Substance Abuse
Monday’s NYT has a review of the cover art of Jay McInerny’s forthcoming novel The Good Life. The cover was designed by Chip Kidd and features dishes covered with concrete dust in the foreground with faint images of the twin towers in flames in the background. The article deals with the issue of invoking images of 9-11-01 in fiction, mentioning Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example of dealing with the Trade Center attacks as metaphor or reality. Here is the problem: images are not words. For many people the attack on the towers remains fixed in our consciousness in pictures. The event and its horror entered our collective experience with a visual wallop. Then there was sound: people close to the tip of Manhattan heard the roar, smelled the dust, the heat, and felt shock and despair.
What is the substantial task of a novelist who evokes 9-11 through cover art? It seems to me that the effort of dealing with contemporary tragedy in fiction begins and ends with intent. Can a writer introduce anything new to the emotional matrix 9-11 invokes? Or is the author trying to manipulate the pre-existing array of feelings they know exist? This is dangerous ground, literally and figuratively; readers of fiction expect to be manipulated to some extent, generally through surprise. Scenes that end in an unexpected way are most memorable. We know how the scene of 9-11 ends.
Whatever Jay McInerny has in mind for us with The Good Life, it had better have a moral substance equal or greater than the reflexive horror left imbedded by the attacks. Novelists have to be held to a higher standard than journalists if fiction is to have any relevance in the Information Age.