Terror and Narcissism

...Besides their arid self-absorption, their degree of chic is comical and exasperating by turns, particularly in the light of the day’s events...

...First her extraordinary talent as a dancer and then her marriage to a German alienated her from her past...

...Schulman may intend satire (I hope so) when she dwells on their perfectly boiled duck eggs, their fig-andgoat-cheese snacks, their preoccupation with the qualities of espressos and lattes, their Mercedes SUV, their special massaging shower, and so on...

...Perhaps human beings can get used to anything, Suzannah mused, once the shock of the new is over, even a grinding, painful reality can come to feel normal...

...Gerhard fearing that the planes mean warfare, takes his wife and son, their French African au pair, and a stranger he finds stranded and distraught, and beats a hasty retreat to East Hampton, where they camp out in a patron’s luxurious beach house...

...At four years old he is still in diapers...

...Prophetic words, it turns out, that will shortly resonate on the larger stage as well...

...Yo u ran away...

...Still, her work will be scrutinized closely because of its sensitive subject: judged for verisimilitude, probed for exploitation, poked at for political significance...

...We don’t know much more since there seems little more to know...

...he hums as if entranced...

...There is no question that the tragedy moves Gerhard and Suzannah profoundly...

...His confidence seems naïve and unwarranted, given the unpromising conditions on both the home front and the national...

...With a sure touch and forceful language, Schulman gets the chaos of those morning hours just right: the sights and smells and sounds, the sirens, the smoke, the crowds...

...The change in Suzannah is less explicit...

...The descriptions of the violence and its aftermath are painfully vivid and authoritative, from the plummeting bodies Suzannah sees out her window to the howling, careening traffic Gerhard encounters on the streets...

...Yo u and me, we will be better...

...She thinks of herself as “Alone with company, which was how she had spent most of her life...

...It is a serious and astute—though quite problematic—look at how the attacks affected those who witnessed them up close...

...The world will rise to the occasion...

...From the windows of their downtown loft, the three witness the planes hitting the towers, and the shock convulses their already troubled life...

...The book ends on an uplifting note, at least for Gerhard, who proclaims his newfound optimism: “It was a wakeup call...

...The intimate power struggles Schulman delineates, the errors of judgment and gaps in understanding, the acute state of denial the couple lives in—all can be translated into social terms, extrapolated to signify our national flaws...

...Under the pressures of the day, each has behaved erratically, or rather, in an exaggerated version of their typical behaviors...

...Meanwhile, on the morning of September 11, Gerhard is shouting protests into the phone at his lawyer, who is flirting with a waitress at the Windows on the World restaurant in the South Towe r. Suzannah, almost 20 years younger, began life as a middle-class Jewish girl from the Bronx...

...forthcoming, “The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G...

...The calamity doesn’t occur until the end of the first section, where the family is introduced and placed in context...

...and their four-year-old son Nikolai...

...Gerhard, successful, selfish and arrogant, emigrated from Germany when he was 17...

...These climactic scenes, among the best in the novel, crackle and explode with hysteria and pent-up rage, as both characters come to stinging realizations about themselves, each other, and their disjointed marriage...

...It doesn’t take a professional to diagnose autism or a related disability, but Gerhard (who pays little attention to the boy) and Suzannah (who pays a great deal) hardly admit any serious problem...

...In the end, Gerhard and Suzannah are dubious examples of how public tragedy can turn private lives inside out, not because they are more cosseted than their fellow New Yorkers, but because they are more shallow...

...Unfortunately it seems to be the only thing, beyond their own concerns and comforts, that affects them at all...

...But the effect is more often distancing than satirical...

...In the spring of 2005, when the first wave of them was about to roll in, a New York Times article was headlined, “After a Long Wait, Literary Novelists Address 9/11...

...A Day at the Beach” is also the title of a work Gerhard is choreographing...

...still, she finally acknowledges that her son needs something more than her strained, hovering love...

...I hope the public mood has changed and that Schulman’s novel finds an audience...

...Gerhard has taken care of business but neglected the two people closest to him...

...Suddenly, through the maneuvers of his board of directors, he is ousted from his own company and lapses into impotent rage and confusion...

...he spins like a top...

...It was my impression, two years ago, that people were not keen to read fiction about the events of September 11, 2001, regardless of the reviews or advance publicity...

...As if a novel didn’t take several years to ponder and write, not to mention the mysteriously increasing length of the publishing process itself...

...Suzannah is Gerhard’s creature: First she served his artistic needs and now she serves in the domestic arena...

...The novel is, however, political by analogy...

...We could have been part of the city, we could have helped somebody...

...Narcissists are the backbone of fiction and can be enchanting to read about, but this pair are too drearily self-absorbed to be powerfully engaging...

...As if, unlike visual artists or musicians, fiction writers had somehow been remiss in granting the matter their attention...

...One character, a French tourist, assumes immediately that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, while the Americans barely recognize his name...

...The world will come together...

...Sooner or later, she hoped, Gerhard’s mood would improve . . . and they could move on, to what, something new and yet to be invented...

...You’ll see...

...Sebald” WITH her new book, Helen Schulman joins the small group of novelists who have written “9/11 novels...

...The world will heal itself of this shocking brutal performance...

...Fractured” because something is very wrong with Nikolai...

...Suzannah has isolated and cocooned herself with Nikolai...

...The narrative spans just 24 hours, and in that brief time the attacks function like a thallium test, lighting up ominous danger spots in the body— here the body of the marriage, a microcosm of the body politic...

...Yo u always do.’” In the calm that follows, Gerhard, to his surprise, discovers elements of genuine good nature beneath his protective cynicism...

...We could have stayed home and helped out our neighbors, Gerhard,’” Suzannah declares: “She spit out the words as if they were discrete little pellets...

...Pure and simple...

...he often does not respond verbally and rarely plays with other children...

...Yo u got scared and you ran...

...With its four parts of almost equal length, the book feels like a carefully composed symphony or suite, which is appropriate for its dancer protagonists...

...It notes, for example, Europeans’ political sophistication compared to Americans...

...A Day at the Beach is not overtly political, except in the most tangential and wry way...

...Full disclosure: I am a member of this group too...

...His rage about the loss of his company dissipates amid the greater grief and chaos, and he feels inner equanimity for the first time in months...

...In the world of fiction, I suppose anything is possible...

...He originally toyed with a career as a petty criminal, but when he saw his first ballet his ambitions changed, and in time he became a major figure in the modern dance world (he casually throws around names like “Martha” and “Merce...

...Another, born in Germany, grasps intuitively, in the first baffling hour, that “Someone somewhere wanted other people to suffer...

...The reader gets to know her well physically—her halo of dark curly hair, her pale skin, her extreme thinness, elegant spine and dancer’s flexibility...

...Suzannah’s one salient, selfless trait is her devotion to Nikolai, a boy who cannot let his mother out of his sight...

...As the radio and TV reports grow grimmer, the rest of the novel charts rising tensions, with new characters appearing on the scene, friends Gerhard runs into at the local gourmet grocery...

...Far from being exploited for shock value, the attacks are woven into the fabric of the characters’ lives and become necessary to their eventual (though not convincing) transformations...

...IN THE FINAL section, all hell breaks loose between husband and wife...

...In the real world, his words have already been proven wrong...

...he has fits of uncontrollable screaming...

...In The Next section, the family flees...

...It pivots on the politics of marriage and family, exemplified by Gerhard Falktopf, 55, a well-known New York City choreographer...

...While they add variety and stir up already agitated emotions, they do not really function dramatically Indeed they seem to prolong what might have worked most pointedly as a novella...

...People matter more than art, he decides...

...Nikolai is the focal point of the marriage, “the fractured inheritor of their fractured world...

...Fortunately for Schulman, who is the author of three previous novels and a story collection, her book arrives in the next wave, too late even to be faulted for lateness (or to have its jacket reviewed for daring and taste...

...Suzannah, his much younger wife, muse and principal dancer, now devoting herself to motherhood...

...He, for his part, gives her “direction and order,” purpose and meaning...