The latest fictions on a horror story

The Writing on the Wall

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

(Counterpoint)

Plot: A language-obsessed librarian witnesses 9/11 on her way to work while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The events force her to reflect on losses she has repressed in her life (the death of her twin sister and the loss of her niece). Schwartz’s narrative is interwoven with news bites and comments by President Bush.

Back story: Schwartz, a New Yorker, started the novel in 2002, appalled at what she considered inadequate descriptions of the events in the media. The media “talked about our ‘collective grief’ as if it were experienced exactly the same way,” Schwartz says. “It was so inadequate and generalized, I felt it had to be pointed out.”

From the text: “How could she be touched by the deaths of strangers? By the crater downtown. By the future suddenly shaken into a new pattern, as if someone rattled a kaleidoscope.”

*

Saturday

Ian McEwan

(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Plot: Post-9/11 anxiety pervades upper-middle-class London society. Set during protests over the imminent invasion of Iraq, “Saturday” follows 24 hours in the life of a neurosurgeon who witnesses a plane’s emergency landing from his window. Think Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” without the stream of consciousness.

Back story: McEwan had been working on a comic novel during the fall of 2001, but after the events he “no longer felt very funny,” he told The Times last spring. Turning away from the historical time period of his previous novel, Booker Prize-winning “Atonement,” he set the book amid antiwar demonstrations in London to illustrate a shift in society and the sense of an “era having finished.”

From the text: “Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed.”

*

Windows on the World

Frederic Beigbeder

(Miramax)

Plot: A bestseller in France, this minute-by-minute account of 9/11 is split between two points of view: a divorced father and his sons breakfasting at the famous restaurant just as the planes strike, and a writer in Paris contemplating the World Trade Center and American culture.

Back story: “In Western countries, all the rich, privileged people are terrified by 9/11 because they feel threatened,” Beigbeder told The Times in March. One reviewer called Beigbeder a “moral dandy, a hipster nihilist, a publicity hound, a jerk, a self-impressed renegade,” but found his book “funny and moving.”

From the text: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.”

*

Extremely Loud &

Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

(Houghton Mifflin)

Plot: Nine-year-old Oskar Schell journeys through New York City searching for traces of his dead father, lost in the World Trade Center. The precocious child, who could be a member of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, imagines skyscraper air bags and a cityscape that lets planes pass through.

Back story: After the success of his first novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” Foer focuses on the effects of war on civilian life, and includes images of crying elephants and pages of flip-book-style cartoons. He is taken to task by book critics for basically being too clever for his own good.

From the text: “I found a bunch of videos on the Internet of bodies falling.... It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?”

-- Ava Chin