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Leaving New York: The Post-9/11 South

in Reynolds Price and Jay McInerney

Thomas Ærvold Bjerre

Last year marked the tenth anniversary for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Since the first so-called 9/11 novels came out in 2004, a steady stream of novels dealing with the attacks and their ramifications have been published. By now, enough novels have appeared to form a subgenre of 9/11 literature; novels that contribute to the way Americans, the way we all, perceive and think about 9/11. The list of American writers is comprised of both old and young, of well-established, canonical writers—like John Updike, Reynolds Price, and Don DeLillo, of up-and-coming writers like Nick McDonnell, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ken Kalfus, and those in-between, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Andre Dubus III, and Jay McInerney. The majority of the novelists who have taken on 9/11 in fiction are themselves New Yorkers.

When it comes to the southern literary response to the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, Barry Hannah seemed to sum up the general tendency among southern writers: In his short story “Sick Soldier at Your Door,” the narrator interrupts his story to state: “I’m not going to say a damned thing about 9/11, by the way. I think the innocent dead will appreciate that. I was at Sewanee once when this academic Northeastern nit read a poem about 9/11 in 2006. I was in the front row .... It was all I could do not to race over and throttle this man” (29).

The refusal to respond to the terrorist attacks through art mirrors some of the initial responses from other writers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. “After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation,” British author Martin Amis wrote in an article in The Guardian. “A novel,” he continued, “is politely known as a work of the imagination; and the imagination, that day, was of course fully commandeered, and to no purpose …. The so-called work in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble” (Amis). His view was countered by Robert McCrum, in his September 23, 2001 article in The Observer titled “The need for novelists.” McCrum pointed to the paradox that “it’s the imaginative writers who have provided the most trustworthy response to the dreadful irruption of horrifying reality…” and alluded to “contemporary masters” like Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, “who have come up with the words of comfort and clarity we crave in the midst of shock and desolation” (18). In his famous essay, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Don DeLillo also argues that the writer’s role is “to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space” (39).

Seeing how southern writers have a long tradition of dealing with the nation’s, and their region’s traumatic history, Barry Hannah’s aggressive refusal to engage artistically in 9/11 is somewhat surprising. Furthermore, southern writers, with Hannah as a prime example, have often explored southerners’ culture of honor. According to Fred Slocum, “the ‘culture of honor,’ commonly found among native-born white (especially male) Southerners, mandates that perceived challenges or insults never go unanswered or unpunished, lest the challenged party lose face in the eyes of the peers” (1). Slocum construes the 9/11 attacks as “a colossal national insult,” and argues that the Bush administration’s “aggressive, accept-no-boundaries responses... are virtually perfectly consistent with the Southern ‘culture of honor’ value system” (1). Certainly, popular culture has seen a wide variety of revenge narratives, from Toby Keith’s jingoistic song “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” to Brian Trenchard Smith’s film DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.

But it seems that the national insult has not stirred up southern writers. Perhaps the longstanding southern mistrust of New York City plays a factor. As Marcel Arbeit has pointed out, southern writers from Faulkner to the present day have depicted New York in ambivalent terms. In Faulkner’s The Mansion New York is “a potential Sodom” (Arbeit 42), and despite his personal fascination with it, Faulkner “maligned the city as inhuman, asserting that no one seemed to be behind the windows” (Karl 792). Likewise, in Flannery O’Connor’s stories “The Geranium” and “Judgment Day” New York City is depicted as a sterile desert. And as Arbeit notes, some of Barry Hannah’s stories support the idea “that all people in New York are the same .... only appurtenances of the crowd there, deprived of their individual characteristics” (56).

There are several southern writers who have approached the post-9/11 era obliquely, such as Cormac McCarthy in The Road. Richard Gray reads The Road as a 9/11 novel, “not just in the obvious, literal sense, but to the extent that it takes the measure of that sense of crisis that has seemed to haunt the West, and the United States in particular, ever since the destruction of the World Trade Center.” And unlike the novels dealing directly with 9/11, “McCarthy’s alternative strategy in The Road,” Gray asserts, “is not to domesticate but to defamiliarize” (39-40). Percival Everett’s The Water Cure reflects the dark side of the post-9/11 world of rendition, secret prisons and torture, such as waterboarding, as a response to harm done. And while Madison Smartt Bell does take on 9/11 in The Color of Night, it is done, not in a southern setting, but from the perspective of a woman living in Las Vegas.

But there are two 9/11 novels that actually leave New York for a while and go south: Reynolds Price’s The Good Priest’s Son (2005) and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006). A shared tendency in these books is that of contrasting New York—the loud, crazy, traumatized metropolis—with the South, traditionally the image of laid-back tradition and old manners. For many, perhaps even more so for Yankees, the South is still synonymous with certain characteristics or values, perhaps more so than any other region in the country—”a greater attention to the past …. a religious sense, a closeness to nature, a great attention to and affection for place, a close attention to family...” (Hobson 3). These values become important in the two novels which momentarily retreat from the chaos of a wounded New York to the tranquility of the Southern countryside.

In many ways, these two novels follow the tendency of the other 9/11 novels: All of them focus on private, individual lives. Rather than trying to see the terrorist attacks in a larger, global perspective, they focus on how the events influenced the lives of a few American people. Often, the novelists use personal crises (divorces, traumas, etc.) to reflect the larger, national crisis. The crisis in McInerney’s narrative is, in Richard Gray’s words, “recuperated... assimilated into conventional structures and a series of tropes tending to reassure the reader that nothing has determinately altered” (51).

The Good Life

Jay McInerney was one of the young stars on the literary scene in the 1980s. Together with his buddy Bret Easton Ellis he gave a satirical portrait of the hedonistic lifestyle in Manhattan in the 1980s. But while The Good Life still focuses on Manhattan’s upper-class, the tone is much more subdued, serious, almost sacred. This very traditional story tells of two married Manhattan couples. Russell and Corrine Calloway and their 6-year-old twins live in a rented loft in TriBeCa and are “trying to subsist on less than two hundred and fifty grand a year” (18). Several miles uptown, perched near the top of the Upper East Side’s social register, the wealthy ex-investment banker Luke McGavock and his beautiful socialite wife Sasha live with their teenage daughter Ashley.

Both marriages have become routine, and the terrorist attacks serve as a catalyst. Luke, who makes it out of the World Trade Center alive, meets Corrine on the street. They both start volunteering at a soup kitchen for rescue workers, fall in love and start an affair. One of the novel’s recurring themes is how the attacks upend the rigid social patterns that have guided the characters’ lives. As Sonia Baelo points out, “the soup kitchen becomes a melting pot where social differences are unimportant” (9), and Luke and Corrine’s new acquaintances include a carpenter, a policeman, a Russian exotic dancer recovering from her latest boob job, a hippie girl, an insurance adjuster, and three young women who work at Ralph Lauren.

After a drug overdose, Luke’s daughter Ashley runs away to Tennessee where her grandmother lives in Luke’s childhood home. Luke drives south to reconcile with Ashley, leaving behind him the wounded metropolis, his wife, and his mistress. And he comes into contact with a drastic change in scenery. As a contrast to the superficial Manhattan role-playing, the reader senses an immediate connection to place and the past: We are told that the house is close to “the ill-fated route that had brought Hood’s Army of Tennessee from Spring Hill to the southern edge of town, where it was devastated by entrenched Union forces” (269). Luke is surrounded by family warmth despite some friendly Dixie vs. Yankees banter. McInerney does poke fun at outsiders’ stereotypical notions of the South, such as when Luke calls Corrine back in New York, and she tells him: “Do you think I’d like it in Tennessee? I have this image of the kids riding their bikes barefoot to school and going fishing with cane poles” (277). But he immediately undercuts himself since his depiction of the South never removes itself from exactly these clichés. In fact, while talking on the phone with Corrine, Luke is in the hayloft in the barn, “the warm air in the eaves thick with the odor of the old chestnut boards .... Motes of dust swam like insects in the shaft of orange sunlight piercing the gloom through the door at the far end of the loft” (276).

We are told that “Luke wasn’t one of those for whom southernness was a religion, for whom nostalgia was an emotion more primal than lust” (278), but it is clear that he still feels a strong connection to the region. In an important scene ripe with Southern Gothic undertones, Luke, who is pondering leaving his wife Sasha for Corrine, sits in a Civil War graveyard at night, listening, “waiting for the dead to communicate. It seemed worth a shot. No one else was going to tell him what to do, and surely these men knew something about duty and honor” (289-90). Like a good ole southerner, Luke respects the wisdom of his elders and tries to gain their advice.

As these passages show, McInerney paints the South as a haven, a place of regeneration and of real values opposed to the superficial role-playing in Manhattan. His daughter Ashley kicks her addiction and brings back to New York a newfound pride in her southern roots. At the annual pre-Christmas lunch at a fancy New York restaurant, a choir performs Christmas carols and then sings “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When they follow up with “Dixie,” Ashley, “who’d spent most of lunch trying to shrink under the table,” surprises everyone by rising and standing to attention. When she urges her father to do the same, Sasha, always keeping the right Manhattan appearances, can only shake her head “almost imperceptibly, forcing a smile of tolerant indulgence,” and bitterly commenting “Well, aren’t we the rebels,” before refusing to join her family with the acid remark: “There’s a time and a place” (330-31). With a little help from the South, McInerney can include a sort of happy ending within his larger narrative.

The Good Priest’s Son

While McInerney is a New York writer with ties to Tennessee, Reynolds Price has been considered a southern writer his entire career. In The Good Priest’s Son, the 53-year-old art conservator Mabry Kincaid is on a plane returning from Europe to New York when he learns of the terrorist attacks. Realizing that he will be unable to reach his Manhattan apartment, Mabry decides to return to his small hometown in North Carolina, where his old, ailing father still lives. But because of its southern setting, however, the terrorist attacks and their aftermath are more in the background in Price’s novel than in the other 9/11 novels, including McInerney’s The Good Life. Several reviews criticized this aspect, for instance Booklist’s Brad Hooper, who complained that “the 9/11 aspect seems... only a manufactured feature” (1414). However, it seems quite a deliberate point on Price’s behalf, one that matches not only the reality of the aftermath outside New York City but also the protagonist’s state of mind.

Mabry is in many ways detached from the world he lives in, and it would seem that his southern background is what makes him able to ignore the present. When he learns of the attacks on the World Trade Center, his first thought is of the Civil War. And when he goes to sleep that night, it is into “a perfectly harmless dream—not murderous Muslims” (22). This mirrors the way Mabry experiences the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of the terrorist attacks in the South: “...no one said a single word about the recent disaster or gave the least hint of suppressing any knowledge of the horror. Their calm devotion to the job at hand—an old, entirely honorable game involving considerable harmless skills—was as reassuring as anything Mabry had met with in three days of efforts from all sides of the Western World” (58). As Gerald Préher points out, “The South appears as a world apart that cannot be affected by what is happening outside it” and Mabry’s decision to head south is “an apparent attempt to resist history and ignore what is going on in his country” (171, 167). The South soon comes to serve as a stark contrast to Mabry’s newfound disgust for New York. Returning briefly to his Manhattan apartment, he realizes that “he’d never enter that door again,” struck as he is with “the death that hung enormous above him… his country’s inevitable doom somehow inscribed around him in the air they were breathing” (209).

Returning to the South is of course a way of escaping the current tragedy, but as it turns out, Mabry has plenty of old demons awaiting him at home. In fact, the reason he has refused to see his home as home is because of various issues of guilt or even trauma: The death of his brother years earlier, a strained relationship with his ailing father, his guilt over years of infidelity in the wake of his ex-wife’s recent death, and as a result a strained relationship with his daughter. Add to this a decaying body with signs of multiple sclerosis, and you have an idea why The Washington Times reviewer called the novel “a meditation on how the events in one’s private life can be all-consuming even during times of grave public tragedy” (Bose).

But even in the South, Mabry initially finds ways of resisting his past. He seeks shelter in the fictional comforts of Gone with the Wind, a film that is referenced throughout Price’s novel: When Mabry finally reconciles with his daughter Charlotte over the phone, and she calls him “Pa,” he finds himself choking:

Not so much because of the implicit affection but because of the reminder of the heartbreaking moment in Gone with the Wind when Vivien Leigh has waded her way back to Tara through Yankee hell-and-holocaust only to find her beloved Irish father in dementia. Doesn’t she lean to kiss his curly white head and say ‘Oh Pa, don’t worry about anything. Katie Scarlett’s home’? Mabry even tried it on Charlotte now. “Katie Scarlett, dear child—”

And wondrously she got it. “Safe back at Tara. You’re in decent hands, Pa.” (189)

In fact, as Préher argues, Mabry uses the movie “as a substitute for life” because it “pictures people who, like him, cling to a way of life that has eluded them” (172). This nostalgiaembracing strategy is also apparent in Price’s characterization of the father’s African-American help Audrey Thornton. This is not just because she mimics Prissy from Gone with the Wind. Audrey is a divinity student who sacrifices much to care for Mabry’s father. Jeffrey Melnick has called Audrey a neo-Mammy for the post-9/11 age (97). And it is hard not to see her as a stereotype of the Mammy-figure. As it turns out, she not only cares for Mabry’s father, but she ends up serving as a sort of salvation for Mabry, who is in desperate need of redemption. And he finds it in Audrey, a pure, innocent female character, whose strength, rootedness, and religious beliefs serve as a contrast to Mabry’s rootless existence. Victoria O’Donnell defines the “Mammy” figure as the “southern archetype of the earth mother .... Mammy as a character is the quintessence of strength, constancy, and integrity. She is not only capable, generous, and kind but also very religious, long-suffering, and sometimes scolding” (243-44). This archetype is apparent in Price’s first description of Audrey: “... she looked like a handsome natural object somehow grown by the boards she stood on—that natural, in place, guaranteed to last” (25).

In line with the novel’s intertextual dialogue with Gone with the Wind, a pronounced sense of nostalgia saturates the narrative. Mabry displays a paradoxical nostalgia for the South (54). As Préher argues, Mabry’s focus is not on the horrors of 9/11. Instead, his attention is focused on “the Southern past” (54), and he is saddened by the realization that “the South has also lost something it will never be able to regain” (Préher 173), namely slavery, or, in the words of the narrator, “the eternal richness of the monstrous relation between whites and blacks that had nonetheless yielded more than two centuries of a daily tolerance far more complex than anything visible now in schools and stores. Well-gone, God knew, but not yet replaced with anything richer...” (54). This is a good example of “imperialist nostalgia,” which according to Renato Rosaldo is “a mood of nostalgia [that] makes racial domination appear innocent and pure.” It is based on the paradox that “someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention.” Furthermore, imperialist nostalgia “uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture peoples’ imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (Rosaldo 68, 70). Likewise, Mabry’s paradox mirrors what Tara McPherson describes, in her discussion of white viewers’ reactions upon watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War, as a “strain of nostalgia and melancholy inextricably mired in loss, a loss that is, but should not be, separated from the end of slavery” (124). Mabry does suffer from a guilty conscience on behalf of the southern past and makes attempts at penance but he is unable to relinquish the power structure already inherent in place in his family home.

When Mabry’s father dies, his last will is that Audrey is given the family’s house. Mabry agrees on the condition that he can stay there with Audrey taking care of his ailing body. So as a male version of the Scarlett O’Hara that he admires, Mabry gradually finds strength in the southern soil and eventually recovers his southern identity, complete with a mammy to boot.

While the two novels in many ways are realistic depictions of the aftermath of 9/11, their view of the South seems to perpetuate the stereotypes that have trivialized the region in the first place. It should be mentioned that there are writers that do not gloss over the ramifications of 9/11 in the South. The image of a South unaffected by the terrorist attacks is not mirrored in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox (2005). Although it is not a 9/11 novel, it depicts how a group of Mauritian immigrants in the fictional town of Madagascar, Mississippi are treated with suspicion in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A character also reports that that “all Mauritian men” in Kentucky “had been taken” (412-13). Being both Muslim and immigrants, the Mauritians experience the wave of anti-Muslim paranoia as well as the racial profiling that swept over the country in the wake of the terrorist attacks. This is also the focus point of Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun (2009) in which the Syrian immigrant Abdulrahman Zeitoun has stayed behind in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has wreaked havoc. But he becomes a victim of the paranoia, racial profiling, Islamophobia, and incompetent bureaucracy—all a result of the Bush Administration’s reaction to 9/11. Mistaken for a terrorist, Zeitoun is taken away by six armed officers. For more than a month he is held captive, without charges, and refused medical services as well as a phone call to his wife.

While writers like Shearer and Eggers do not shy away from some of the ugly and troubling ramifications of 9/11 in the South, McInerney and Price seem content with relying on established and well-worn stereotypes to forge narratives of hope and redemption. As Richard Gray argues, by relying on a familiar pattern, the “romance pattern” of The Good Life (30) and the “initiation novel” of The Good Priest’s Son (53), the unfamiliar is simply assimilated “into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense, domesticated .... The ‘worst day’ becomes... the occasion of rehearsing and replaying a deeply traditional narrative” (30, 53). The modern world may be falling apart, but, according to Price and McInerney, the South is fortunately not a part of it.

Works Cited

Arbeit, Marcel. “A Place of Growing Up, or Getting Lost: New York and Southern Writers.” New York: Cradle of America’s Cultural Plurality. Eds. Michael Peprník and Matthew Sweney. Olomouc: Palacký University, 2007. 37-62.

Amis, Martin. “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd.” The Guardian (June 1, 2002). <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jun/01/philosophy.society>.

Baelo-Allué, Sonia. “9/11 and the Broken City: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life.” Paper presented at the European Association for American Studies conference, Oslo, May 2008.

Bell, Madison Smartt. The Color of Night. New York: Vintage, 2011.

Bose, Supid. “A Man Who Learns the Steps It Takes to Go Home Again.” The Washington Times (July 31, 2005): B08.

DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Harper’s (December 2001): 33-40.

Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Everett, Percival. The Water Cure. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007.

Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Hannah, Barry. “Sick Soldier at Your Door.” Harper’s (June 2009): 27-31.

Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1991.

Hooper, Brad. “The Good Priest’s Son.” Booklist (April 15, 2005): 1414.

Karl, Frederick R. William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography. 1989. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

McCrum, Robert. “The Need for Novelists.” The Observer (September 23, 2001): 18.

McInerney, Jay. The Good Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South.

Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

Melnick, Jeffrey. 9/11 Culture: America under Construction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

O’Donnell, Victoria. “Mammy.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Vol. 4: Myth, Manners, & Memory. Ed. Charles Reagan Wilson. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. 243-44.

Préher, Gérald. “Resisting History or How to Turn 9/11 into Southern History: Reynolds Price’s The Good Priest’s Son.” Le travail de la résistance dans les sociétés, les littératures et les arts en Amérique du Nord. Ed. Yves-Charles Grandjeat. MSHA, 2008. 165-184.

Price, Reynolds. The Good Priest’s Son. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. 1989. London: Routledge, 1993.

Shearer, Cynthia. The Celestial Jukebox. Washington, DC: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005.

Slocum, Fred. “Militarism, Southern Culture, the 9/11 Attacks and the Bush Administration’s Responses: The Implications for Contemporary Southern Politics.” Paper presented at the Southern Political Science Association conference, New Orleans, January 4-7, 2007.