The Post-911 City in Novels by Golimowska Karolina

Author:Golimowska, Karolina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2016-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

The presence of these two characters representing two levels of fictionality and positioned in Waldman’s novel within New York in 2003, suggests that the events of 9/11 did not only change the actual city and the way it is being reflected in fiction but also that already existing fictional representations change after 9/11 in the way they are being incorporated into the altered body of the city through other fictional texts. In referencing Carrie Bradhsaw, Alyssa Spier locates her in post–9/11 New York and on a meta-fictional level inscribes her into that specific urban environment.

Lives of all of the characters in the novel change after 9/11 and all of them are to some extent involved in the process of creating the new urban place in question—the memorial. In taking positions in the conflict, they interfere with the city and try to claim it as their own. In this space-based struggle they have to position themselves on either of the sides of the conflict emerged around Mohammad Khan. They all have to support or to be against him—the novel draws a strong parallel to the either-or dialectics of George W. Bush’s administration at the time.

For Sean Gallagher, 9/11 is a sense-generating event which he “uses” together with the death of his estranged brother, to re-establish himself. He is a clearly negative, selfish and weak character, described as primitive and arousing aversion. Yet, in the dynamics of the political post–9/11 dichotomous rhetoric which the novel references, he can easily make it as the iconic white American patriot. His moral advantage over Mo is unquestioned by the brain-washed society, the novel is suggesting. When Sean’s anti-memorial movement starts an alliance with the “SAFIs” (“Save America from Islam”) and his authoritarian leadership position is in danger, his frustration grows and makes him even more angry and aggressive. The SAFIs—mostly women and mostly from Staten Island, Queens and Long Island—so from outside of the quintessential metropolitan center of Manhattan, see the discussion about radical Islam as their “freelance obsession” (139). Patronized by their female leader, Sean develops a frustration deep enough to influence his perception of the city—all of a sudden New York seems to be hostile and full of enemies. As a literary motif it becomes even more prominent when Paul Rubin agrees to have breakfast with Sean in an expensive coffee shop on Madison Avenue in which the scale of the economic gap that lies between these two men becomes visible. The “weaker” character immediately blames the metropolis for social inequalities and his position within the turbo-capitalistic society. Manhattan as its quintessence with its exorbitant rents and coffee prices, and at this point also gendered, since Sean’s frustration generally has a lot to do with being unsuccessful with women, becomes an unreachable object of desire:

He felt himself in the camp of the enemy—not Muslims but the people born with silver sticks up their asses, the people who had made Manhattan a woman too good to give Sean her phone number [127–128].

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