THE SUBMISSION by Amy Waldman

A hand-picked jury is debating the merits of the various submissions to a design contest for a memorial at ground zero. The jury does not know the identities of the entrants. Claire, whose husband was killed in the 9/11 attacks, lobbies for "the garden" and wins over the majority. The jurists are thrown into a tailspin, however, when they learn that the winner's name is Mohammed Khan—obviously a Muslim. Someone leaks this juicy tidbit to the press before the official announcement, and political bedlam ensues. The author treats this controversy with the seriousness that it deserves and posits two sides to a moral dilemma with no perfect solution. My favorite line is the book is this quotation from a music executive: "'It just makes me uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable makes me even more uncomfortable.'" This perfectly describes my feeling about the situation. We all love that American stands for freedom, but our gut feeling is that having a Muslim-built memorial for a site destroyed by Quran-quoting terrorists is a recipe for disaster. Is the memorial really a martyr's paradise? Such was not Khan's intent, but his motives are not clear to the public, because he's not talking. Born in Virginia, he's indignant that his lineage has caused his allegiance to be called into question. From the public's perspective, he's an enigma, but he's really just too proud to buckle to the scrutiny he deems unfair. Claire, for all her high-minded initial support of Khan, begins to vacillate when a loathsome reporter plants a seed of doubt about Khan's political leanings. The reporter's lack of ethics and her success in duping Claire made me angry. I wanted there to be some non-Muslim who supported him unequivocally. Alas, Khan's egotism and intransigence ensure that even American Muslims ultimately abandon his cause. I love the title and all of its possible meanings. There's a comment in the book that Islam is submission, but isn't all religion submission to a higher power? Then there's also submission to public opinion, to emotion, to ambition, to political pressure—all of which come into play here. My only criticism would be that we never get close enough to Claire or Khan to experience their inner turmoil. The author brings focus more to ourselves and our own principles, and how we as a country and as individuals respond to this type of polarizing argument.

THE WHOLE WORLD OVER by Julia Glass

It took me a long time to read this book. The characters just didn't leap off the page as they did in the two other Julia Glass novels that I've read. Sometimes it seems that an author who wins a big book award then feels s/he has a license to give us a really long book. And some books, even though they're long, I don't want them to end. This was not one of those. There were a lot of interwoven plot lines, some of which I found to be somewhat sleep-inducing, and when I got buried in one of those, I had to give up for the night. The main and most interesting plot line is that of Greenie and her husband Alan, New Yorkers with a small child named George. Alan counsels couples, and Greenie owns a bakery but has been offered a job as the chef for the governor of New Mexico. Since her marriage is not in a good place at the moment anyway, Greenie and young George head to Santa Fe. This estrangement allows both parties to follow up on some relationships from their youth. Less compelling are the stories of Walter, a gay restaurateur, and Saga, a slightly brain-damaged young woman who helps find homes for abandoned pets. Actually, the least enjoyable plot line was that of Walter's teenage nephew Scott, who has been sent to live with and work for Walter. His misbehavior is annoying and frustrating, and I kept waiting for Walter to give him the boot. In fact, Walter generally worries that he's overreacting, and I'm constantly thinking he's too much of a softie. It's not that I didn't enjoy this book; it's just that the author's other two are so much better.

THE FALLING MAN by Don DeLillo

This book opens with an apocalyptic-type scene where a man is walking through ash and debris. Three pages later we realize that the scene is New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Keith is a lawyer who escapes from the South Tower and goes home to his estranged wife Lianne and young son Justin. He brings with him a briefcase belonging to Florence Givens, who lost it during a fall in the stairwell. The book is about these 4 people, primarily Keith and Lianne, plus Hammad, one of the terrorists. The Falling Man is a performance artist who seems to re-enact the leaps from the burning towers by falling head first with a harness and a non-bungee-like tether. (My favorite image is that of the Falling Man as a Tarot card.) Symbolically, Keith is the falling man, though, as he has a brief affair with Florence and then becomes a full-time poker player—possibly in some kind of homage to his poker-night friends who died in the World Trade Center. DeLillo makes copious use of pronouns, so that it sometimes requires several paragraphs of reading to determine who is the antecedent of "he" or "she." This technique emphasizes the disconnectedness of the characters that is prevalent throughout the novel. The tragedy has caused them to become somewhat robotic and caused me to consider the lives of the survivors and their families. The inclusion of Hammad's story, brief and incomplete, seemed unnecessary to me, and he doesn't come to life nearly as well as the terrorists did in The Garden of Last Days by André Dubus III. As far as Keith and Lianne are concerned, DeLillo sums them up in what is probably the most quoted and most telling line in the novel: "She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

Amazon: 3.5 stars (86 reviews)

Barnes and Noble: 3 stars (14 reviews)

THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS by Andre Dubus III

Like Dubus's first novel, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days has several flawed, desperate characters—three, to be exact. April is a single mother working as a stripper trying to save enough to buy a house or two. Bassam is a customer at the strip club who just happens to be leaving for Boston shortly to participate in one of the 9/11 hijackings. AJ, another customer, is an angry wife-beater who refuses to acknowledge the gravity of his sins. All of the action takes place in Florida during the several days preceding the 9/11 tragedy. April's usual babysitter has gone to the hospital with a panic attack, and April uneasily takes her daughter Frannie to the club where Tina, a sort of housemother, will keep an eye on her for a price. Tina, however, is derelict in her duties, while Bassam is showering April with cash during a private dance. AJ, who has already been thrown out of the club for the night, spots Frannie in the parking lot and decides to save her from, in his mind, her obviously neglectful mother. I read this book with some trepidation, given the gritty outcome of House of Sand and Fog. The theme here, though, seems to be appreciation of one's family and loved ones and learning from one's mistakes. Bassam and his murderous cohorts are the least interesting characters as they try to justify their carousing while seeing themselves as martyrs. AJ is a saint next to them.

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST by Mohsin Hamid

On the next to last page of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez, the Pakistani Princeton-educated narrator, says, "I have felt rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe." This allusion to Heart of Darkness is very illuminating, as Hamid's book bears several similarities to Conrad's novel. First, the narrator is telling his story to an unidentified stranger, although in this case the narrator is the Kurtz-like character. More telling, though, is the fact that Changez's story is that of a star team player run amok. The revelation at the end will tell you who is the Marlowe character and will make you want to reread the novel. The title is a little puzzling, since Changez is encouraged in his New York job to focus on fundamentals. He is, however, never reluctant in that regard. He is either totally gung-ho or totally apathetic. I think he is "reluctant" to abandon his American lifestyle to re-engage with his "fundamental" Pakistani roots, but 9/11 and the U.S. response to that tragedy have a sudden and jarring impact on his perspective. I'm not sure, either, what purpose his girlfriend Erica serves, as she loses her own way in her grief for a lost love. Perhaps she is a metaphor for the U.S. in its post-9/11 grief, but my biggest complaint about the book is that no clear explanation is given for Changez's obsession with her. I suppose that he just longs for something he can never have, just as he can never fully blend in with lighter-skinned Americans. All symbolism aside, the rhythm of the prose somehow evokes the narrator's heritage and builds suspense, right up until the last sentence. There is also some clever wordplay that made me smile, such as "Maximum return was the maxim to which we returned, time and again."

THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN by Claire Messud

Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children about three thirty-somethings in New York did not sound appealing to me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and wanted more at the end. The personal entanglements and the arrival on the scene of a twenty-something with the unfortunate nickname of Bootie make for great reading. All four of the young characters are career-challenged, in various stages of identity crises, and failing to live up to their own expectations. Clothes are one of the many symbols here, and the characters cloak their true selves in a veneer that is neither admirable nor endearing. Another important character is Murray Thwaite, a famous, charismatic and well-respected personality, father of thirty-something Marina, and perhaps the "emperor" in the title. Messud weaves in a lot of suspense, especially with regard to a long-anticipated 9/11 tie-in. Each time I expected the worst to happen, an eruption of a different sort would occur. Everyone in the book is cheating in some way--Julius on his lover, Murray on his wife, Marina on her publisher. The main theme of the book, though, seems to be whether or not honesty is the best policy. Bootie is brutally honest in some ways, but he is also the least likeable character with his slovenly ways and poor treatment of his mother. He exposes that "the emperor has no clothes" but turns out to be deceitful in the extreme.