The Submission by Amy Waldman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yeah…so…wow! (This is my review, as it appeared on Bookbrowse.com, October 5th, 2011.)

First time novelist, Amy Waldman, has created a gut-punch of a novel in The Submission, a tale that wonders: What would happen if the architectural design competition for the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial was won by an American-Muslim?

The story opens two years after the attacks, with a jury deliberating over the two finalists in the Memorial Design competition – The Void and The Garden. The jury, after very tense and prolonged deliberations, finally selects its winner: The Garden. It is at this point the identity of the designer is revealed, an architect named Mohammad (Mo) Khan.

Chaos, of course, ensues as Khan’s identity as an American-Muslim, is leaked to the media and citizens. Special interest groups and pundits argue for and against the fitness of both the individual and his design. Claire Burwell, whose husband died on September 11th, is a member of the jury as a representative of the families who lost loved ones in the attacks. Throughout the blind competition (the identities of those who submitted designs were kept secret), Claire was the most vocal champion for The Garden, feeling the concept offered the strongest opportunity for healing and reflection while honoring those who died. She is then thrust into an awkward and precarious position of balancing her belief in the winning design with the emotional and confrontational outbursts from the families she was supposed to be representing.

Waldman has created something I really love when reading fiction – unreliable narrators. Several main characters – Claire Burwell, Mo Khan, and Sean Gallagher – dig their heels in, waver, reevaluate themselves and others, and cause rippling consequences. Claire has long anchored her identity in liberal social thinking but has never really had to examine her convictions. Mo is arrogant and unknowable in his aloofness. He refuses, on the basis of being a free American citizen, to answer questions about his intentions with his design. This avoidance, on principle, leaves many confused and paranoid.

Sean lost his firefighter brother, Patrick, in the attacks and also lost himself. He felt he was never good enough growing up and had never really known his place in the world – until he began speaking out about his brother’s death. But is that enough to give his own life meaning? All of these characters are tested and pushed to reassess their ways of thinking. Trying to make a difference in the world – which all three are striving to do – is not something that can be undertaken without fully knowing one’s self.

At its heart, The Submission is a tale of caution; if you think you know yourself, please, think again. Readers are taken through a trifecta of large issues: grief, ambition, and prejudice. And early in the novel, a particular quote slapped me in the face: “You couldn’t call yourself an American if you hadn’t, in solidarity, watched your fellow Americans being pulverized, yet what kind of America did watching create?” It is an inescapable question. The media allowed for interminable full access, nonstop watching and reading at our disposal. Talking heads from television infiltrated our own minds. Special interest groups tore at our heartstrings. Pundits swayed our thinking this way and that. Throughout, there was never any disagreement that 9/11 was a domestic tragedy of global significance. A national embrace brought families who lost loved ones to our collective chest in an effort to support them and keep them safe. And yet. And yet there were so many competing interests fighting and often losing sight of the reason for the heightened passions and positions – the people who lost their lives.

The very title of this novel says a lot. Each character we meet is asked to submit – whether to alter a long-held belief, upend their moral center, or open a door to a stranger. The Submission also represents the architectural design Mohammad submits in hopes of creating an important work. Within a religious context, the word “muslim” means “one who voluntarily submits or surrenders to God’s will.” Around one simple word, so much turns. And as with Waldman’s novel, a world evolves around one simple concept.

The author, a former journalist for The New York Times, and their South Asia Bureau co-chief for over three years, was in Manhattan on the the day of the attacks in 2001, and she spent the following six weeks reporting on the aftermath. Several years ago – while talking with a friend about the controversy Maya Lin endured when, in 1981, her Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial design was selected through open competition – Waldman supposed that a Muslim-American planning the WTC Memorial would be a modern equivalent situation. And so, The Submission was born, as was her career as a novelist.

She has stated that in writing a story about 9/11, she “was just interested in looking at the variety of experiences and the grief. To tell the story from multiple perspectives.” Waldman succeeds in achieving this goal beautifully with her debut novel; through her gifted prose and fully realized characters, she has created a very powerful reading experience.

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Dear Steven Tyler;

The noise in your head doesn’t bother me so much, I get a lot of noise in my own head so I can relate, to a degree, but the words in your book really bothered me. A lot. Because the words in your book are a poorly put together bunch of sentences and nonsensical tripe. Way worse than almost any noise. Except for maybe that noise Jim Carey makes in “Dumb & Dumber” when they are having that most irritating noise contest.

Your anecdotes aren’t even funny or entertaining. Also – you sound a bit whiny. Did you know that? I mean, look, those who know even a bit about Aerosmith know about the drugs and the girls and the antagonistic relationship you and Joe Perry share. So, none of this is new(s). It felt like, in reading, someone doth protest too much. Seriously. This book could have been 100 pages shorter if the repetition had been edited properly. Usually, if someone is a dick or a jerk or an ass-hat but they are aware of that aspect of their personality and are upfront about said trait, I can deal with them and even find them funny or appreciate their eccentricities. For some reason, your upfrontness did not translate into me caring about your story (or you). I didn’t expect that from reading your book. I thought it would be a bit of fun, a brain-cleanse for the end of the year.

SIGH!

Also – I didn’t count but totally should – never have I encountered the word ‘placenta’ used so often in situations having nothing to do with birth or pregnancy. I do not think that words means what you think it means.

So that I am not a total cranky-pantsI about this read, I do have to give you props for your apparent Bookishness. The literary references were cool to find and I wouldn’t have guessed that about you, Steven Tyler.

Still, I would offer a bit of advice (that I know you won’t listen to, or even read for that matter but it’s fun to pretend):

a) placenta – get a dictionary, look it up and then use the word sparingly and in its appropriate context;

b) quit whining – no one likes to hear a person of wealth and privilege whine and complain;

c) find a boxing club, take Joe Perry and then hammer the hell out of each other in the ring for a while, The two of you really need to punch each other and I would say it is really time to get that shit out of your systems.

d) photos of nearly-naked 60+-year-old men are never a good idea. EVER. I don’t care who you are.

e) you should find something fun to do. FUN. Have some. Preferably with laughter. Antics equal not fun.

I think that’s it. There might be more but, frankly, reading your book made me tired.

Best,

Jennifer

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Author Miriam Toews has enjoyed modest success in her home country of Canada. Of Mennonite tradition (see sidebar) and hailing from rural Manitoba, many of Toews’s novels explore this way of life. She won the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for A Complicated Kindness, and she was awarded the 2008 Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize for her novel, The Flying Troutmans. All this to say, Toews has writerly chops.

Irma Voth came about when, in 2006, she was approached to star in a film by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas. He was taken with her photograph – seen on the jacket of her novel, A Complicated Kindness – and felt she would be perfect to play the role of a Mennonite wife living in northern Mexico, trapped in a troubled marriage. Toews studied film at university but had never acted and, initially, thought Reygadas was a bit nuts. She ignored his emails for a long time but relented when he posited that being in his film “…will give [her] something to write about.” (Silent Light, the resulting movie was an independent darling in 2008 and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival that same year.)

And write about it she did. Miriam Toews has a wonderful and minimalist style, and in Irma Voth she explores some familiar themes – a young woman’s longing for freedom, getting by on wits alone, and a road trip. She has a great ability to take readers into amazing places that are a little bit strange but a whole lot inviting, and because of her incredible skills, I was very eager to dive into her new novel.

Irma Voth revolves around a simple question posed by our protagonist: “How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband, or God?” For a young woman raised within strict, old-order Mennonite beliefs, it is a disturbing question – one that unmoors Irma but also helps to ground her. At the beginning of the story, Irma has been disowned by her very strict and rigid father for secretly marrying a man who is outside of the Mennonite faith. While still residing in a separate house on her father’s property, Irma and her husband, Jorge, struggle to communicate and make a go of their new marriage. This attempt is made all the more difficult as Jorge frequently absents himself from home for long periods of time.

Metaphorically, Irma is a widow and orphan at the age of nineteen, even though her family and husband exist. Her mother is portrayed as having two main functions – making babies and being subservient to her husband. Her sister Aggie, at only thirteen-years-old, is strong-willed, and more vocal and rebellious than Irma, though Irma does take her opportunities where she can find them. It is this relationship, the one between sisters, that Toews really explores. The level of maturity and capability of both girls is astounding. There is a resilience and hopefulness in Irma and Aggie that will make you cheer for them as they try to improve their lot in life.

Toews writes honestly and with humour, and her balanced style makes her work accessible to readers. We are given a beautiful literary story that becomes much more real with her interjections of observational wit. Her narrative never seems forced, instead it feels as though you are listening to a friend relay a tale.

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By Zoe Williams, The Guardian

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it’s almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson’s I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away.

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“Why be happy when you could be normal?” is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful). There are passages and phrases that will be recognisable to anyone who’s read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: this is not surprising, since that first, bold announcement of Winterson’s talent was a roman à clef, and never claimed to be otherwise.

So anecdotes and jokes crop up in both books: the mother says the lesbian sweet-shop owners deal in “unnatural passions”, and the young Jeanette thinks it means they put chemicals in their sweets; the gospel tent, the CB radio, all the memorable details of the first fictional outing come up again, but the point is not that this is repetitive. Rather, that the documents are intended as companions, to lay this one over the last like tracing paper, so that even if the author poetically denies the possibility of an absolute truth, there emerges nevertheless the shape of the things that actually happened. I had forgotten how upbeat Oranges was; it may have been peopled by eccentrics, with a heroine held in alienation by the aspic of impotent childhood, but there were upsides. “I suppose the saddest thing for me,” Winterson writes now, “thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”

The upbringing as she tells it now is far bleaker; she was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. However, the story’s leavened throughout by other observations. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: “In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?” But it wriggles with humour, even as Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – “she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard.” There is Winterson’s quirky favourite hymn (“Cheer up ye saints of God,” it starts, “There is nothing to worry about”), her loving, impressionistic descriptions of classic authors, from TS Eliot to Gertrude Stein, as she first encounters them. And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well – it ends in escape.

Then there’s an odd page or two entitled “Intermission”, which finishes: “The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can’t write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …”

And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he’s moving to an old people’s home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. “My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place.” At times she describes the process with precision. Other times, though, the scars of this first abandonment are given in the most unadorned, uncharacteristic prose, as though she’s trying to gnaw her way through her own sophistication to get to the truth of it. In a way, the presence in the narrative of Susie Orbach, with whom Winterson started a relationship just before she started looking for her birth mother, acts as a reassurance to the reader as much as to the author, a fixed point to whom we can return, whose very inclusion means that, whatever happens, a fresh abandonment won’t be the outcome. Otherwise I genuinely think it would be unbearable. At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears.

There is much here that’s impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one’s sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start – her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father – emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged. In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is, in this sense, more important and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

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Well….I don’t even know how to review this epic novel…so I will share a NYTimes piece, by Kathryn Harrison. This article ran only a few weeks ago and though it addresses Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?, she makes many observations and comments that I also shared during my read on Melville’s novel.

It’s a hard sell Nathaniel Philbrick has undertaken in “Why Read Moby-Dick?” The novel’s plot has been recycled for decades, inspiring films, radio dramas, cartoons, comic books, a television mini-series, a couple of heavy metal albums, a music video and a rap rendition. How many potential readers approach the masterwork of Herman Melville without already knowing the story of Captain Ahab and the white whale? Any? And why would such an overly exposed audience embrace a work of such heft, especially as almost every edition carries the added weight of ponderous academic commentary? “Moby-Dick” would appear to be one of those unfortunate books that are taught rather than enjoyed.

“The mythic incarnation of America: a country blessed,” in Philbrick’s words, “by God and by free enterprise that nonetheless embraces the barbarity it supposedly supplanted,” we are a nation, and a species, ever poised on self-destruction. “Listen to every word” Philbrick says of what might be read as a cautionary tale, betraying an optimism he cannot have drawn from Melville. After all, the ending he saw was unavoidable extinction.

~ Kathryn Harrison, NYTimes 21 October 2011

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During the summer of 1996, on July 5th to be exact, Greenberg’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Sally, suffers a profound crack in her being which spirals into manic psychosis. This father makes a very difficult decision to commit his daughter to a psychiatric hospital for very needed treatment but struggles with why and how this happened.Hurry Down Sunshine offers a very intimate glimpse of a common psychiatric syndrome delivered from an uncommon perspective. In doing so, Greenberg illuminates an arena of collateral damage of mental illness that often eludes societal concern. The book is a two month segment of the life of a writer immersed in problems endemic to many – career, housing, finances, a first then a second marriage, children and several generations of troubled family, all suddenly up-ended by a mental illness as familiar and incomprehensible as if it were his own.

“Sally, the quirky, brilliant 15-year-old daughter from his first marriage (to Robin), was transformed overnight into an angry stranger exploding with kaleidoscopic energy, her speech shattered like dropped glass. The story, in addition to being a heart-wrenching account of the brilliant burst and fall-out fading of a full-blown mania, records the desperate efforts of the author to hold the center of his life, manage the crisis, and quench his intense thirst to understand what was happening. The author’s obsession with etiology ranges the expanse from bad parenting to drug abuse, genetics, nutritional deficiency, a rare force of nature like a blizzard or flood, offenses to God, misaligned spirituality, a bad throw of the dice, and back to bad parenting. The question “Why?” can never really be fully answered in Greenberg’s case, nor, I suspect in the case of most people suffering and living with the same disease.

The tide didn’t turn until well into Sally’s second month of illness, and recovery proceeded like sludge. But one evening the author perceived a slight shift in the air and quite unexpectedly Sally leaned against him and said, “You and Pat saved my life. It must have been hard for you.” The miracle of normalcy and ordinary existence had descended upon them. Sally was back, and she was able to return to school that fall not fully asymptomatic, but functional. In a postscript, we learn that she graduated from high school with honors, but shortly thereafter became ill again. Two years later, she entered a marriage that lasted only three years and at last report available to the reader, she was living and working near her mother in the country. We depart this eloquently told tale, yet unfinished, in hope and worry with her father.”

JUSTIN SIMON, M.D.
Berkeley, Calif.
As featured in The American Journal of Psychiatry, September 2009

SIGH!

A lot of people are going to hate me for this rating! I love quiet, contemplative novels. In fact, some of my favourite works of contemporary fiction are of this very nature – The Sea, Homer & Langley & Out Stealing Horses, as great examples. The Cat’s Table just doesn’t hold a candle to these books. I really wasn’t engaged with the story or the characters. There was a hopeful moment of interesting reading at the very end of the story but it was, I suppose, too little, too late.

I am sorry, Mr. Ondaatje.

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3.5-stars, actually.

Interesting book. There is a preface that states even though Geda wrote this story for Akbari – from listening to his story – the book “must be considered to be a work of fiction, since it is the recreation of Enaiatollah’s experience – a recreation that has allowed him to take possession of his own story.”

The tone is so matter-of-fact. I think this serves to downplay the times of danger Akbari faced but it also serves to emphasize Akbari’s ability to survive and thrive. It is noted a few times during the story that the Akbari feels the people and places don’t matter. What matters is what happened.

Geda has done well to bring Akbari’s story to the world.

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McKay knocks this, her 2nd novel, out of the park! Her prose is tight and haunting – giving us settings and characters one can see, hear and nearly touch. I feel this story sheds a light on a time and era in NYC’s history of which little is known.

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Writer Lynn Coady sort of sums this novel up perfectly, with her back cover blurb: “The ever-shifting fault lines between the sex lives and sexual objectification of teenaged girls are traversed with all the artful nuance and precision of the ballet itself…a gripping and unflinching novel.”

This is Shabas’ first novel and it is mostly tight. The first few chapters were overly detail-laden – every bit of minutiae, “I folded the paper back into the envelope” sort of stuff, is noted. This took away momentum very early on but by about page 60…it was worked out and the action and details being written about help propel the story forward.

This novel is fairly dark and twisty. I spent a lot of time in this world so can identify completely and while I felt a lot of the story was well handled, at moments, it felt like a characterization in a spooferific and clichéd way. Hence, the dreaded 3-star rating.

Shabas definitely has talent and I look forward to her next book. She is a bold writer.

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