The past few months have seen the appearance of two short novels by American writers. Both books begin in downtown Manhattan on the morning of 9/11, and both forsake grand socio-political theorizing for the intimate study of one family's reaction to the tragedy. In both cases, the family in question consists of a husband and wife in a strained marriage and their troublingly uncommunicative son. Of these two eerily similar books, Don DeLillo's Falling Man has received more attention. But to my mind Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach is the better novel. A Day at the Beach follows choreographer Gerhard Falktopf and his wife and former principal dancer, Suzannah, from the lazily innocent hours before the planes hit to their escape to East Hampton from their loft in Tribeca. The book is a moving group portrait of a husband and wife struggling to do right by each other even as they feel pulled in different directions. Of course, all art about 9/11 must also, to some degree, be art about art about 9/11, and A Day at the Beach is also a compelling and convincing exploration of the place of art in times of crises.
Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one who was impressed by the novel. On Slate, Ruth Franklin wrote that "[Schulman's] steely vision of human relationships makes this book a standout in the increasingly crowded field of 9/11 novels." Writing in Time, Anne Lamott said, "Schulman's book makes me feel physically ill with jealousy that I did not write it, but physically ill in a good way."
Helen agreed to answer a few of my questions about the book over email.
Your novel takes place on 9/11, and one of its central concerns is the role art in times of great tragedy. "Art never saved anyone from anything," Gerhard thinks. You add that, "The thought was both emancipating and unmooring." I wondered how your own thoughts about art and tragedy compare with Gerhard's. Did 9/11 change the way you think about your job as a writer?
There are moments when I have all sorts of lofty ideas about the writer's role, this writer's role, and after 9/11 I thought is was my job to make a historical record of the culture, without satire or irony, but with nerve. I am a life-long New Yorker, and I lived through 9/11, but I never did more research in my life than I did when writing this book.
My book takes place over 24 hours, so I watched and re-watched the same corresponding 24 hours of CNN reporting on tape. I made my second home at the Museum of Television and Radio. I interviewed people who were in East Hampton that day, and was lucky to find a generous East Hampton Star reporter to talk to. Google became my best friend. Blah, blah, I wanted to write a novel that was true.
I thought that it was my job to bear witness, not only to the horrors and multitudinous acts of courage we saw that day, but also the heady, heedless parts that was life in Manhattan on September 10th. Manhattan was an art lover's dream, a hedonist's delight, and money was king. At the time, there was much speculation that the terrorist attacks would change all that, but as we have seen, the culture has only revved up in these ways. We may be at war but, at least in Manhattan, people are still "partying like it's 1999." There has been very little raising of the public consciousness.
But in direct answer to your question: yes, I don't think art has ever saved anyone from anything. And yes, I do think that the frightening realities of our fractious world remind those of us who have devoted our lives to trying to make art how weak we are. The only one art saves is the artist.
It's interesting to hear you say that, "The only one art saves is the artist." The book is so good on the excitement of creativity, on what Gerhard calls "the test and tangle of the process." Gerhard spends so much of the day thinking about his work-in-progress, Day at the Beach, but also thinking that "art was probably not the point right now." What did immersing yourself so thoroughly in that day do to your own creative process? Were you still able to enjoy the excitement of it?
In some weird way, when I was writing A Day at the Beach, even though I was doing so much research, I felt like I was writing it in a dream. Like the story itself was real, just mine to excavate. I have no idea where Gerhard came from. I've never known anyone like him. He is a German and I am a Jew. He is a man, a choreographer, etc., etc. So many things I am not. And yet I felt like I knew his entire history and, in a way, I fell in love with him. When I first started showing the book to people, so many of my readers hated him. And I was stunned, because I loved him so. "Why does he need to be such a prick?" a friend said. And I thought, Is he a prick? And then one friend, a trusted reader, said, "Does he have to have girlfriends?" And I thought, He has to have girlfriends because he does have girlfriends. I felt like a reporter, rather than a creator.
At one point in the novel, Gerhard thinks of those day's events, "Was there a plot on someone's desk somewhere that could possibly compete?" He is certainly not the first to feel that real world events have overwhelmed narrative art. Did you feel challenged to write "up" to this material?
In the weeks following 9/11, I remember saying to my husband: "Think of all the bad novels that are going to come out of this." There seemed no more compelling theater than the 24-hour news coverage that I have from that moment on become addicted to. I am a big reader, and my tastes have always and will always lean towards fiction -- but even I have been seduced away by the news. I read three newspapers a day (why?). I am constantly checking the blogs. I still read magazines. CNN. Sure, what I do (write fiction) in comparison to, say, what George Bush has done to this country and the world is comparatively miniscule, a tiny micro-organism. But still it is what I do. Print media may die, and the novel may go the way of poetry and classical music, but it is the way that I respond to the world around me.
Gerhard's work-in-progress is a ballet choreographed to Brian WiIson's legendary album Smile. The Beach Boys were a sort touchstone of sunny American optimism. Gerhard is a New Yorker, but he's not an American (a point you make quite strikingly, I think.) What do you think attracts Gerhard to Smile?
The Beach Boys represent the life Gerhard never had. He lived such a crabbed, joyless existence back in Germany with his father. He is so attracted to the sun and surf, the girls in bikinis, etc., sure. But more, I think recognized the sacred quality in Smile. And while Gerhard is an atheist, I think he also believed in the deeper, more beautiful mysteries of life. In a way, it is because of this quality that he can be ennobled and enlarged (however briefly) by his experiences that day. For a moment, he truly be a husband and a father, a man. My feeling is that the moment is fleeting, but it is miraculous that it existed nevertheless. This what I think we experienced as a country on 9/11. I think we were ennobled and enlarged. So many people risked their lives for others, for strangers. In New York, we knew no boundaries (race, creed, class) -- everyone reached out to one another. We could have rioted and looting, but we stood shoulder-to-shoulder. It was a wonderful flowering of humanity in the face of true evil and unspeakable loss. That was all squandered, squandered by the very people we chose to lead us. Like Gerhard and Suzannah, we could have gone one way or the other. Look what we chose.
I also wanted to ask you about the relationship between Gerhard and Suzannah. She has retired from dancing to raise their son, but she remains, in many ways, Gerhard's muse. Later in the novel, she finds that she has unknowingly served as the muse for another artist. What drew you to write about this artist-muse relationship?
I don't have a clue.
Suzannah's main concern, throughout the day, is her son Nikolai, who suffers from unnamed developmental problems -- possibly autism. Was it a challenge to balance the individual tragedies of your characters with the larger tragedy that frames the novel?
On September 11, my best friend's father found out that he had inoperable stomach cancer -- where do you think her focus lay? History's most potent tragedies interrupt real lives, lives fully in motion, flawed, problematic, complex lives. I remember reading all those "Portraits in Grief" in the New York Times and wondering about the real stories behind the public faces of those people so brutally taken from us. Almost 3,000 innocent Americans were murdered on 9/11. Does the fact that they were human (like the rest of us) take away anything from these horrible crimes? I think not. It isn't easy to be a person even when planes aren't crashing into buildings. These huge historical atrocities only further compound human misery. Finally, as a mother, I have to say, nothing compares with one's feelings for one's children. Nothing even comes close.