A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Ken Kalfus Simon & Schuster, 237pp, £12.99
ISBN 0743286081
Joyce and Marshall are getting divorced. With neither of them willing to vacate their cramped New York apartment, their relationship has been reduced to a bitter and seemingly endless cycle of legal negotiations, and their two young children, Victor and Viola, are caught in the middle.
Then aeroplanes fly into the World Trade Center and Joyce watches the towers fall from her office window. Marshall narrowly escapes the collapse. But instead of prompting a reconciliation, the fearful post-9/11 atmosphere infects what is left of their marriage. In the months that follow, Joyce tries to implicate her husband in an anthrax scare and Marshall stirs things up between Joyce's ultra-Waspy family and her sister's Jewish fiancé.
Ken Kalfus's acerbic second novel blurs the boundaries between the political and the personal to entrancingly dark effect. He deftly depicts how the horrors of terrorism can bleed into the everyday. (Viola "plays 9/11" by repeatedly jumping from the veranda, having seen images of people falling on the news.) Yet there is something lacking at its heart. Joyce and Marshall are rarely more than caricatures, and the world Kalfus depicts is so desperately sad that it's a relief to leave it.
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