The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11

Rating:
Summary: A novel that goes beyond 9.11.
Review: Mind you; this is not a 'historical' novel about the events of 9.11 and it's certainly not a journalistic account.
It deals mainly with one character and his struggle to regain his identity, lost in the aftermath of 9.11. Together with his therapist (who gets similar problems by listening to his patient) they will have to find a new way to deal with reality.
A civilization able to bring forth writers like Paul West, can look at the future with some optimism.

Rating:
Summary: Ground Zero
Review: Out just in time for the second anniversary of the Twin Towers disaster,
The Immensity of the Here and Now is an author's attempt to stretch mind and language around an event that should be bigger than both. Yet somehow, West pulls it off. Like Melville and Milton, who also unhinged metaphysical jaws to engulf subjects which most presume not to so much as scan, West writes in a style that dwarfs the minimalism that is so often the order of the day, dazzles like pinwheels of sunlight glossing lake water where an oar has dipped, amazes by taking the reader places where he or she never expected to go. Don't be fooled by the opening pages which seem an odd and even an unrelated approach to what is perhaps the defining moment of the new millennium: it's only West twisting empirical reality---as he will do throughout the book--into a subjective continuum of his own device.
Thankfully, West shuns the swarm of cliches and media catch-phrases, the absurdly enthnocentric demonizations that have obscured this event from day one. The novel unwinds in a dialogue between Shrop, a man who has lost his memory as well as his ability to navigate the world, and Quent, a legless veteran of the Vietnam War turned psychologist ("an unshrinking soul stationed between two bicycle wheels"). They are a pair, as West puts it, comprised of "a man who could remember only losing his memory confronted by a man who seemed to forget losing his legs ..." Having been friends before the fall of the Towers, the two enjoy an unorthodox relationship in therapy that often produces digressions that border on the fantastic.
"What is on fire beneath [Ground Zero]? You may well ask. It is as if corpses develop into a new fodder they never knew in life. And there are hundreds of them as in some ancient Scandanavian burial zone where bog people reign, and you wonder how in years to come the diggers of the day will construe the jumbled carnage that reposes here, crammed together in an instant as if an instant were some kind of creative maestro, devising fresh combinations of human limbs and trunks undreamed of in Japanese sex manuals or the Kama-Sutra."
Mentally eviscerated, Shrop does his best reacclimate himself to the social environment-efforts which culminate in a party of epic proportions. Not since William Gaddis's The Recognitions has so much sparkling wit, dark humor and circulating glamour crowded together in one New York City bash. ("We have to make light of what's lousy," Shrop thinks while hosting his own affair, "because we don't know what on earth to do with it otherwise.")
We discover that what is in fact smoldering beneath Ground Zero is Shrop's beloved. While West effortlessly takes history, geology, philosophy, and science--among other disciplines--and shapes them as though they composed the glowering cloud that rose over the 9/11 disaster, this novel is, above all, a lament, a one-sided conversation with the dead, a paean to lost love. Perhaps the book's most poignant moment is when Shrop imagines taking the cells out of "your beautiful body one by one, carefully setting them aside, and I polish them one by one, bestowing a kiss on each before reverentially sliding it back into place, beginning with your head, of course, and working down the shoulders to the rest. [...] The cleansing of cells may occupy something like a month, most of all when the special allure of a cell in the lip or nose bridge merits a longer look, which is when the artificer peers and glows at the workmanship displayed."
Anyone who has had the merest acquaintance with tragedy or loss will likely fall into this book headfirst and re-emerge from it days later, gasping for air but steadier in purpose and posture, filled with a new appreciation for life and what it means to be alive.

Rating:
Summary: A riveting novel set in the modern day
Review: The Immensity Of The Here And Now by Paul West is a riveting novel set in the modern day during the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. The Immensity Of The Here And Now is the story of two men, one who lost his memory and the other being war-wounded therapist who tries to help him yet is slowly losing his own hold on life, The Immensity Of The Here And Now is profound, disturbing, and a compelling inner study of picking up the pieces in the wake of personal devastation.