Briefly Noted    

Alumni/ae are urged to advise the Exonians in Review editor of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates. Whenever possible, authors and composers are encouraged to send one copy of their books and original copies of articles to Edouard Desrochers '45 (Hon.), the Editor of Exonians in Review, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833. Alumni/ae interested in reviewing works by fellow Exonians are also encouraged to contact the editor at the same address, or by email at edesrochers@exeter.edu.

Alumni/ae     

1937–Douglas M. Knight. The Dancer and the Dance: One Man's Chronicle, 1938-2001. (Separate Star Inc., 2003)

"Nothing was the same for anyone after that."

The words are those of writer Joyce Maynard '71, and her subject is September 11 and the stark "before" and "after" the events of that day created in our collective psyche. We have been living in that after for 20 months now, struggling to understand it, to reconfigure our understanding of the world and our place in it. So have Maynard and another Exonian author, the essayist and social critic Jedediah Purdy '92, and earlier this year they each published responses to the after in which we now find ourselves. These are two very different writers, yet both attempt to take the measure of a cataclysm-Purdy a political one, Maynard a personal one-and to suggest where we go from here. The result: two very different but good books.

Jedediah Purdy '92 and Joyce Maynard '71 have written two very different books that are both responses to September 11.

Purdy's Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World (Knopf, 2003) is deeply ambitious, a quality it shares with his first book, For Common Things, published in 1999 when he was just 24. Most famous 24-year-olds are athletes or pop stars, but Purdy's renown, which began in intellectual circles but rippled widely outward from there, came for writing a serious and erudite critique of American culture and values-especially the high premium placed on irony. Like Joyce Maynard before him (who published a much-read cover story in The New York Times Magazine at the ripe old age of 18), he was singled out-and occasionally mocked-as a voice of his generation.

September 11 prompted many Americans to hunker down, not only in their homes but also in their suspicions of the wider world, but it had precisely the opposite effect on Purdy. He spent that fall and winter traveling in Egypt, India, Indonesia and China, seeking "to understand the attraction and resentment, the imitation and rejection that America inspires everywhere." He found instances of each in the people he met, including Ingy, the young Egyptian woman who describes Osama bin Laden as a hero "because he is the one who hit the U.S.," but whose job (she's an attorney), lifestyle (which includes drinks and dinner at a Cairo TGIFriday's) and outlook (ambitious and materialistic) are recognizably Western.

Many Westerners find such contradictions hypocritical; Purdy finds them human, the result of an ambivalence that considerably predates September 11. "Most who sympathize with nationalism and fundamentalism," he writes, "are torn between resentment of American power and attraction to everything America represents. . . . Young men who do not know whether they want to fight for the mujahideen or study engineering in New Jersey, and who are as likely as not to put up a mujahideen poster even if they get a dorm room at Rutgers, are not our enemies-yet. They are unformed, and the form they will take is tied up with their attitude toward the United States. We need to be on the side of those parts of divided nations and souls that incline to liberalism."

Purdy alternates his reporting with careful readings of history and philosophy, adopting, he writes, "the compass of Edmund Burke," the 18th century British politician and writer who "defined his marriage of liberal and conservative commitment by saying that he loved liberty but hated violence." These are Purdy's convictions as well, and while Being America was written before the war in Iraq, it both anticipates and condemns it. He is scathing in his analysis of the Bush administration's "blithely imperial" foreign policy, which assumes that "in us, and only in us, [do] power and righteousness coincide." Such "perfect moral self-confidence," he writes, coupled with a selective and disingenuous use of our military might, is likely to push divided nations and souls deeper into nationalism and fundamentalism: "Believing in our own innocence only suggests to others who cannot believe in it that we must be smug about our guilt."

If Purdy's book is shot through with politics, Joyce Maynard's new novel, The Usual Rules (St. Martin's Press, 2003), is conspicuously devoid of it. There are only fleeting references to the forces that set September 11 in motion. Instead, Maynard examines the repercussions of September 11 on a single family, and most specifically, on a single 13-year-old girl, Wendy, whose mother leaves their Brooklyn apartment on that beautiful Tuesday morning for her job on the 87th floor of the World Trade Center and never returns.

Her mother's death leaves a hole in Wendy's life as large as the one in the New York skyline. Suddenly and without warning, the usual rules no longer apply: not only can mighty towers crumble and several thousand people disappear, but other pillars can give way as well. Wendy's devoted stepfather all but collapses under the weight of his own grief, leaving him with few resources to care for her and her 4-year-old brother. Then, on Halloween, a ghost of sorts appears: Wendy's irresponsible and long-absent father, who announces he is taking her back with him to California. There, slowly, and with some frightening missteps, Wendy begins to find her way forward through her grief, buoyed by her father's imperfect but real love and her own growing strength.

September 11 looms as a powerful symbol of loss in The Usual Rules, but all the book's characters suffer bereavement in one form or another: loss not only of loved ones (whether to death or estrangement), but also of innocence and hope. Loss, Maynard gently but insistently reminds us, is, in fact, the usual rule of life. But so, she adds, is our capacity for rebirth, even in the face of great tragedy and loss.

Maynard opens her book with the words of another 13-year-old whose world had been turned upside down, but one who "still believes, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" and "that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank hovers like a guiding spirit over the book and over Wendy, who begins reading her diary in the days after September 11. Anne did not live to see her "after," but Wendy does. "We won't get things back how they used to be," she tells her younger brother. "But if you think it's going to be okay again someday, it will be. If you believe in goodness, it's still there."