Discussion of Claire Tristram's After (with the participation of the novelist) starting on March 12, 2007.

Hey guys -

Sorry to get the discussion started so late, but the schedules of our group members have not been playing nice.

One of the themes found in Claire Tristram's "After" that I thought was the most interesting was that of identity - which I think crops up in several ways. I'd like to know what you guys think.

First, neither character is named, either in reference to themselves or each other, until the very end of the text, when the "Muslim" thinks of his wife at home talking to him. Outside of that reference, both characters are defined by external characteristics, he is always the "Muslim" and she is "the American widow", or in her own references to herself, "the widow of a Jew". In fact, no characters are named at all - the couple they meet, the farmer, et cetera. Everyone in this book is defined by their circumstances.

Secondly, through the first parts of the novel it is clear that neither character has any real desire to "get to know" the other - while they both seem to be there for very different reasons neither is looking for a personal connection. However, later in the novel, the Muslim is the first to become personally attached to the widow, and desires for both of them to become emotionally as well as physically intimate.

After the widow forces the Muslim to undergo the same experiences as her husband did, she tells him that this was the only way for him to "know" her and to understand her. She transposes part of her husband's identity onto him.

Through these uses of personal identity, what do you think the author was trying to say about the characters, and about the story?

To coincide with Julia's astute realizations of "After"'s major thematics:

On page 61, the man re-enters the hotel room as per the widow's request and is coached through a reenactment of her late husband's love making.

Considering that this novel occurs "After" September the 11th and involves us within the life of a character directly affected by the event, what significance can this scene hold when paralleled with re-enactments of the attack (ie: replayed news reel/united 93/WTC)?

Does the recreation of her past events/emotions relieve her from her loss?
What is it about re-living our experiences that appeals to us?
Can it ever act as a catharsis? Why or why not?

What has the capability to expunge the overwhelming power of mourning and loss?

If not re-living then what if anything?

How does this scene use polarity (black and white extremes: ie. late husband/new lover) to exert complexity (grey area. ie: the future)?

Just to get the discussion going about the text, context, subtext.

I will post back later with points of discussion concerning “After” and the legitimacy of literary symbolic interpretation in our current post- apocalyptic landscape.

Looking foward to your interpretation of this scene!

I read this book in January after we got the reading list. After reading it again this weekend, I have found a prominent theme throughout the book. It has to do with a theme we discussed in one of our first classes earlier in the semester, (when we read Baudrillard, Virilio and Zizek)- the attraction for violence and horror and sadomasochism. We were discussing that theme in regard to the events of 9/11. People were attracted to the horror of the images of the Event. In After, both the widow and the “Muslim” (as he is so often called) could be called sadomasochistic in their “love” affair.
Here are some passages I marked that I felt illustrated that theme:
1. “He felt the sudden urge to plant small bites along her neck to leave a trail of black and blue marks along her white, white skin” (p. 50)
2. “She saw how attractive violence was to her” (p. 58)
3. “Her passivity filled him with nearly unbearable desire to violate her” (p. 61)
4. “He was grabbing her, angry, at the crotch” (p. 75)
5. “He felt his mouth close over and bite, hard, on the nipple. She clutched his head closer to her, in response to the pain, letting out an earthy rumble and swiveling her hips toward him until there was no help for it, and he hammered at her until she was nothing more than a banner snapping in the wind.” (p.76)
6. “And then he bit her… {She} bit back…” (p. 80)
7. “She had come into his life as sudden as a knife edge” (p. 85)
8. “She felt marked, infected, abused” (p.88)

I think you get the point… Anyway, I think this is an interesting commentary on the characters and on people in general. The widow’s marriage, or at least the sex with her late husband, had always been “neat”. Likewise, her lover felt that his marriage was monotonous and lacked something. There is something in human nature that craves exhilaration, even if it comes with bad behavior, violence or pain. She got it from being with a man who looked Muslim because of the association between people of “his kind” and her husband’s death. (Which is ironic, because we find out on page 81 that he is not even Arab and is not particularly religious at all… another commentary on the ignorance of Americans who just assume that a dark-skinned man is Muslim or Arab.) He got his thrill from the fact that he, as a Middle-Eastern-looking man, had caught the eye of a woman, (other than his wife,) in a post-9/11 world.

Another thing that I believe Tristram did an excellent job of was portraying the awkwardness and dirtiness of the situation. There were many awkward moments; from their first meeting on the stairs to the first time they did the deed. (Is that a childish way to say it?) She filled in many details that convinced me that both parties felt there was something dirty about this affair: “He made her pay cash”, the mildewed hotel stationary, the coffee shop with only packets of instant decaf, the pock-marked face, the thick-fingered man, the faded and threadbare hallway runner and the dim lighting, the potholes on the road and the mobile homes surrounded by chain-link fences hung with dead roses.

There is one last thing that stuck out at me the second time I read this, which did not the first time. Around page 90, there is a scene in which the “Muslim” is shaving, and the widow has a mental image of “black-haired men slowly shaving their arms and legs and chests, gliding the edge of a straight-edged razor over every inch of their skin, with self-referential eroticism and with ritualistic precision, preparing themselves for their coming sacrifice and resurrection.” After reading about, (and seeing in the 9/11 films we’ve watched,) how the 9/11 terrorists shaved their entire bodies before they carried out the attacks, reading this was a stark and chilling reminder of the situation the widow was in and why she had sought out this man.

Like Julia did, I also noted that names were not used in this book. I agree that the purpose of this was to define people by their circumstances. By not giving us a name to relate to the person, we must think of her as “the widow”, he as “the Muslim”, the others as “the thick-fingered man” and “his girlfriend”, etc. We do hear an awful lot about Cesar though!

I just finished reading this book and I am somewhat disappointed by the whole lay out. I think that at best this is a real unoriginal idea for a book. I think the grieving widow in this book is somewhat twisted for her outlook. Really, because your husband was killed directly or indirectly at the hands of terrorists, you feel the urge to bed down with the enemy? What was the point? Was it for therapy? I mean I am sitting here now looking at this book right now and wondering what if any educational value this book has? This whole book was lame and at best it was a story for 13-year-old girls. I guess the question raised if any, is maybe a moral question at best. As I was reading this I just thought more of how psychologically twisted this whole thing was. I agree with Lauren that this book is more like the ones we talked about in one of our first classes earlier in the semester, (Baudrillard, Virilio and Zizek the attraction for violence and horror and sadomasochism). I believe as Americans we have a fascination with violence that has taken a center stage in our lives and society. I believe that this theme we were discussing with the other events of 9/11 is somewhat unique to Americans. People were attracted to the horror of the images of the Event with gratititious violence. The widow and the Muslim man, or dark skinned man whatever he is, engage in sex. I mean was this supposed to be "hate sex" or some kind of "angry sex"? The woman depicted in this book sounds more mentally ill with her fascination for violence and relating it to her personal situations. This was really a bad book hidden in 15 chapters of sex talk with minimal relevance to 9/11-I feel and at best a smutty sex story for teenage kids.

Chris, your message just came up on the forum, and let me say that many readers reacted negatively to the novel. My foreign rights editor shared with me that she never sold such a polarizing book. Editors would tell her, I -hate- this book, or I -love- this book, with nothing in between. I think it has to do with the expectations a given reader has for a work of fiction, not just my fiction but any fiction.

For example, readers expecting the novel to be "erotic," which is fair since every hardcover copy in 13 countries to date had a naked person on the cover (Japan being the only one with a naked man)--were often disappointed. Some reviewers complained "this is not erotic!" or "this book is only tepidly erotic!" which was strange to me, since it wasn't meant to be erotic at all.

Also many readers have a requirement that a novel have a sympathetic protagonist, so much so that, even though I have my character behaving in a manner that strongly suggests mental illness--from shaving her body to threatening to murder her lover to hallucinating her own self running down the beach toward her--the power of the sympathetic character trope is such that many reviewers saw her behavior as being volitional and redemptive, purging her of past trauma and allowing her to live on. Other readers felt snookered because they see the protagonist behaving in a less and less sympathetic manner as the novel progresses. This I did purposefully--I wanted to confound that particular expectation, and shift sympathy from one character to the other. This is in some sense not playing fair, and some readers disliked it a great deal.

Anyway, I think it's all right to dislike a book, and can even be useful to think about why a book doesn't work for you, especially when it's a short one.

I thought that Tristram's text also worked in tandem with Freud's theory on grieving in _Mourning and Melancholia_, which I touched on briefly last week. It seemed as if the widow only felt like she could move on after having a substitute for her husband.

Also, I thought the lack of detail given to the actual terror "event" in this novel was notable. In other fiction texts that we will read (i.e. Windows on the World and Incendiary), the event is described in great detail. In "After," we get bits and pieces throughout the text (i.e. the phone message, the widow's secular husband proclaiming himself a Jew). This works in conjunction with thinking of the post-9/11 genre as sadist or masochist in that those texts that shy away from the "terror" still must portray some kind of violence.

"After" also had many references to games and chance, which mirrored much of what we read in our departed Baudrillard. Two examples: "He understood that now, that all these words and gestures were a kind of game, one that would not effect the eventual outcome" (Tristram 72) and "The illusion of choice had been stripped away, leaving him unable to pretend any longer that he could choose" (Tristram 162). I'm wondering if this hints at the idea that all the events of the novel were merely a game to both protagonists?

Thanks, Professor Durand, for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I’ll use my first message to outline my original intent for the novel, and then I’ll follow with a second message to address specific thoughts from above.

Since writing AFTER (I began writing Sept 1, 2002, and finished in April, 2003, the book was accepted for publication in June, 2003) I’ve learned first-hand that any published book is a mediated experience—between the writer and the reader there is usually an agent and an editor, both with editorial suggestions that the writer needs to either follow or argue their way through. Then, the book is packaged a certain way, and sold in a certain way. Once the book is published, what you read there will be affected by your own experiences and your way of reading.

My own editor, for example, reads AFTER in a way I never intended—he calls it “erotic,” and “redemptive.” I did not mean the book to be erotic on any level, and redemption was not on my mind, either. I didn’t argue with him. He wanted to publish my book. I’ve decided that it isn’t a bad thing, to disagree about a text—it’s inevitable.

Which is a long way of saying that author intent is interesting, but it’s not as important as reader reception.

That said, here are my original intentions, and I hope they enrich your experience of the novel:

1. to write a novel about our post-9/11 world as closely as I could to the event itself. I began to write Sept 1, 2002, and finished April, 2003. I could not understand the hesitancy of fiction writers, the idea that we need to wait 10 years to say anything. Post-9/11 poets and non-fiction writers certainly didn’t feel that way--they were stacking up books and still no novels had come out to speak of. My goal was to write of what I was feeling –then-, and to capture it before it became historical. It’s not a reflective book. It’s a reactive book. I think such books have a place in the world. What happened, which was once so vivid, already feels like BACK THEN. Back then people were opening their mail and dying on the spot, and contemplating what dirty bombs would do in some near future to the food supply, and regularly we heard about electronic terrorism and the threat to banking, and there were gasoline and electricity shortages in California, where I live, and people were dying of some new and mysterious respiratory disease, later named SARS...I wanted to throw two characters into that anxiety of present or near-future times and see what happened. It's not that anything has changed, per se...but our anxiety is less, because no one can remain that anxious all the time, and the books written now will be different because of it.

3. to challenge assumptions about the world as it was being portrayed by media and other influencers, by creating characters who were violently going against type--a widow who was not stoic, not brave, but indeed well on her way to reflecting her enemy in a very tangible way. I hoped that this character's disintegration would shock people out of a kind of sleepiness that can come over us, even about language itself--to think we would ever have a category of persons known as "9/11 widows" and believe, from the word itself, that we could understand something about a human being from that description, for example.

4. to explore the nature of memory, and history, and whether it’s more useful (to individuals and perhaps nations) to endlessly remember, or to forget the past and move on. The widow can’t forget anything. The Muslim feels released, in the end, when he finally can’t remember exactly what happened to him in Tehran when his friend was killed. His wife, the happiest character, is a master of forgetting. These intentions are almost so personal that they aren’t addressed in the book in an overt way, but they were and remain hugely important questions to me as its writer.

So that's what I meant to write. Or what I remember about what I meant to write. When I look at the book now, four years later, I feel like an archeologist.

Let me give you my take on some of your questions, above.

Re the lack of names for most characters: There are a few answers for this one. 1) In a very practical way names were not needed for my characters—usually there was only one “he” and one “she” in the scenes. 2) It felt that they were not relating to one another as more than types so that names would be too personal; they would avoid using them with one another. 3) They are also beginning to believe themselves to be types, nameless and undifferentiated, because that is how the world around them treats them. 4) Changiz is the Persian variant of Ghengis Khan. Cesar is, of course, another name for a conqueror. So I was thinking on some level of these past glories and how sordid, and how personal, warfare and conflict has become, in contrast with these great names. 5) It is quiet, but to me significant, that Changiz regains his name and his self-identity only after thinking of family, wife, home, all the things that identify us, and that belong to us alone.

Re the widow’s compulsion to re-enact past scenes of love and violence: This compulsion ties into my personal question about whether it’s better to relive and rehash the past, or to forget and move on. Does retelling the story or re-enacting or reliving a past pain make it go away, or does it augment its power over us? I came out on the side of thinking it makes the past too powerful, too important.

Re the attraction for violence and horror and sadomasochism: I can’t remember being aware of this as a theme, Lauren. I felt the characters were compelled to act this way, but that it was a compulsion coming from the outside, forced on these characters after the endless repeating in their minds and on television sets of the events themselves—a conditioned response, and a tragic one, rather than the expression of an innate need.

Re lack of detail regarding the terror event itself: The reason I did this was terrifyingly practical, I’m afraid. As i wrote I was imagining some big terror event to come, any day now as a matter of fact, and I didn’t want to date my book to a particular “After.” It was enough to know that something bad had happened, and that people were soldiering on, a bit more brokenly than before. I was worried that by the time my book was published there would have been so many beheadings that no one would believe one woman would be singled out the way ‘the widow’ is. I imagined the murder of the husband, when I imagined it at all, as the first web-cam, live-event beheading.

Re hints at games: This is unintentional. My only goal was to blur the line between volitional participation in sado-masochism and forced sodomy. I did not want to come down on either side, as it would have been too reductive, I thought.

I hope these answers don't limit your own interpretations.

I hate to be late to the party, but I wanted to finish the novel before posting anything and I am a notoriously slow reader so…

There have been a number of fictions dealing with life in a post-9/11 world in all different media and Ms. Tristram’s work I consider to be one of the better written pieces I have come across. Other works I have looked into that fit this genre are: The 25th Hour and Shortbus (in film).

Identity: Her use of identity (or lack thereof) has been touched upon numerous times in the forum and to this idea I would like to add my interpretation for better or worse: I feel that this anonymity creates a wonderful unease for the reader since they are forced to, in a sense, create the character for themselves and become intimate, to interact with them in a way that a “named” character would not require. A named character would allow for a distance whereas an unnamed character forces you to engage them head-on.

Sexual Interactions: It has become a signature of this post-9/11 world that, at least in fiction, that sex is used as something of a coping technique. Lauren did a great job of outlining the sado-masochistic tendencies apparent in the text and to that I would like to add a number of thoughts: this could be construed as a kind of “punishment” for both characters where one is “bedding the enemy” and the other is playing into his newfound stereotype as aggressor and clandestine danger. Another way of reading this would be to view it all as submission. The world was once a “safe” place, a “neat” place. But these characters have clearly given in to this new world, one which is a little more dangerous, one where living everyday as the last of your life is a reality. And as a reaction: their sex lives have come to represent this.

Hope that helps the group.

Upon reading Claire Tristam’s After, I have to admit that I was shocked with all of the sado-masochistic scenes. I had not expected it to that degree. However, upon reflection, I can see how this would fit into our discussion of 9/11 in regards to Baudrillard, Zizeck, and Virilio. I also noted that no names were used and I agree with Andrew that if there were names for the characters that would distance us from them more. I’m interested at how Tristam created such a despicable protagonist and wondering why was it a 9/11 widow and not a firefighter who survived or another person touched by these events?

There was a small passage in After that I really enjoyed: “Even after decades of living in an English-speaking country he found there were times when he could will himself to hear the language as sounds only, empty of meaning, and thus protect himself from any meanings he preferred not to have leech in his mind” (108). This amused me because it was what I did everyday when I rode the tram in France. It was definitely an experience not to be bothered by annoying passengers, or at least to be able to effectively tune them out! I really appreciated this and began to realize how much I miss that sometimes.

Personally, I enjoyed the identity, or lack thereof, in After. Though the characters are defined in their roles, not merely by title, but action as well, I find myself, as I am sure many others have as putting a familiar faces on the persons in the story. We all know someone who was affected by the attack, and this gives a chance to see their perspective. I think this is constructive as the story allows for a lot of flexbility and creativity for their reader in regards to the character. As I said earlier, the need for this is imminent, as we all know someone who has been in similiar situations as described in After.

I apologize for being a bit late in this, although it seems I'm not alone:

First of all, many thanks to Claire Tristram for joining us and proving her comments on the novel. I've never had the experience of being able to hear the author's intentions in a book like this immediately after reading it, and I feel like it's a great asset to us.

My initial reaction to the book is that it left a foul taste in my mouth. It was a profoundly unpleasant read, as I believe it was intended to be. I've always had a weak stomach for violence, and sexual violence in particular is enough to make me nauseous, even in a fictional story.

After reading Ms. Tristram's comments on the idea of repetition and questioning whether it is healthy or beneficial, I at least feel as though there were some purpose in reading these uncomfortable things. It is not always enough to simply reason out that something is good or bad; human beings by nature often need to learn things "the hard way" in order to really learn them at all.

We do, as human beings, have a tendency to cling to negative memories and obsess over them, repeating things in our heads, writing it down, and in the case of something like 9/11, watching the same clips over and over again. Why is it that we almost always do this only with negative things? It is uncommon for the average person to repeat a positive experience over and over again for a long period of time.

The widow in After is obsessed with her husband's death to the point of apparent insanity. She even talks about family members and a grief counselor trying to help her, showing that they care in some way, and the possibility is there for her to make the decision to move forward in life and try to find some positives in the world, but instead she chooses to cling to one painful memory. Her problem is not that her husband was killed by a terrorist: it is that she obsesses in this way and refuses to find some way to cope with her loss. The only coping mechanism she seems to attempt is a perverted reenactment combining her last night with her husband and his murder.

The novel portrays a situation in which this act of clinging to a negative event obsessively leads to the destruction of someone's mind. The parallel to the nation's obsessive attachment to 9/11 is easy to see. Even now, five and a half years after the fact, we are continually bombarded with media and conversation relating to the terrorist attacks. We even go so far as to create a class at a university where the students are required to read and view endless amounts of material relating to the attack for an entire semester. How healthy is this?

Response to issues in "After"

I wanted to respond to a couple of the ideas that have been broached thus far. First, however, I would like to thank Claire Tristram for participating in our discussion, hearing her insight regarding our analyses has been very interesting.

First, I want to go into more detail regarding the Muslim re-enactment of the death of the widow's husband. I think there are a lot of interesting theories regarding the purpose for this scene. It could be part of an act of catharsis for the widow, or a way for the Muslim to empathize and understand her, or a way for the widow to mourn her lost husband. I think that Jenna posed an interesting question regarding the purpose of this re-creation. What is its point? Does it provide for catharsis, the ability to empathize, or the ability to mourn? I think that I am most interested with the author's point of view – that the re-creation could potentially allow for the reliving of the past, or for the ability to forget and move on. I think that in the case of this novel it could be a combination of the two - that only through the reliving of the past is the widow able to move on, especially since she feels so guilty about not engaging her husband the last time that she saw him.

Secondly, I wanted to respond to Justine's comment that the widow's relationship with the Muslim may be part of a mourning process where she finds a substitute for her husband. While I think that this is an interesting application, I don't think that the Muslim really fits the role of a substitute. In fact, from her descriptions it seems as though he is as different from her late husband as was possible. I think that this might be even more appropriate than just finding a substitute, because rather than seeking to replace her husband she is seeking something different.

Let me try to provide more insight from a writer's point of view, for what it's worth, about how and why this scene came to be written in such a disturbing way.

The genesis of this particular scene--bondage, sodomy, the threat of murder--was not something I cooked up before I began writing. I created these two characters, wrote them to their meeting at the hotel, and then I remember writing on the draft itself: "What happens next? They can't just sit on the bed and talk." At that point I didn't know if it would be a loving relationship, or something else.

I think in this case current events chose my course, not just the events you know about that were happening to all of us, but also personal events. I had an odd, violent experience just as I began to develop this relationship between my two characters further. At the time I had a bumper sticker on my car, "no war in Iraq." People were still gathering and demonstrating for a non-military solution. Tensions were very high on both sides of the question. I had my two kids in the car. Some people walking by started shouting about the bumper sticker, evidently identifying me with the "you're with the terrorists" camp because of it. They took it very personally, as if I were spitting on the grave of the innocent dead. Their feeling was so visceral and sudden that one minute they were walking along the sidewalk, and the next they attacked the car. Most of this was just slaps and shakes and shouting, but that was scary enough, and then one of them cracked my windshield with a brick. My kids were seven and two. The bumper sticker, this small thing, was enough for people to do that. I suppose this says a lot about me that as soon as we were out of danger I knew I wanted to write something about that irrational fear, in the novel I was working on. These people looked average. The man with the brick was in his forties and looked completely normal before he started shouting. There were women in the group, too, although they were back on the sidewalk watching instead of participating. I don't think this level of anger and fear was uncommon at the time. We were all a little crazy about what was going to happen next.

Which is just to say that a given writer's themes when you come to a novel often aren't there at its genesis. They grow up organically as the words are being written, and are influenced by what is going on in the writer's life, and may not even be entirely thought out or acknowledged by the writer at the time.

There is an echo in the book itself of my encounter with violence, in the scene when the couple drives into town and someone crossing in front of the car slaps the hood.

While I’m reading this, I feel Chris was justified by seeing this book as a teenage girl romance novel. There are some interesting underlying themes nonetheless. The identity theme allows for clear interpretation of the relationships between the characters in the novel, and also allows for emphasis when names are used. I found the motives of each character the most interesting part of this novel; the widow desiring to create controversy, the Muslim wishing to heal the widow. The description of situational awkwardness is right on, granted awkwardness would no doubt be present in most of the situations described. Alternating narration between chapters allowed for insight into the psyche of the characters. The relationships and desires were obviously trying to portray the feelings of those affected by a tragedy. After being the turmoil of someone’s world when jarred by this.
This book has its worth in the underlying themes. It’s hard to forget the identity as stereotypes, but when it all boils down, people are people. They want to be loved, to be desired, and when tragedy happens, they want retribution. I found this to be an interesting description of people reacting to tragedy, mixed with an awkward romance novel. Not my style, but respectable for what it is.