Kahuna
LIF Toddler
Member since 4/10 497 total posts
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Anyone planning on reading The Submission?
Just got it on my Nook.
Fictional ‘Submission’ raises real questions after Sept. 11
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
August 16, 2011
What if a Muslim-American architect won an anonymous competition to design a memorial at Ground Zero for the victims of 9/11?
Should an architect's religion trump his design?
And what if the garden he designed was seen as Islamic, a "martyrs' paradise" for the terrorists who brought down the towers?
Amy Waldman's emotionally and politically rich novel, The Submission, raises wrenching post-9/11 questions about what it means to be an American.
She says her novel, set mostly in 2003, was underway before a real-life controversy erupted last year in New York over plans to build a mosque and Islamic community center two blocks from what was once the World Trade Center.
That controversy, still unresolved, echoes in Waldman's fiction. But the novel stands on its own, built on the moral complexities of the politics of grief and fear. It's fiction that could happen here.
It assembles a diverse cast of characters: politicians, activists, including a group called Save America from Islam, and individuals thrust into a media circus. A 9/11 widow on the jury to pick the memorial design champions the garden — at least at first.
The architect, Mohammad Khan, is politically naïve, ambitious, arrogant and principled.
He was born and raised in Alexandria, Va., the son of Indian immigrants. His friends call him Mo. He's Muslim, mostly in name only, at least until his religion is questioned.
Waldman boils down issues into dramatic dialogue.
As the controversy grows, Khan's father tells him, "We could have given you some solid American name. But as much as we turned our backs on religion, we never shied from being Muslim. We believed so strongly in America that we never thought for a moment that your name would hold you back in any way.
"And now … it is my own son who has brought about this doubt — my doubt for the first time about whether this country has a place for us."
The son replies, "Of course it does. But sometimes America has to be pushed — it has to be reminded of what it is."
The risk of writing a political novel is that it will be judged on its politics — left or right? — rather than as a work of fiction.
As a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Waldman may be viewed with suspicion by some conservatives.
A few of her secondary characters, especially the opponents of the design, seem like plot devices.
But for the most part, her novel transcends ideological politics.
The unnamed president is mentioned only in passing as the former owner of a baseball team who suggests "trading" Khan ('He withdraws, then we make him a goodwill ambassador to the Muslim world') or sending him to the minor leagues ('His memorial gets built, just in some other town or city').
New York's female governor is a Democrat and a demagogue who whips up opposition to Khan's garden out of political ambitions.
Waldman's best and most heroic character is an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, who gives birth to a son after her husband, a janitor at the World Trade Center, is killed.
"We have tried to give back to America," she says. "But also, I want to know, my son he is Muslim, but he is also American. Or isn't he?"
Readers of The Submission will have to answer that for themselves.
Good NPR story here
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