Of all the things Americans supposedly put on hold after September 11—from ironic humor to political skepticism—I wonder what happened to divorces.
Surely there were nasty custody battles underway that Tuesday morning. Did husbands and soon-to-be ex-wives put down their weapons and circle their broken wagon trains? Or did the shock of the attacks only harden determination to raze marriages to the ground?
This is the scenario Ken Kalfus places at the heart of his surprising new novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. As the book begins, New Yorkers Joyce and Marshall Harriman are in no-holds-barred marital combat.
Rather than dampen their blood lust, the events stoke the Harrimans' dispute to the blaze of full-blown domestic terrorism.
This is a dangerously glib equation to make, but Kalfus manages it cleanly. For unlike so many satirical novelists at work today, he doesn't pull his punches. From the very first scene this is a bracing book of ugly deeds and even uglier thoughts.
When the first tower collapses that day, Joyce entertains the fantasy that the father of her two children—who worked inside Tower 2—has perished.
As it turns out, Marshall is one of the lucky ones. In a scene notable for its beautiful writing, he dodges falling debris and zombie-walks home to Brooklyn, the grotesque thought that his wife was on the flight out of Newark keeping him going.
At this point, even a gullible reader will pause before proceeding with a grimace. This seems a calculated move, for the goal of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is to put that grimace of disbelief on your face and then tighten it to a full-blown mask of disgust.
This is, after all, a slap-happy book set in a slap-happy time. One moment the nation was on the long, slow side out of its biggest boom time in decades, and the next it was in all-out war with an unseen enemy.
Kalfus aims to show how domestic life became just as off-kilter as the nation's public life. This book's plot veers here, there and everywhere, as if anything could happen at any time. Although some of these inventions seem ill-advised—especially a scene toward the end that recalls the climax of Rabbit, Redux—the effect lingers.
Shortly after the towers fall, Marshall borrows a page from the NSA and buys a device that allows him to listen in on Joyce's calls. Meanwhile, she begins coveting some of the hot, impulsive terror sex her friends claim to be having with strangers met on the street.
As Kalfus guides us out of the explosion and into the heart of this nation's reaction—both emotionally and militarily—to those attacks, Disorder shows what happens when two parties become equally hell-bent on revenge and refuse to budge. You wind up in an all-out march to war.
Sometimes Kalfus makes the connection between world events and domestic events a little too neat. This isn't necessary, for the book's atmosphere would have done it for him.
Here are all those landmarks of the post-9/11 world: the terror alerts and ultimatums; the lionized "first-responders" and the sudden chill in people's reactions when those same civil servants did not immediately recover from their grief and trauma.
Although A Disorder Peculiar to the Country feels at first like a huge departure for Kalfus, the deeper one reads the more it seems only he could write this particular book. Like his previous novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, this is a novel about how people chafe against the huge, unsentient brush of history.
But since this is a novel set in America—not Russia at the turn of the 20th century—there is an indifference to its characters' attitudes toward the past, a decadent lack of care about the context of world events in which terror attacks were not freak occurrences but developments long in the making.
"How informed do I have to be about Israeli history?" Marshall erupts at one point. "I'm an American. When we went to war in Somalia and Kosovo, how much history did I have to know? How much does anyone know about other places' just-as-complicated histories?"
As the events of this book show—especially those involving the Harrimans' marriage—you can know all the history in the world and not grasp why things fall apart. In fact, you can still lose everything.