The Decade We Had

I haven't read anything worth writing about in the last few weeks, and I'm stewing around about this fact. I recently started Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, and it is so miserably depressing that I have put it down for awhile. I know it won the National Book Award, and I'll eventually persevere and finish it. But it is not, at the end of 2009, a book I feel compelled to read. I'm feeling the same way about Up in the Air, which I did see. And what a brilliant downer of a movie it was.

Interestingly, I did find something of Colum McCann's today worth reading and celebrating. The New York Times published a lengthy multi-piece editorial titled "The Decade We Had," in which ten noteworthy and diverse writers (Richard Ford, Anthony Bourdain, Scott Turow...) chronicle the first ten years of this century. Each author specializes in a year and talks about it from his or her perspective. These pieces are each short, and there is no reason not to read all of them. However, my attention span is even shorter. I'm requiring the extraordinary at the moment, and Colum McCann delivers a big dose of it in his overview of 2008, the only year I've found interesting enough to finish. Not surprisingly, McCann talks about the historic nature of 2008 in terms of literature. It is probably egregious to cut and paste the whole piece right here, and I'm doing it anyway. I just reread it again, and it is so extraordinary that I am going to pull out that wretchedly depressing new book of his and give it another try.

"Titles of the Times" by Colum McCann

We are built on the wounds and mercies of the past: everywhere we are is everywhere we have been. I traveled to America long before I came to America. I grew up in Ireland in the ’70s, a teenager reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Brautigan, Ferlinghetti. I would walk the length of Dun Laoghaire pier — a moving corduroy of sea waves in front of me — with a paperback copy of “Trout Fishing in America” tucked in the waistband of my jeans. Leaving was already written in me.

When I became an American citizen more than two decades later, I took James Joyce along with me. He sat on the metal chair at the swearing-in ceremony, and it was our secret that I’d now become a man of two countries: the only other people I told were my wife and children.

I still, these days, mark time by books. It is my chance at history. So I enter the 1920s not through Wilson, or Harding, or Coolidge, but in Gatsby’s gorgeous pink rag of a suit. I find Herbert Hoover hanging out on the running board of the Joad jalopy. Kennedy and Johnson traipse along feeling the weight of the things they have carried, and Bill Clinton sounds out the saxophone alongside the white noise.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else. It is another chance at history. It is also my opportunity to align myself with the sort of American that I would like to be.

But for all my pursuit of what it meant to belong, I still hadn’t, by 2008, three years after I took the oath, told anyone but my family about my blue passport. Throughout the Bush years, I carried an awkward brick of language around with me — “Blackwater” and “levee” and “jumpsuit” and “Enron” — and that was not a language I wanted to build a house upon. I stayed silent and I tucked my dual citizenship away.

Then on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Obama stepped onto the stage of a country maimed by war, cleaved by greed, riven by a collapsing economy, and I walked outside my New York apartment with my 5-year-old son in my arms, and I felt those old bricks falling away from me, the guilt, the doubt, the American stammer. Up and down the street, people shouted out the windows of their cars. Strangers were hugging one another. It was the briefest of parties — Bernie Madoff was on the way, after all, and Afghanistan loomed — but my boy had fallen asleep on my shoulder, and I felt I was, then, like the old phrase, the son of my son.

Fiction deals elegantly with issues that politics eventually wrestles with, corrupts, destroys, but nothing specific had been written to prepare me for President Obama. I wasn’t able to align him with any fiction, and yet it seemed that so much of literature has worked toward the moment. From Vladimir Nabokov to Aleksandar Hemon to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, American literature has always been prepared to take in the “other.” It has also allowed writers to hold onto their own country, so that they can have their hands in the warmth — or bitter cold — of both places.

The night confirmed for me so much of what I had wanted from the American experience, and so much of what I’d already received from her literature. Two halves of me were welded. It was as if politics had woken me from books, and I felt rooted and at home.

When 2008 is crushed and lying in the smithereens of memory, far from now, when it has taken on new shape, or when it has been undone by other years, when it has been dissected and torn, when it has been transformed into novels, shot through with language, reinventing the president, and indeed us, I will still return to that November evening, a moment that — like good fiction — was the marker of a beginning and an end.

Colum McCann is the author of “Let the Great World Spin.”

Editor's note: 2001 is a good read, too.