The Submission by Amy Waldman

This book uses the real life terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent attempt to memorialize those who lost their lives there that day as the subject for her work of fiction. She imagines what would happen if a jury in charge of selecting a ground zero-like memorial were to choose, from among the many anonymous submissions, a design that turns out to have been created by a Muslim-American architect. I really liked the authenticity with which the book depicts the actual events surrounding the attacks in New York, both on the day they happened and in the months and years that followed, and then the tweeking of the truth to make it more controversial, so that as a reader we can examine our own responses. The book not only captures the political furor and media storm that ensue when a Muslim American architect is , but also gives us an intimate, immediate sense of the fallout that these events have on the individuals involved. They include: Mohammad Khan (or “Mo,” as he’s known to family and friends), the architect whose winning design brings him notoriety and condemnation instead of praise; Claire Burwell, a wealthy widow and the families’ representative on the jury, whose early championing of Mo’s design later gives way to nagging doubts; Paul Rubin, the jury’s pragmatic chairman, who’s eager to find a politically viable solution to the whole situation; Sean Gallagher, a protester, whose brother died in the attacks; and Asma Anwar, an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant whose husband was also a victim. The cast of characters contains almost no one who is entirely likable (Asma is an exception to that rule), but they all have aspects of each of us. The book also harkens back to another memorial and the controversay that swirled around it at the time. In 1981, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The starkness of her design, as well as her ethnicity as an Asian American, fueled controversy over her victory. Politicians, art critics and veterans excoriated her, and she was forced to defend her work before the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. So we haven't come all that far, it turns out. The truth is more painful than fiction.