Tech Takes Over
Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather,” died in 1999. Among his last words, according to a friend, were: “Thank God I won’t have to deal with the internet.” Sept. 11 was the first world event experienced communally online; it changed how technology threads through our lives. The next morning, everyone who didn’t have a cellphone bought one. As Joshua Cohen wrote in “The Book of Numbers,” “Suddenly, to lose touch was to die.” Luddite semi-holdouts like Shirley Hazzard (“the audible nightmare of the cellphone”), Stephen King (who wrote a novel about zombies set loose by bad cell signals), Jonathan Lethem and some of the characters in Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” who worried that cellphones were vulgar, fell by the wayside. Crime novelists were affected: It became harder to get people alone. A new kind of anomie was detected and appraised. In “Motherhood,” Sheila Heti described “the empty-internet feeling inside me.” Jennifer Egan, in “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” noted how “everybody sounds stoned, because they’re emailing people the whole time they’re talking to you.” Yet there were new forms of connection, too. In Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” a father who’d had his son taken from him hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. It’s unbearably moving. —DG
Sontag Sparks Outrage
In the Sept. 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker, Susan Sontag’s response to 9/11 was one of the shorter ones. Longer reflections by other writers conveyed a roiling sense of bewilderment, confessions of how the attacks, for all of the fire and rubble and death, felt almost unreal. By contrast, Sontag pointedly called the attack a “monstrous dose of reality,” and enjoined Americans to be wary of the violence that was probably going to be perpetrated in their name.
Sontag was furiously denounced from all quarters. She admitted privately to her son that she felt the piece was “defective,” having been dashed off while she was in a Berlin hotel room, listening to what the talking heads were saying on CNN. In his biography of Sontag, Benjamin Moser notes that the substance of her critique proved to be correct, even if the piece as a whole betrayed a dearth of empathy that coursed through her life and her work. To a traumatized public, her admonishment sounded unfeeling and accusatory. But the vituperation leveled at her was so extreme that you would think she had started a war. —JS
A Critical Ceasefire
What was it like working in the worlds of writing, publishing and criticism in the wake of Sept. 11? Well, as Martin Amis wrote: “After a couple of hours at their desks, on Sept. 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” I was an editor at The Times Book Review on 9/11, and many critics felt the same way. Criticism may be a form of love, but it didn’t seem so in the direct aftermath. No one felt like lowering the boom; criticizing a novel felt, briefly, like clubbing a baby seal. (We’re in a similar moment with restaurants, which have been hurt by Covid; The Times has stopped bestowing, or removing, stars.) It may not be a coincidence that in the decade and a half after 9/11, there began to be a rise in publications (The Believer, Buzzfeed) whose book sections refused to run negative reviews at all, and were thus essentially unreadable. Writers found their way back. So did critics, who wrote again in the spirit of Wilfrid Sheed’s dictum that “mushy reviews are a breach of faith.” —DG
DeLillo’s Take
When Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man” was published in 2007, it wasn’t quite the 9/11 novel some of us were expecting — not from him, anyway, a writer who had been circling the big themes of power and terrorism for decades. “Falling Man” was mostly an intimate book, about relationships that were frayed and forged in the aftermath of the attacks.
