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110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11
Edited by Ulrich Baer
New York University Press, 333 pages
Letter Grade: A

September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond
Edited by William Heyen
Etruscan Press, 272 pages, paperback $19
Letter Grade: B-

Given the shattering cataclysm of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States and the wealth of media coverage dedicated to the tragedy, it's only natural that artists would dig deeper than the media could to make sense of the event.

The media, after all, are there to report the event as it happens, and whatever analysis they provided in the days and weeks following Sept. 11, it left a nagging suspicion that these were just talking heads doing what they do - talk.

Artists, by contrast, were bound to feel an event like this and explore the ripples of meaning that spread through the American consciousness. Visual artists are sure to display their interpretations of the attacks and their impact, and writers are having their say in two new books.

The better of the two is 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, reactions from fiction writers, essayists and poets to match the 110 stories of each tower of the World Trade Center that went down in fire, smoke and dust. The contributors are as diverse as fiction writer Jocelyn Lieu and Maus creator Art Spiegelman, who supplied the collection's haunting, surrealist cover.

They all live in New York, which makes their pieces scream with immediacy; they're poignant and gripping. Their pain for the city they love leaps off each page.

The writing - most of it in narrative form, often with the writer's thoughts transposed into the actions and thoughts of characters in his story - buzzes with an electricity that keeps you glued to the book. There's a wealth of wisdom here, but it's wisely presented in a literary format, not as a bunch of pedantic, self-centered, accusatory bits of rhetoric.

There's also a healthy dose of droll New York humor, as with Jennifer Belle's Gelato Is Gelato, about the Weight Watchers group that suspends its dieting for a week because of the attacks.

The writers were asked to keep their pieces to two pages, so most of the entries read like staccato reports straight from the soul.

Even the physical details of the book are well-thought-out - it's a thin book, bound in a format that echoes the shape of a high-rise building in hand-held size.

There are surprising perspectives here. The first piece in the book is Humera Afridi's apparently fictional story Circumference, a fascinating snapshot of a Muslim woman's first foray outside her cordoned-off Greenwich Village neighborhood a week after the attack.

She writes: "Three people on her street - all Caucasian. Smoke belches and curdles from the site and subsumes the neighborhood in an acrid haze. She positions her mask over her face and walks north. Two people pass her and glare. Is she imagining it?"

Another piece, Jonathan Ames' Womb Shelter, more a reaction to the bombing in Afghanistan than to the New York attack, is a randy musing that posits sex as politics. He writes from the perspective of a New York professor, a writer-in-residence at a Southern all-girls college, who lusts after the young students like an old lech who's oblivious to world politics. "Bring on the bombs," he writes. The story seems out of place, yet it makes perfect sense in the topsy-turvy post-Sept. 11 world.

Other writers are more focused on matters at hand. Writer-artist Spiegelman, who lives in lower SoHo on the fringe of what has become known as ground zero, writes in his first-person account, "I tried to underscore the deadly blackness of the event with the wondrous crystalline blue sky that underscored the surrealism of that bleak day. I sketched the towers, shrouded in black as if by a Christo in mourning. They floated against a tranquil Magritte sky above a lower Manhattan cityscape. But Surrealism was inadequate to that moment, and the vividness of the color seemed to obscenely mock the blackness at the heart of the picture."

This plein-air sense of place also comes up in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, but the immediacy isn't as focused.

William Heyen, an English professor at the State University of New York at Brockport, invited 127 writers, including heavy hitters - even Pulitzer Prize winners - such as John Updike, W.S. Merwin, Erica Jong, Ishmael Reed and Maxine Hong Kingston to submit pieces for this collection.

But the parameters weren't as controlled as with 110 Stories. The pieces vary in length, so some are short and sweet and others ungainly; the writers are spread across the country, which seems like a good idea, until you realize that hearing how they learned of the attacks is tedious in comparison with the stories of those who lived beneath the shadow of the Twin Towers. Some entries are in narrative form or fictionalized interpolations of the attacks and others mere verbatim exchanges of verbose letters expressing disbelief, anger and fear.

Sure, these letters are well-written, but they might be any Joe Schmoe's thoughts in the days that followed the attacks and add nothing to the intellectual resonance of the post-Sept. 11 reality. They may as well be transcripts of talking heads from the media.

For example, an exchange of letters between John Allman and David Zane Mairowitz sheds no more creative light on the subject than anything you and I might write: "We are already getting bogged down in endless talk. Endless analysis. Infinite second-guessing about what we should have done back when. What we have to do is use a real and credible threat of major force to affect international cooperation in tracking down terrorist networks."

And, the point is . . . ?

American Writers Respond makes the reader work too hard to find the nuggets amid the duller - albeit well-written - stones buried in the sand. Overall, the book comes across as a somewhat academic exercise, meant for the brain, while 110 Stories punches the reader right in the gut.

Given the horrific scale of the attacks and their impact on our consciousness, the punch feels like the more appropriate expression.

This review ran in the Rocky Mountain News on Sept. 6, 2002