Amy Waldman takes the temperature of American tolerance in The Submission

From The Week of December 3, 2012
Of the many cancers that can ruin lives and relationships, suspicion is the most devastating. For within those afflicted by its necrotic caress -- the wife cheated on, the employee lied to, the sibling betrayed --, distrust finds fertile ground in which to breed, ruining for good any chance of repairing what has been so thoroughly broken. But as much as suspicion damages the individual, it has an equally deleterious impact on societies, devouring the people's faith in their government, in their institutions, even in their fellow man. When this faith is broken, when the people no longer believe that they will be served and protected by the shieldwalls they pay taxes to keep in place, then discord and discourtesy rule the day, forces that possess more than enough power to devour belief and hope and replace them with conspiracism and anger. This is an enduring truth cleverly captured in Ms. Waldman's fascinating if problematic novel.
The year is 2003 and the United States is in the process of coping with the many traumas resulting from the terrible attacks on September 11th, 2001. While the military, economic and legislative fallouts from the destruction of the Twin Towers unfold around them, a group of eleven jurers have been tasked with the sensitive mission of choosing a memorial for the victims that will be created at Ground 0. This assemblage of artists and intellectuals, including at least one 9/11 widow, know nothing of the architects behind the various submissions up for consideration. They see only the designs which are contentiously whittled down to a single victor, a garden composed to represent death and rebirth, destruction and healing. There's just one problem. The architect of the winning submission is a Muslim.

The son of Indian immigrants, Mohammed Khan is an American through and through. He's worked hard for his achievements, harder perhaps than most. For with a name like Mohammed Kahn, he has had to overcome subtle forms of discrimination inherent in any significantly religious society. But now his day has come. His design has been chosen to be brought into being, immortalized as a symbol of strength and dignity to those who sought to destroy his country. And yet, the moment the public learns that the architect of the memorial to the victims of a crime perpetrated by Muslims is himself a Muslim, his dream is jeopardized and his motivations questioned. His very identity is under attack as elements of his own society savage him. Should he withdraw out of sensitivity to the families of the victims? What were his motivations for submitting his design in the first place? And is it a paradise for martyrs? He is in the midst of a public inferno that he's far from certain he can survive.

At times captivating and intense, The Submission is an eminently readable examination of the state of American tolerance. No other country of consequence has been founded on such highminded principles of freedom and justice. And yet, it is also a nation that appears to blithely ignore these foundational virtues when convenient, substituting them with the same skeins of suspicion and distrust that plague every corrupt human society. Ms. Waldman vividly captures this very paradox with deftness and skill, all while animating her various actors with a keen eye for detail, nuanced emotion and personal complexity. In this, she has brought to life a New York, with its power and its diversity, its classes and its crimes, that anyone can recognize.

For all its virtues, though, The Submission is troubled by a fluidity of character and plot that burdens the narrative. By the conclusion of Ms. Waldman's work, most of her primary characters have transitioned to the opposite position from the one they held at the beginning of the novel. While this is not impossible for any human to accomplish, it is certainly rare for anyone to completely reorder their lives and their worldview because of a single issue, albeit the defining issue of their lives. It is far more common for people to dig in their heels and hold to their existing positions until it becomes disadvantageous for them to do so, at which point they will find a way to justify the degrees to which they've switched sides. But this is not how Ms. Waldman's world functions. Here, good people and good intentions are relentlessly chipped away at by agendas and suspicion until the latter have succeeded in reducing the former to ash.

For its challenges, Ms. Waldman has succeeded in a very difficult task. By carrying off the central conceit of her novel, that a muslim might win a contest to build the memorial for 9/11, she has allowed her readers to contemplate, through her lens, their own tolerances and prejudices. It's unclear if this novel was inspired by the recent controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque. If not, it is serendipitous. For that controversy activated many of the same emotions and ethical knots as the issues tackled herein. If, however, it was inspired by this controversy, then it is a solid re-imagination of America's original sin, chiefly, that it is not in actuality the country it purports to be in principle. Its people, their cultures and their values, have failed to live up to the highmindedness of their nation's founders, a reality which creates constant friction between a people as they are and as they should be.

Fascinating work burdened by its own contortions... (3/5 Stars)