REREADING

Sauntering through the commas: the pleasures of a book revisited

Wendy Lesser on how rereading an old favourite can reveal volumes about our younger selves

Wendy Lesser
Saturday 22 December 2001

I

t began, as things often do for me, with Henry James. I had nothing new in the house to read (a recent spate of bad fiction having destroyed my appetite for buying new books), so I searched my shelves and idly chose The Portrait Of A Lady, a book that I hadn't picked up in 20 years. Rereading it turned out to be an astonishing experience.

I had first read this novel when I was an undergraduate, and had gone through it again as a graduate student of English literature. Both times I was too close in age to Isabel Archer to appreciate her properly, and both times I read largely for the plot. The fact that I already knew the plot the second time around did not deter me: at the age of 26, I still zoomed, suspense-driven, towards the final pages, as if only the ending counted. But in your 40s the journey begins to matter more than the arrival, and it is only in this frame of mind that you can do justice to James. (I say this now, but just watch me: I'll be contradicting myself from the old age home, deploring my puerile middle-aged delusions about him.)

At 46, no longer in competition with Isabel, I could find her as charming as her author evidently did. Moreover, having had a life, with its own self-defined shape and structure, I was more sympathetic to Isabel's wish to acquire one. As a young person, I only wanted her to marry the lord and get it over with. Now I understood that nothing ends with such choices - there are always additional choices to be made, if one's life is to remain interesting. I cared less, this time, about what decisions Isabel made than about how and why she made them. This, in turn, gave me far more patience with the length and complexity of James's sentences.

Once, perhaps, I had viewed them as pointlessly extended or merely ornate; now they were useful keys to the pace and method of Isabel's subtly complicated mind, so that whereas I used to be tempted to skip ahead, I now wanted to saunter through the commas, linger at the semi-colons, and take small contemplative breaks at the periods.

The book was much better than I had remembered it. More to the point, I was a much better reader of it. Both pleasure and understanding came more easily to me. The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck me with the force of a revelation. It meant that something old wasn't necessarily outdated, used up, or overly familiar. It offered an escape route, however temporary, from problems that were both personal and cultural - my own creeping middle age, the prevailing fin-de-siècle tone of fashionable irony, and above all the speeded-up, mechanised, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our collective daily life.

Like others before me (including, I noted wryly, James himself), I felt menaced by too-sudden change, as if something I held dear was about to be taken away from me, or perhaps had already been taken away when I wasn't paying attention. I felt... But I needn't elaborate. You were there. You lived through it, too.

My own situation differed somewhat from the average, in that I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to, and therefore shielded from, the clamouring demands of the marketplace. Well, "purposely" may not be the right word; in fact, one function of this book will be to examine in some detail how little "purpose" one can have, at 15 or 20 or 25, in imagining or projecting a life.

But let us say that, for whatever reason, I found myself in the luxurious position of being able to reread. I had the necessary background - that is, I had read a lot of books when I was younger - and, even more to the point, I had the necessary time. Time is a gift, but it can be a suspect one, especially in a culture that values frenzy.

When I began this book, almost everyone I knew seemed to be busier than I was. I supported myself, contributed my share to the upkeep of the household, and engaged in all the usual wifely and motherly duties and pleasures. But still I had time left to read. This was partly because I incorporated reading into my work (I run a quarterly literary magazine), and partly because I worked very efficiently (the magazine is my own and I run it, so there's no busywork whatsoever: no meetings, no memos, no last-minute commands from the higher-ups).

I had constructed a life in which I could be energetic, but also lazy; I could rush, but I would never be rushed. It was a perfect situation for someone who loved to read, but it was also an oddball role, outside the mainstream - even the mainstream of people who read and write for a living. How often have you heard an editor or an academic or a journalist say, "Oh, I wish I had the time to reread Anna Karenina!" (or Middlemarch, or Huckleberry Finn, or whatever beloved book rises to the surface of one's memory)? Well, I thought, I have the time. I could reread on behalf of all of us - and record my experiences in a book, Nothing Remains The Same: Rereading And Remembering, which will be published in the US next year.

Of course, it never really turns out that way in practice. Nothing points out how personal reading is more than rereading. The first time you read a book, you might imagine that what you are getting out of it is precisely what the author put into it. And you would be right, at least in part. There is some element of every aesthetic experience, every human experience, that is generalisable and communicable and belongs to all of us. If this were not true, art would be pointless. The common ground of our response is terrifically important. But there is also the individual response, and that, too, is important.

I get annoyed at literary theorists who try to make us choose one over the other, as if either reading is an objective experience, providing everyone with access to the author's intentions, or it is a subjective experience, revealing to us only the thoughts in our own minds. Why? Why must it be one or the other, when every sensible piece of evidence indicates that it is both? Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover.

You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you - the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers, the older one and the younger one.

You know there are two of you because you can feel them both responding differently to the book. Differently, but not entirely differently: there is a core of experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary work, even in the face of your own alter ations over time - so that you begin to realise how all the different readings by different people might nonetheless have a great deal in common.

This thing that I am calling "rereading" succeeds only under certain circumstances, and part of my effort has been to locate those cases where the circumstances prevail. The book must, in the first place, be a strong one - not just a memorable one (though that is crucial, of course), but also strong enough to hold up interestingly under the close scrutiny of a second look. It would be tedious to have a series of chapters recording how disappointing it was to reread this or that favourite work of science fiction or adventure or humour or romance (not that these categories would inevitably prove disappointing, but they do seem to be the categories in which youthful enthusiasm most often led me astray).

I also hoped that each chapter would say something different - about the process of rereading, or the nature of growing older, or the quality of a work of art, or my own personality, or (preferably) all of the above. As both reader and writer I felt anxious to avoid mere repetition, which is not at all the same as rereading. And then, of course, I had to remember the first reading well enough to get something new out of the rereading.

This, unfortunately, eliminated some otherwise ideal candidates. For instance, I recently reread The Charterhouse Of Parma, this time in Richard Howard's excellent new translation. I could remember exactly the circumstances surrounding my first reading: it was the late autumn of 1984; I was staying at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, and Stendhal's book was there in the library (having been acquired due to its associations with the region, no doubt); I was working on my own first book, and I was pregnant with my first and only child. Rich material for recollection, you would think. The problem is, I couldn't recall the slightest thing about the book itself. It was as if, on my recent rereading, I were coming across the Stendhal novel for the very first time - a tribute to the translator, perhaps, and a great pleasure in any case, but no help at all to my rereading project.

Sometimes I selected a book on the basis of its obvious appropriateness to my topic, only to discover that my rereading failed to produce a useful chapter. The Interpretation Of Dreams, for example. What could better represent our collective readerly unconscious than this work that had permeated my generation's sensibility long before we ever read it? At 20, I devoured Freud's book with fascinated hunger, as if I both knew and yet didn't know everything it had to tell me (a perfect example, I remember thinking, of "the uncanny").

On my first reading, the book had caused me to dream intensely, and to write down my dreams; perhaps that would happen again. And how appropriate it would be, I felt, to reread it on the 100th anniversary of its 1900 publication date. But all to no avail. My primary, insuperable experience when I attempted to reread it was one of annoyance. Why had Freud mucked up his lovely approach to dream interpretation with that rabid insistence on the theory of wish-fulfilment? And why was he such a tyrant about it?

Bristling under the yoke of his oppressive manner, I tried another translation, but with no better results. It would be unpleasant, I finally decided, for readers to hear me yammering on against Freud's authoritarianism - after all, this is hardly news - and it would be even more unpleasant for me to do the reading and writing involved in constructing such a chapter. Since I rely on pleasure to fuel my criticism (though sometimes it's thwarted pleasure, in the case of negative criticism), I had no choice but to drop the book.

Some books, precisely because they seemed so appropriate, were never under consideration to begin with. David Copperfield and Remembrance Of Things Past are both quite explicitly novels about rereading - so much so that I felt it would be redundant to examine them in this light. Also, as I had written about Dickens in every previous book of mine, it seemed only reasonable to give him a rest.

The rules I cobbled together, in the end, were hardly onerous, but were strictly enforced. I had to have done my first reading when I was "young"; in other words, I needed to be coming at the work anew as an altered, older self. I had to remember the first reading well enough to draw the comparison - that is to remember it viscerally, not just remember that I had done it. And I had to get something new out of each individual rereading, some fresh idea or experience that had not appeared before, in order to make the chapters sequentially interesting.

If I could do all this, I felt, I would have a book about rereading. It would be necessarily personal, with criticism merging into autobiography, but I hoped it would not be merely personal: that what I had to say would find an echo, or at the very least a nod of assent, in the minds of other readers.

It has occurred to me that the danger of such a project is the danger of all escapism: we flee into the past because we can no longer tolerate the present. But you cannot actually live in the past, and I am certainly not ready to stop living. I never intended my rereading book to be seen as a purely conservative measure, keeping out the new in favour of the old; I didn't ever stop reading new books while I was working on this project. For both professional and personal reasons, I can't imagine choosing not to read any new books. (By "new" I mean new to me: not necessarily books that have just been published, but books that I have only now encountered for the first time, whether they are just out or hundreds of years old.)

And in fact my rereading project, far from making me shun new books, stimulated my desire for all kinds of reading. During the same time I was reading Don Quixote, for instance, I was also reading Henry James: A Life In Letters, Philip Horne's new book; Shirley Hazzard's memoir Greene On Capri, which led me immediately to her novel Transit Of Venus; Geoff Dyer's essays, collected in Anglo-American Attitudes; JM Coetzee's Age Of Iron, which I turned to after finishing his more recent Disgrace; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; and Alberto Moravia's Contempt.

Of these, only Age Of Iron turned out to have a direct bearing on my Don Quixote chapter, and that was purely by chance, but the stew into which they all went was, nonetheless, necessary to my writing. I suppose what I mean is that I needed to feel a life of letters going on around me - drawing from past works all the time, but also creating new ones every year, every minute - in order to feel that a book about reading was worth writing.

I did not set out to draw any general conclusions about rereading. General conclusions, I often feel, are the enemy of perception, at least in the literary field. To the extent that you can actually sense what is going on in a work of literature, you are sensing something more particular even than life itself (since life tends to have more repetition, more boredom, more plain old dead space than good literature usually does).

But I did, in the course of producing this book, come upon one idea or image or tendency - I don't know exactly what to call it - that repeated itself over and over again. That was the idea of vertigo. There is something inherently dizzying in the effort to look at a still work of literature from a moving position - that is, from two different points in time. And this vertiginousness seems to be linked, in turn, to our directional sense of time's passage, to the poignance of the fact that time only goes one way.

There is some parallel, I can't help feeling, between that kind of one-wayness and the one-wayness of the relationship between a reader and a book. The characters in a novel can speak to us, but we can't speak to them, just as our younger selves can be heard and understood by our older selves, but not vice versa. These are not, of course, identical situations, but they are close enough to make us temporarily lose our balance.

Or so I found when I looked at what Borges had to say about Cervantes, Hitchcock about the past, Wordsworth about childhood, McEwan about time... and so on down the list of artists I examine in my book. They all talked about vertigo, which is also, probably, the best word to describe what I felt when I looked again at the books I had first read a long time ago.

· Wendy Lesser is the founder editor of the Threepenny Review

THE GUARDIAN

KISS / REREADING

Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy / Of course it's political 

Rereading / Childe Harold by Lord Byron

Rereading / Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz's centenary

DRAGON / REREADING
2001

Sauntering through the commas / The pleasures of a book revisited

2002

Jane Austen / Emma´s pride

Rereading / One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis

2007
Daphe du Maurier / Mistress of menace

2010

Jeanette Winterson pays tribute to Rose Gray

2011
Rereading / Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Colm Tóibín / The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

2012

Salman Rushdie / Rereading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

2013

Jonathan Franzen / Rereading The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim

Why we need fairytales / Jeanette Winterson on Oscar Wilde

2015

Rereading / Garth Risk Hallberg on how fiction can ‘make it new’

2017
Beautiful and brutal / How James Salter set the standard for erotic writing
School of hard knocks / The dark underside to boarding school books
Rereading / Primo Levi’s If This is a Man at 70
Studs Terkel’s Working / New jobs, same need for meaning
My Cousin Rachel / Daphne du Maurier's take on the sinister power of sex

’Tis a strange serpent /10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature

Eric Homberger / WG Sebald

WG Sebald

WG Sebald

German writer shaped by the 'forgetfulness' of his fellow countrymen after the second world war

Eric Homberger
Monday 17 December 2001

'I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position," remarked the German writer WG Sebald, who has died, aged 57, in a car crash in East Anglia. That scruple put him at odds with much of contemporary writing.

Zadie Smith / This is how it feels to me

Review

This is how it feels to me

Last week James Wood blasted modern fiction, calling for a return to feeling from self-conscious cleverness in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Zadie Smith, one of the novelists he cited, replies

Zadie Smith
Saturday 13 October 2001

T

he critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called "hysterical realism". It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped - this was Wood's point, and I'm with him on it. In fact, I have agreed with him several times before, in public and in private, but I appreciate that he feared I needed extra warning; that I might be sitting in my Kilburn bunker planning some 700-page generational saga set on an incorporated McDonald's island north of Tonga. Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else, smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.

James Wood / Tell me how does it feel?

 

Review

Tell me how does it feel?

US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter, says James Wood

James Wood
Saturday 6 October 2001

A

few days after the events of September 11, this newspaper published a response by Jay McInerney, supposedly the creator of "the definitive modern New York novel". He told us that on that very Tuesday, still shaken and shocked, he took lunch at Time Café, "a once fashionable dining spot". And who should immediately enter but "the actress Jennifer Beals... a camera around her neck, looking slightly dazed".

Later, McInerney repairs to the apartment of another New York novelist, Bret Easton Ellis. On Bret's kitchen counter he sees an invitation to a literary party, and blurts out: "I'm glad I don't have a book coming out this month" - a statement he knows to be "a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand." Bret replies that he was just thinking the same thing. Then Jay says to Bret: "I don't know how I'm going to be able to go back to this novel I'm writing." He adds, to the reader: "The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered for ever."

Is McInerney right? Will the horrid alteration of America's greatest city also alter the American novel? One is naturally suspicious of all the eschatological talk about how the time for trivia has ended, and how only seriousness is now on people's minds - not least because the people saying it are usually themselves trivial and, as in McInerney's piece, are thus unwitting arguments against their own new-found seriousness. Doubtless, trivia and mediocrity will find their own level again, in novel-writing as in everything else. And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all. If I live the rest of my life without having to come across another book like Bret Easton Ellis's New York novel, Glamorama, I will have very happily been what Psalm 81 calls "delivered from the pots".

There has, of course, been great fiction set or partly set in New York: Melville's story "Bartleby", which is set in a Wall Street office; Stephen Crane's Maggie; The Great Gatsby; the last section of Theodore Dreiser's novel, Sister Carrie, which rails splendidly against the capitalist inequities of what Dreiser calls "the Walled City"; a chapter of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night; Henry Roth's great novel of immigrant life, Call It Sleep; Bellow's Seize the Day and Mr Sammler's Planet. Yet as soon as one recalls these novels, it becomes difficult to imagine the precise ways in which they would have been different had they had to accommodate a mutilation of the kind visited upon the city on September 11. And that is partly because they are already dark books, in which the city looms jaggedly. It is only the McInerneys, for whom Manhattan is a tinkle of restaurants, who are suddenly surrounded by the broken glass of their foolish optimism. The pessimist is already ruined, and knows it.

What also unites these dark works of fiction is that their foci are human and metaphysical before they are social and documentary. They are stories, above all, about individual consciousness, not about the consciousness of Manhattan. Here, terrorism may well have an impact. For after all, the dream of the Great American Novel has for many years really been the dream of the Great American Social Novel - certainly since John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis.

The Great American Social Novel, which strives to capture the times, to document American history, has been revivified by Don DeLillo's Underworld, a novel of epic social power. Lately, any young American writer of any ambition has been imitating DeLillo - imitating his tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture, to be a great analyst of systems, crowds, paranoia, politics; to work on the biggest level possible.

The DeLilloan idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer - a cultural theorist, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry - has been woefully influential, and will take some time to die. Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, "knowing about things" has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge. (Richard Powers is the best example, but Tom Wolfe also gets an easy ride simply for "knowing things".) The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

Zadie Smith is merely of her time when she says, in an interview, that it is not the writer's job "to tell us how somebody felt about something, it's to tell us how the world works". She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as "guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but... they're still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever."

But this idea - that the novelist's task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality - may well have been altered by the events of September 11, merely through the reminder that whatever the novel gets up to, the "culture" can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands. If topicality, relevance, reportage, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts - in short, the contemporary American novel in its current, triumphalist form - are novelists' chosen sport, then they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material. Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan.

For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II - a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, "alter the inner life of the culture"? Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.

For example, Jonathan Franzen's distinguished new novel, The Corrections , has just appeared in America. It is a big social novel trying hard not to be one - softened DeLilloism. Franzen has announced a desire to take the DeLillo model and warmly people it with characters. It's an admirable project. But there is a passage near the end of The Corrections about the end of the American 20th century that is pure social novel, and which now seems laughably archival: "It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she'd seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off... But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts." As McInerney might say, "I'm glad I don't have a novel coming out this month."

The other casualty of recent events may well be - it is to be hoped - what I have called "hysterical realism". Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

Rushdie was at it again in his most recent book, Fury, a lamentable novel that combined hysterical realism - dolls, puppets, allegories, a coup on a Fiji-like island, rampant and tiresome caricature, and a noisy, clumsy prose - with the more traditional social novel. Alas, the social-novel part of the book was set in Manhattan, and offered a kind of diary of last year's Manhattan events. We encountered Rudy and Hillary, J-Lo, the Puerto Rican parade, Bush versus Gore, the film Gladiator and so on. Of course, the book was already obsolete when it appeared in early September, just before the terrorist attack. Its trivia-tattoo had already faded. But now it seems grotesque, a time-stamped scrap of paper.

It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism. Both genres look a little busted. That may allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not "how the world works" but "how somebody felt about something" - indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings). A space may now open, one hopes, for the kind of novel that shows us that human consciousness is the truest Stendhalian mirror, reflecting helplessly the newly dark lights of the age.

THE GUARDIAN

Jay McInerney / Brightness falls

 

Brightness falls

Jay McInerney, author of the definitive modern New York novel, witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Centre from his apartment window. He describes the week that changed his city for ever

Jay McInerney

Saturday 15 September 2001

There was a hole in the skyline, the morning after. I pulled the chain on the shade of my bedroom window with a certain mournful sense of ceremony. A plume of pearl-grey smoke rose into the sky, marking the spot where the twin towers used to stand - my view, and everything else, forever altered. It's just steel and concrete, of course - but the dead and the injured were still largely invisible and uncounted. And the ruined towers were also a symbol, to those who targeted them as well as to those of us who lived, often unconsciously, beneath them.

Now I am angry. I'm depressed. I'm weepy. I can't control my emotions at all. I want to hug strangers. I want to hurt other strangers, anyone who had anything to do with this, those fucking people in the Middle East who have been dancing in the street. With maximum prejudice. It's not just me. Everyone I have spoken to is feeling indiscriminately compassionate. And furiously vengeful.

It's always dangerous to generalise about this heterogenous and contentious mass of humanity, but I think it's safe to say that New Yorkers have finally come up against a phenomenon larger than their collective capacity for jaded equanimity. We are famous for not looking up at our signature skyscrapers. We took them for granted, just as we took our own pre-eminence, our own importance, for granted. Public displays of surprise and wonder are banned by city ordinance. But we are visibly stunned by the disappearance of one of those monuments to our own magnificence. We will probably feel the absence of those towers far more acutely than we did their presence at the apex of our skyline.

We will never forget where we were on Tuesday when we first heard the news, when we first saw two 100-storey buildings collapse. Me, I woke at 8.15, and lay in bed till 8.40, at which point I got up and struggled with my bedroom shade, the chain of which had somehow become jammed. As I tinkered with the chain, trying to get it back on its track, I briefly noted the fact that, after four or five months in this apartment, I was already starting to take the view for granted. It had been days, maybe weeks, since I'd really looked out at the vista of the river to the right and the World Trade Centre rising above the apartment buildings of the West Village. I went out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker.

When I returned to the bedroom a few minutes later I noticed smoke coming out of the north tower of the Trade Centre. It was hard to tell but there seemed to be a jagged hole up around the 80th floor. I looked at the clock; it was 8.50. The phone rang - my girlfriend Jeanine, sounding breathless, told me to turn on the TV. (Actually my ex-girlfriend, but in light of the events of the day the distinction seemed to blur.) CNN was showing a similar, slightly better view of the World Trade Centre, the north tower smoking away, although no one was sure what had happened. I kept turning between the window and the television, a 90-degree angle, verifying what I was seeing on television. Just before nine, CNN got an eyewitness on the phone who said he had seen a plane crash into the tower. I realised I had missed seeing this incredible event by a matter of seconds - like the lumpish ploughman who fails to witness the fall of Icarus in Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. It didn't seem to occur to me or the commentators on CNN that this extraordinary event could be anything but an accident.

I went out to get the papers, although never had they seemed less relevant. The towers weren't visible from the street. In the deli two scruffy old codgers were arguing about the merits of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. I asked them if they'd heard about the plane that had crashed into the World Trade Centre. They looked at me, the way one looks at fellow New Yorkers who are ranting incoherently, before turning away. "You can't compare Rear Window to Stagecoach," said the skinny one, resuming the argument.

Out on the street, a young woman walking her pug stopped me to ask me if I had heard about the crash, restoring my confidence in my own sanity. Incredibly, the New York Post had a picture of Paul McCartney playing piano for a smiling Hillary Clinton. I'm not quite sure whether I was looking at the TV screen or at the window when the second plane hit a few minutes after I'd returned to my bedroom.

I've seen the replay so many times now. The plane approached from the south so that I couldn't see it from my south-facing window. And over the course of the next 40 minutes I kept turning between the TV and the window. I remember that I was looking out of the window when I first noticed that the south tower seemed to be tilting; a minute later it collapsed. From the window I just saw it disappear into the smoke, sinking beneath the rooflines of the West Village. About 10 minutes later, the north tower did the same. Jeanine called again; she'd been out on Sixth Avenue and watched the tower go down. She told me that people were crying after the collapse of the second tower. A policeman with tears in his eyes had suggested that she stock up on food. It seemed like a good idea - like the kind of thing that people in this kind of situation should do. By this time we realised that we were an island in the strictest sense - all bridges and tunnels were closed. Anyway it was a response - a course of action in the face of a sense of paralysis.

I walked one floor down to check on Lora, my downstairs neighbour, and suggested a grocery run. "Can you believe this?" she asked repeatedly. We discovered that we weren't the only ones who'd decided to stock up - the aisles were jammed with shopping carts. Lora got into line behind 20 people while I went around stocking up - eggs, milk, pasta... I couldn't really focus. Everyone grim but strangely polite. A strange silence prevailed. Curiously, no one was really talking now, two hours into the crisis.

Back at the apartment, I tried once again to reach my ex-wife in Tennessee. I wanted to let her know that I was alive and check on my kids. I felt aggrieved that once again there was no answer. I wanted to share the news of my survival, to let the mother of my children know that they still had a father. I wanted to report from the front. After hanging up I called Jeanine, who was 12 blocks closer to the front, but her line rang busy.

I decided to venture out. Walking down Eighth Avenue toward the West Village I was going against the flow. A long column of pedestrians was marching uptown, away from the smoke. The procession was grim but orderly. Refugees from Wall Street - women in high heels, men with suit jackets slung over their shoulders. A low-grade state of shock seemed to prevail. The sense of order started to fracture as I approached St Vincent's hospital on 11th Street, next door to Jeanine's apartment. Dozens of cops were directing traffic away from the hospital as ambulances screamed in from all directions. Hundreds of people were lined up on the street to give blood, hundreds more were standing around watching the ambulances come in. Dozens of orderlies and nurses stood at the door, waiting. The strangest sight of all was of a fleet of wheeled office chairs draped with sheets, awaiting the wounded.

Jeanine was frantic. She was producing a commercial, which was supposed to shoot out on Long Island, a half-million-dollar shoot. Half the crew was out in Montauk waiting, half trapped in New York. The director refused to work until his kids were evacuated from the city. And the phones were barely working. The word came through that a van was leaving from Great Jones street, some 10 blocks from her apartment. Apparently cars could leave Manhattan via certain routes. Maybe. Nobody really knew but Jeanine's company, she had just discovered, had no insurance for terrorist acts and if they didn't get out there to shoot the ad they would be liable for the entire amount. We ran half a mile with her bags.

Sixth Avenue also had its parade of refugees, some of them covered head to foot with white dust, strange walking ghosts among the living. We arrived at the rendezvous breathless, my back thrown out. Her cellphone rang: the van had gone to pick up the director's kids. There was no way to get 30 blocks to the rendezvous. Jeanine started cursing. Then she started crying.

We walked across the street to Time Café, a once fashionable dining spot. It seemed incredible that they were open for business as usual and that they could seat us for lunch. The TV over the bar was tuned to CNN, replaying the collapse of one of the towers. The actress Jennifer Beals walked in behind us, a camera around her neck, looking slightly dazed. We sat down next to a couple covered in white dust. They met an hour before; they had both been caught in the collapse of the second tower when they evacuated their building on lower Broadway and had both found refuge inside a store.

The man's name was Jeffrey Grimm. He was a liability analyst. It sounded like a useful thing to be at this particular moment in history. His eyes were red and watering; tears streaked the mask of white dust on his face; the waiter brought him a little bottle of eye drops. He told us his office was three blocks from the WTC. After the second plane crashed they were ordered to evacuate. He was on the street when the tower collapsed. "There was a rumble, a kind of thunderous sound, and then we were engulfed in a cloud of dust and debris. I couldn't see a thing. People were grabbing at me, screaming. People were saying they didn't want to die. It was pitch black. I was blind. I heard a voice shouting, 'Over here.' Somebody pulled me inside the door of an office building. He probably saved my life."

Jeffrey lived in Jersey, and had no way to get home; he was going to look for a hotel room since all transit, all bridges and tunnels were closed. I told him to call me if he couldn't find shelter, and Jeanine gave him my name and number. He looked at my name and asked me if I was the author of Bright Lights, Big City.

"I just realised something," he said. "Wasn't the World Trade Centre on the cover of your book?" "My God," I said, "I hadn't thought of that." The cover of the US edition of the book shows a figure standing in the street, looking downtown, the twin towers looming beyond. It had become something of an iconic image. Now it would have a grim new significance.

We managed to get our friend Bret Ellis on the phone; he lived nearby and had sounded, Jeanine said after she called him earlier, as if he was having a serious breakdown. Now we were in his neighbourhood. Jeanine told him we would bring him a burger. We walked up to Bret's building in the East Village. By this time another phase had set in among the pedestrians, who seemed to be realising that they had survived a catastrophe. People were smiling again, although the smiles and gestures were somewhat exaggerated in the manner of restaurant patrons who are in the presence of a celebrity and are eager to mask their interest and assert their own vivacity.

At Bret's apartment we watched CNN for half an hour. We kept telling each other we couldn't believe this. I noticed an invitation to a book party on Bret's kitchen counter. "I'm glad I don't have a book coming out this month," I said - a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand. Nobody was going to be talking about fiction this week. "I was just thinking that same thing," he said, with obvious relief.

"I don't know how I'm going to be able to go back to this novel I'm writing," I said. The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered for ever. "I know exactly what you mean," he said. After half an hour he walked out with us to see what was happening on the street. When we said goodbye he lost his composure. He turned away when he started to cry.

Jeanine and I walked back to my apartment, with her luggage, my back almost ruined after lugging the shit for five miles. When we finally put her bags down in my living room she started to cry. I held out for another three hours before I fell apart. When I checked my email I found a couple of dozen messages from people who had been trying to reach me, including Helen, my ex-wife. Apparently the phones were barely working. I finally raised her on the phone. She seemed genuinely relieved to find that she still had an ex-husband.

The kids had been told. They seemed to be relatively cool about the whole thing, although later my son called me back. He had a question. "Dad, why don't you just leave New York?" It was, under most circumstances, a difficult question. He'd asked it many times before. For once I had an easy answer. "I can't," I said. Before she said goodbye, Helen reported that she had it on good authority - a friend in the military - that the plane that went down near Pittsburgh had been shot down.

A friend in Brooklyn said it was raining paper in her neighbourhood - shreds of résumés, files, letters, tax returns, sales receipts, invoices and possibly even billets doux were falling from the sky. Jeanine got a call from a friend who had managed to escape from the north tower and had run 30 blocks before she realised her leg was broken.

Lora, my downstairs neighbour, invited us down. She'd cooked a leg of lamb. I brought down a bottle of 85 Lynch Bages, the first of several bottles. For 20 minutes I found myself unable to speak without crying. In the middle of the meal Lora got a call telling her a friend had died in the plane that went down near Pittsburgh.

After dinner we ventured out to visit a friend, an investment banker who had escaped from the north tower. He was shaken up; and besides, we weren't remotely sleepy. At 14th Street a policeman from Camden, New Jersey demanded proof that we lived below 14th. I was reminded of a joke in my first book about a character from the upper East Side who felt he needed a visa to travel south of 14th street. Today he would. 14th street has always been a kind of unofficial border. Today it's official. Policemen are posted along the street, blocking access to anyone without proper identification. Jeanine didn't know how to prove that she lived in the area. We all have driver's licences from other states - in Jeanine's case, from South Africa. We want to live here, but we don't want to deal with the city bureaucracy.

I was indignant. What a concept. Prove our residence? Jeanine finally came up with a prescription bottle for sedatives that had her address. "We have our orders," said the cop. "They just shot a guy with a bomb a few blocks down." In the absence of any hard facts, this kind of thing sounded plausible to us.

We finally reached Hayden's apartment. He had a gash on his face. "We heard the first crash," he said. "The building shook. But nobody said anything. There was no announcement, nothing. Finally, when the second plane hit, I just decided to leave. When I got out on the plaza a body hit the pavement 20 yards away from me. I looked up and saw two people jumping, falling 90 floors through the air. I saw 10, 12 people hit the ground." He sounded tentative, as if he were trying to convince himself of the reality of what he'd seen, or just trying to think of a way to tell it. He has the rest of his life. Even those of us who didn't see the bodies falling are dazed, repeating our own war stories, trying to connect ourselves to a catastrophe larger than any we have ever experienced.

On Wednesday morning, we seemed to have regained much of our composure. Here in West Chelsea there was an almost festive atmosphere - an impression that was only reinforced by the lack of traffic and the presence of police officers at major intersections. At lunchtime, those restaurants that were open were jammed with patrons who seemed almost giddy with relief.

At that point, so far as I could tell, after 24 hours of speaking about nothing but the disaster, people here, a mile and a half from the epicentre, were speaking of anything but. The sense of survivor's relief was compounded with a certain pride. We, the unsurprisable, were surprised at how well we were handling ourselves. Even our notoriously cantankerous mayor was showing himself to be more human and inclusive and wounded than we ever imagined he could be. Beyond the immediate scene of the disaster, there seemed to be order and calm. London during the blitz came to mind.

By Wednesday night, the mood seemed to have changed yet again. Two more huge buildings collapsed. The Empire State Building and Penn Station were evacuated because of bomb threats. The wind shifted uptown and we were overwhelmed with an acrid burning smell which seemed to be affecting people's moods. Or maybe it was exhaustion; I saw couples fighting on the street, people bursting into tirades. Another eerie development was the proliferation of homemade posters with pictures of the missing and pleas for help. Suddenly these appeared everywhere, taped to lampposts and fences and the sides of buildings. Missing... last seen... beloved son... please call...

By Thursday, nobody knew what to do with themselves. I told Lora I was heading to the gym at Chelsea Piers. "Don't do that," she said. "They set up the morgue over there."

There are, I suspect, many more mood swings in store. I have a feeling that everything will be "before" and "after" now. As I walked through the streets at midnight, I thought of Frank O'Connor's line at the end of Guests Of The Nation: "And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again."

© Jay McInerney 2001.

THE GUARDIAN