9/11 and Its Aftermath Through Uncommonly Perceptive Eyes

What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change, by Jocelyn Lieu

Nation Books, $13.95, trade paper, ISBN-13 978-1-56858-346-4

Lieu, author of the short story collection Potential Weapons, kept a journal from September 11, 2002 through the following July 3. Based on that journal, this book chronicles the events of those fateful months through the eyes of an ordinary New York City resident (in her case, a New School professor and mother of a toddler living on East Seventh Street in the Village). Lieu has taken what seems to have begun as a purely personal attempt to make sense of what was happening, and turned it into first-class, first-person history. She could have written a polemic, and this can certainly be taken as one, but her genius in crafting this was to keep her anger (and her eventual wrath) close in check, to let the story speak for itself. Lieu writes in a tersely crystalline, imagistic style, as befits a fiction author. If only this were fiction.

With an eerily calm, matter-of-fact delivery, Lieu begins with the all-too-familiar images: the acrid smoke blowing uptown, the desperate posters put up by family members searching for loved ones, the city Balkanized with police barricades, its residents terrorized. These were wartime conditions: Lieu’s church ran out of food for the homeless, her neighborhood pizza place ran out of everything except onions and since it was a hot week, she and her neighbors had to sweat it out, as putting on the air conditioning might well have proven lethal. Lieu reminds us how just about everyone here knew someone who knew someone who died in the towers, and how utterly ridiculous it became to try to escape the order of the day by concentrating on one’s mundane, workaday activities.

But she really hits her stride in the weeks and months afterward. Friends, relatives and colleagues voice their rage against the invasion of Afghanistan, the authorities’ contemptuous disregard for the rights of antiwar activists and the lack of a coherent investigation into the demolition of the twin towers, while Lieu focuses on her teaching and her family. Her precocious infant daughter Gracie does double duty as Greek chorus and to keep her mother rooted in the immediate, present reality; her husband Chuck Wachtel (author of the novel Joe the Engineer) makes the occasional appearance as a taciturnly reliable bullshit detector. Daily dramas – a suicide, a family illness and a crime (Lieu’s purse was stolen but recovered from an inept, most likely mentally ill thief) – play out against a backdrop of disbelief and post-traumatic stress disorder. Armed with a new sense of priorities, Lieu doesn’t let the theft phase her: on the contrary, she takes pity on the culprit, knowing that he will probably be locked up for a long time.

Lieu’s only humorous indulgence is to mete out silly pseudonyms (Breyten, Dublin et al.) on the BoBo parents and children on the Tompkins Square Park playground where she takes Gracie. And she only editorializes when the Bush regime’s incessant fearmongering, running orange and red and yellow alerts up and down the flagpole, becomes completely intolerable. By then, she and her family have already bought the requisite duct tape and masks. And then it’s over. Overwhelmed, stupefied and disheartened, Lieu stopped writing. The police state had perhaps inadvertently done its work, putting an end to the most understatedly revealing of the many good post-9/11 New York City narratives. The Plague Year had Daniel Defoe; the Holocaust had Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. New Yorkers should be grateful to have Jocelyn Lieu. One of the essential historical works of our time, What Isn’t There should be required reading for all college students.

Sadly, interested readers searching for this title in stores need to look very closely. Even if the book’s displayed face-out, only the subtitle is visible from a distance against its white cover: marketability has taken a back seat here to some art director’s idea of negative space.