The Last Days of Muhammad Atta
“The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a short-story by Martin Amis published in the latest New Yorker, fails as an act of imagination. It is an account of the last few hours in the life of the passenger in seat 8D of American Flight 11, and is limited by the following defects, none of which constitute the real reason for its failure: one, a flat-footed, comically literal interpretation of the near-grimace on Atta’s face as a sign of constipation; two, the absence from its narrative of a strong sense of a collective action, so that individual pettiness and resolve function as the key to an event both enacted and experienced in larger terms; three, the domination of the temporal framework over the spatial one, producing a tale tragically limited to temporary rented spaces, a bad choice for introducing a subject that is quintessentially bound to a global geography. But, as I said before, these aren’t the reasons that come close to describing why the short-story is so peculiar and dissatisfying. The story’s chief conceit is its greatest shortcoming: because many of the facts are verifiable the reader is unsure whether the smallest details are true or not. This doesn’t always pose a problem in fiction, but in this particular instance it is lethal. The narrative’s purported aim is to provide an insight into the mind of a mass murderer. What really happens while reading this story is that Muhammad Atta is no longer the subject of your attention–instead, Martin Amis is. (Note to Amis: It would have been more honest to write a memoir if you thought September 11 or the First World War or Hiroshima was all about you.)
The ever-reliable Maud Newton has provided a link to the Literary Saloon and to the Independent about the forthcoming collection of Martin Amis’s stories.
The question to ask, as I see it, is not: “what went wrong for Martin Amis.” It’s: “why were we so thrilled with him in the first place”?
His energetic writing still charms and entertains when he’s writing about writers (”literary criticism” doesn’t quite seem the right word for it), and he’s a notable memoirist.
But his recent failure at fiction is indicative, I think, of wider failures in speculative writing in our time. The fidelity to genre is one thing- this form of Austen’s continues to creak along in the most unlikely way- and I wonder not so much that the novel isn’t dead as that other forms aren’t being born in a way that matches our experience. Do we blame the publishers for not championing genre-busters? Do we blame the MFA programs for churning out adjective-addled clones?
This problem of form is perhaps related to my chief objection to Amis story: simply put, the subject seems vulgar to me. It’s exactly the same reaction I had to the synopsis of Safran Foer’s most recent book (or, for that matter, his first). The inherent drama of the material is placed as a substitute for true imaginative work.
Is it too demanding to want work that interrogates the human condition? Must we settle for subject ripped from the headlines? I’ll say it again- it’s vulgar to look directly at this atrocity- and in hands like Amis’s, hands that cannot help but make a thing into a plaything, it’s doubly vulgar. This is right up there with the film of Flight 93.
In the company of Sebald or Coetzee, what one gets are indirect glances, and somehow, what comes across in this elliptical technique is the true enormity and horror of the human condition. There are a few younger writers carrying on this work, but they are by no means among the most celebrated practitioners at work today.
Comment by St Antonym — April 22, 2006 @ 7:12 am
Two other examples of post 9-11 fiction: Updike’s upcoming “Terrorist” and McEwan’s lauded “Saturday.” I haven’t read either. Less direct than Amis, but maybe still too topical for my taste. Something about these books seems to me too cheaply won. There are griefs occasioned by that day (and the wars that followed it) that are still raw. Highly combustible stuff, and will remain so for a while.
Comment by St Antonym — April 22, 2006 @ 7:43 am