9-11 and fiction

[pynchonoid]

from: PW Daily for Booksellers (March 18, 2003)

Will September 11-Related Fiction Find an Audience?

Sales of nonfiction books about the terrorist attacks
on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon peaked and petered out
well before the
event's first anniversary. As Sally Lindsay, vice
president of
merchandising and marketing for Koen, said, "There was
the glut, glut,
glut of new titles, and also, emotionally, the public
needed to put it
to rest." But the public may not be allowed much
respite: fictional
accounts of that day and its aftermath are now
starting to arrive in
stores.

Will consumers, who so quickly grew weary of
nonfiction titles on the
subject, welcome such novels? Will readers accept the
transformation
of this tragedy into art yet?

"The timing makes perfect sense to me," said Koen's
Lindsay.
"Ultimately, do any of us really know what to do with
it?"

The first major test is St. Martin's publication of
Joyce Maynard's
The Usual Rules, which uses September 11 as a
catalyst.
Thirteen-year-old protagonist Wendy is living in
Brooklyn with her
mother, brother and stepfather when her mother is
killed in the attack
on the World Trade Center.

Though she resides in Mill Valley, Calif., Maynard was
in New York
City on September 11, 2001. One of the booksellers
near her home, Paul
Jaffe, co-owner, founder and buyer for Copperfield's
Books, which has
six stores in Sonoma and Napa counties, is confident
it will sell: he
ordered approximately 100 copies of the title. St.
Martin's too is
confident, giving the book a 40,000-copy first
printing.

But on the East coast, and particularly in the New
York area, some
booksellers fear appearing opportunistic. Pat Boyer,
co-owner of
Bookends in Ridgewood, N.J. (a community that lost 12
of its members
in the attacks), worried over the appropriateness of
stocking
Maynard's title and others. "We're careful to be
sensitive to our
town," she said. "We certainly carry books about 9/11,
but we're real
careful about crossing the line and bringing it all
back again."

The Usual Rules isn't the first book to mention
September 11, but
perhaps the first to focus on it so closely. There are
tangential
mentions in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
(Putnam) and Carsten
Stroud's Cuba Strait (S&S). This last December,
Little, Brown
published Pete Hamill's Forever, which describes the
life of an Irish
immigrant who arrives in New York in 1740 and, due to
mystical
goings-on, is told he will be immortal if he remains
on the island of
Manhattan. His story climaxes with the collapse of the
World Trade
Center, where the protagonist's one true love,
pregnant with his
child, is working at the time. Heather Fain, assistant
director of
publicity at Little, Brown, explained that Hamill's
status as a true
New Yorker lent him credibility. "Hamill's not
treading on someone
else's story," she said. "He lives a few blocks from
there and he saw
it happen."

Ultimately September 11-related fiction will fail or
succeed on its
own merits, not based on the addresses of its authors.
Robert Fader,
buyer for Posman Books in New York City's Grand
Central Terminal,
observed, "If I felt an author were less than genuine,
that might give
me pause, but if Ian McEwan wrote his next book based
on the events of
September 11, a whole bunch of people would want to
read it. They
wouldn't say, 'He's a Brit, what does he know?'
because he's a great
writer."--Natalie Danford


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