Sherry Chandler

Tricks of Perspective

Here’s a little passage from the end of Ken Kalfus’s novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (HarperCollins 2006). The novel follows the lives of a divorcing couple, Joyce and Marshall Harriman, beginning on September 11, 2001 and ending in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq. This passage deals with the world-wide peace march that took place on February 15, 2003:

[Joyce] did not attend the demonstration after all. She remained home with the children, the three of them watching the news on TV, where the worldwide protesters were an image shrunk within the screen to make room for the “War on Terror” logo, the Homeland Security Threat Bar, and the news crawl. The crawl scurried: you had to have quick eyes to catch it—UN resolutions…troop movements…terrorist attacks—and still follow the stories being told by the live images. You could never catch it.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is a novel about how madness escalates madness. In the supercharged atmosphere after September 11, 2001, the Harriman’s divorce, which was vicious to begin with, becomes monstrous in ways that engulf not just the divorcing couple but also their friends, family, and in particular their children. Joyce and Marshall plot manic revenge and counter-revenge against the background media frenzy. The metaphorical application is obvious.

Robin Bevan in the Sydney Morning Herald describes the novel like this:

Kalfus has said that by glorifying the hero-victims of 9/11, the dead are being dehumanised, “robbed of the particularness of their normally messy lives”. Statistically, he argues, there must have been at least a few partners of the dead who were actually relieved to be set free.

From this starting point, he builds a tall, satirical tale in parallel to the historic edifice of CNN-filtered events leading up to the invasion of Iraq: anthrax, Afghanistan, al-Qaeda. Never hiding his intent - which would be impossible, anyway - the political is overtly personalised. Sometimes these are signposted in giant Times Square letters: their son smashing a vase with a toy plane, for instance. Other parallels emerge subtly, such as a sinister house party that takes on the character of Abu Ghraib. “There’s no analogy here,” objects Marshall at one point in the face of a whole mess of the stuff.

Kalfus’s is a misanthropic and hellish vision, tackling the venality, narcissism and appropriated victimhood of many New Yorkers. It’s very different from other post-9/11 novels like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, seen through the bewildered eyes of the son of a victim, or John Updike’s Terrorist, giving the perspective of a budding Islamicist extremist. Like Ian McEwan’s more oblique Saturday, Kalfus uses the domestic to comment on the worldly.

The Harrimans have particularly messy lives, it’s true.

It took me weeks to read A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. It’s a painful book and not only because it reminded me of things forgotten in the hysteria of the ensuing years: bodies splattering on the sidewalk, anthrax scares, the exploded shuttle.

It also reminded me of feeling, during those years, that there is a reality out there somewhere that, like the peace march, is being obscured by all the noise and shouting, the patriotism, piety, and paranoia, that we have been constantly acting and reacting without perspective, as though we were living in some trompe l’oeil artwork.

It is nevertheless wicked funny.

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