I just finished 'The Submission' by Amy Waldman. It's a novel about 9/11, and I have read a lot of '9/11 novels' but I would have to say this is my absolute favourite.
The events of the novel take place two years after the attacks.An anonymous competition to design a memorial at Ground Zero has been set up. A group of 'worthy' citizens, including artisits, university lecturers, historians and such form a jury of 13 people are judging it. When the finally pick the design they like best, it is revealed the designer is a Muslim architect named Mohammed Khan. Controversy explodes. Claire Burwell, the only member of the jury to have lost a family member that day, fiercely defends Khan's right to win and to build his design, but soon finds herself besieged by the media (left and right), the families, sly politicians looking for an angle, and various groups from all over the political and ideological spectrum who use the issue to puah their own ideologies. Mohammed Khan, the designer, finds himself at the centre of a conflict about what it means to be a Muslim (even though he's not particularly religious) and an American in the wake of 9/11, and whether he can be both. As well as Claire and Khan's stories, we get the stories of Paul Rubin, the jury's chairman, who is also being besieged from all sides, Alyssa Spier,an ambitious and somewhat unlikeable yet naive reporter who capitilizes on the issue to advance her career, but encounters her own share of problems from doing just that, and, perhaps most poignant, the story of Asma Anwar - young, a Muslim, Bangladeshi, an illegal immigrant who lost her husband Inam (also illegal) in the attacks and must raise their baby son alone, and finds herself fascinated in and caught up in the debate, being both a family member and a Muslim.
The novel really addresses not only the 'Muslim issue' in America after 9/11 (reflecting the whole RL debate about the mosque near Ground Zero), but also the question of what it means to 'American' post-9/11 (Muslim or not), the nature of grief (Asma's loss is evoked particularly sharply), and the way 9/11 has become so politicized, with various groups, left, right, conservative, liberal, pro-Muslim, anti-Muslim, as well as various groups in the Islamic world, and indvidual politicians, all using it to advance their own agendas and propagate their own ideologies. What I really liked about that aspect was how the writer wasn't all 'liberals are right, conservatives are wrong' but showed understanding of the strengths *and* flaws in both political outlooks, and how even 'liberal' or 'pro Muslim' groups, as tolerant as their viewpoint might seem, use the memorial, and 9/11 for their own gain.
Absolutely the best '9/11' book I've ever read, and very topical with the memorial for the 10th anniversary and the recent 'Ground Zero Mosque debate'. The novel really *does* explore the nature of grief that comes from an event like 9/11, and how that grief interacts with post-9/11 politics. The characters are real, human and flawed, there are a couple of very unlikable characters (a right-wing radio show host, the reported Spier, a grabbing, canny, too-ambitious governor) but most of the characters are complex enough that I felt my sympathies switching and changing as they changed. Asma is the one character who held my sympathy throughout, perhaps because she's literally caught between both worlds, and because she deals with her grief in such a quiet way, yet becomes such an important part of the book.
