Word: harrimansã
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...review, B3) which portrays the acrimonious divorce between Joyce and Marshall Harriman. Although the novel has a tighter focus than “United 93,” it isn’t as myopic as “World Trade Center,” using the Harrimans?? divorce to represent the sociopolitical changes that rocked post 9/11 America. Kalfus’ prose is as expansive as it is visceral, enhancing the sense that anyone could be fated to divorce, decapitation, or worse, without making the plot feel contrived.Such insecurity can also be enfeebling. Indeed, paralysis...
...sadly for the Harrimans (and their lawyers), Joyce’s business trip is canceled before she gets to the Newark airport, and Marshall, late for work, isn’t at his office when the second plane hits. No armistice follows the Harrimans?? pair of close calls. If anything, Joyce and Marshall feel more trapped by their loveless marriage post-9/11 than...
Kalfus mirrors the postdiluvian upheaval in the U.S. through the battles fought in the Harrimans?? marital war. Both the commentary in Kalfus’ novel and the joy of reading it radiates from this nearly-pornographic voyeurism into the couple’s fights, the epic “blistering argument[s] encompassing all the issues that had brought them to divorce in the first place,” and their underlying emotional dysfunction—“when they watched news of wars on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think...
...Kalfus’ envisioning of the American mind, our twisted desire to gawk at the Harrimans?? fights echoes a similar desire to watch the 9/11 footage over and over again. On the day of the attacks, when the smoking towers were glowing in every TV set, two people were deriving the utmost pleasure out of the possibility of each other’s demise. Kalfus suggests that such seething schadenfreude, while repulsive, is inescapably American...
...allure of Kalfus’ utopia isn’t all that compelling, either. When the Harrimans?? offspring sport their “Death to Terrorists!” t-shirts, we wonder how a post-terror world could ever be anything except terrifying...
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