protagonists can go on being horrible to each other until the War on Terror itself ends, and we all know that there is no end in sight. Once they begin to act as though they are history in a microcosm, there can be no real escape except through history itself.

And this, amazingly, is what happens. In a second stroke as shocking as the opening scene, the Iraq war turns out to be a success; Saddam Hussein is immediately captured and lynched; his hanging silhouette becomes a bestselling T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Death to Terrorists"; Osama bin Laden is captured; crowds gather at Ground Zero in a spontaneous victory march, and Marshall and Joyce, having finally been granted their divorce, meet again as fellow citizens with a common past and nothing else.

This piece of deliberate counter-historical kitsch is the novel's best critique. Marshall and Joyce's celebration, their patriotism and enthusiasm, are not fake. Their public feelings are just, for once, unmixed with their feelings for each other. Our euphoria, despair and anxiety at the state of the world are not part of our family values. Though we may be glad of it, another death will not save us from our own lives. That Joyce and Marshall are granted this modest epiphany after their long struggle serves only as a cruel contrast to the real America, where the majority have yet to figure this out.

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