Note to Ben Kunkel: Never Trust Anyone Under Thirty
If you haven’t read Ben Kunkel’s essay in the Sunday NYT, grab a chair and get busy. It is a substantial essay wherein a young man takes the long view of what he calls ‘terrorist novels’ and offers a brief history of the genre, whose demise he traces to the Trade Center attack four years ago. This anniversary, as grim as Pearl Harbor, more vivid in memory for televised images, serves as a nexus for collective rage and despair. But that is not what Kunkel is talking about.
After one reading these are some impressions, fast and dirty, to be sure, but constant rereading sometimes softens and diffuses the instincts. Kunkel has a student’s eye for the pretenses of art. He nails the decade of the Nineties and the literature of the second Pax Americana from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11, 2001. He calls those dozen years an ‘era’ a word that now resides in the discount bin.
His most riveting reference is to Hannah Arendt. Right, we’re back in time, circa 1970. Kunkel chooses Arendt’s plea to the radicals of the Weatherman SDS to eschew violence, the Old Left speaking to the New Left. In case you missed it, Kunkel quotes Mark Rudd, arguably the most idiotic man who ever lived, saying blow it up, burn it down, let’s start over. Trust fund babies blew a townhouse in Greenwich Village, not a revolution, more of a curiosity as time goes by. The disconnect here is in the nature of the enemy; Arendt looked over her shoulder at the Nazis, the Holocaust. The SDS was preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, the draft, things that affluent young men of the time saw as personally threatening. Fail Algebra? Die, motherfucker.
My hunch is that Kunkel is most fascinated with what he understands the least, that block of time occupied by the intellectuals who escaped totalitarianism, the Sixties and Seventies. The terrorism era, in its current form, started with Black September, the Munich Olympics, the deaths of Israeli athletes on German soil. I think Dom DeLillo’s work predates Kunkel’s thesis, not by pub date, but by DeLillo’s birth date. He was ten years older than the other denizens of the East Village, set apart by maturity and his fascination by what others were doing. DeLillo captures Kunkel’s imagination and that is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing, for Kunkel and for the work he will produce down the road. As Jay McInerny pointed out a few weeks ago, Kunkel can write. Whether that makes Kunkel a dangerous character remains to be seen.