In her new book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” Susan Faludi squares three circles at once. She takes popular culture seriously but, for the most part, refuses to overload each and every scrap in our onrushing media torrent with unearned significance. She connects the spasm of understanding and misunderstanding that began on Sept. 11 with a deep strand of American history, yet without washing away the singularity and enormity of what happened on that grotesque day. Her third feat is this: Her third book, her most fluid and stylish, is also her most compressed. To write well about catastrophes, especially catastrophes that—thanks to media immersion—“everybody knows,” requires a difficult hybrid of concentration, severity, delicacy, nearness and distance. I don’t know that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk. (See under: Giuliani.) Faludi conducts an autopsy of the latter without indifference to the former. “The Terror Dream” is, among other things, a tract for the times against slovenly journalism, which is the means by which this culture decides not to think straight.
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