To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we are sharing an excerpt from Carole Giangrande’s novel All That Is Solid Melts into Air.
The novel follows Valerie, a Canadian woman visiting the French island of St. Pierre, who learns that a plane has struck the World Trade Center in New York. Her husband is in Manhattan on assignment, while her son Andre and his partner James both work in the World Trade Center. Unable to reach her family, Valerie waits for news as the events of that day unfold, moving through fear and uncertainty while memories of earlier losses and tragedies surface.
Giangrande’s novel offers an intimate perspective on a moment of enormous historical consequence: the experience of watching a catastrophe unfold from afar, not knowing whether the people you love are safe. In a world where we are watching increasing climate catastrophes unfold in real time in high resolution, Giangrande’s compassionate and hopeful novel is more relevant than ever, as Susan Glickman describes it, “confronting the incomprehensible without despair and describing profound grief without sentimentality.”
Read on to reflect on this important anniversary with All that is Solid Melts into Air:
Marguerite’s crockery bowl was dun-colored, pressed with a pattern of flowers and leaves. With a spatula, Valerie began to scrape the softened butter out of its wrapper, but Gerard’s anguish was shivering inside her and the butter almost missed the bowl because the spatula was shaking in her hand. Moments later she knocked over the measuring cup, spilling the sugar on the counter. She grabbed a tissue, dried her eyes, cleaned up the mess and started measuring again. An easy recipe. I’ve made it dozens of times. She turned on the electric mixer, watching the beaters spin into a blur, blending the ingredients into a smooth, buttery paste. Butter and sugar, she said, as if she’d never seen them before. Flour’s next, but never in the course of history had someone chosen to fly a plane into a skyscraper, and she had to remember to measure the baking powder into the flour without knowing where on earth her son was. She turned off the mixer, took the spatula and scraped the paste from the sides of the bowl.
Time flipped over inside her, fierce and blue, cloudless at the island airport where her Uncle Joe tuned up Cessnas and Beeches and the single-engine Piper belonging to Mr. Groves, a descendant of the island’s founding family, a decorated hero of World War Two. There was a crowd, lemonade and ice cream, a stand bedecked in red, white and blue. Mr. Groves hadn’t flown since his combat days. Valerie and her family were in the crowd of well-wishers who saw his plane take off for a spin, its propeller humming, and then the little girl watched it disappear into a soft pleat in the sky’s fabric, the day’s blue curtain drawing shut around it.
Valerie asked her big sister what she’d seen. Just the angle of reflected light off the wings, Karen said, creating an optical illusion.
She didn’t believe it.
He’ll come back, said her sister.
He didn’t.
In a moment of terror, Valerie understood that Mr. Groves was never coming back. Worse than that. If a grown man could vanish into the sky, then she herself would never again be safe. She’d become wraithlike, a sheer curtain through which all breezes would pass, including a howling wind of indignity, her Gerard.
See for yourself, he’d say to his TV audience. There are people who are going to die, up above where the plane hit.
How vulnerable they both were. His skin, like hers, was as porous as air, the lost souls on those airplanes drifting through his body, his nerves crackling with their voices. Please help me, I can’t breathe, and the 911 operator’s voice, it’s OK, honey, help is on the way. Looking for his son, Gerard would be as enraged by injustice as he’d ever been. This isn’t good enough. They should send a fleet of helicopters to rescue those above the fire, because he knew that James was up there, too. He could hear the ch-ch-ch of the police chopper overhead, his bones wired to pick up messages.
All those voices singing through his nerves would have told him that this was the way of the living, the fate of humankind. How often he’d said it to her, that the day starts in innocence and at the end of it, the innocent are always dead — if not by some gunman’s hand, then by disease or starvation or accidental stupidity in the wealthiest city on the planet.
That, she realized, was what his admirers liked about him — his knife-edge of honesty. It was something she admired, also.
He’d believed her, that she once saw a plane disappear.
She measured the flour because the blue sky was malevolent. It was as good a reason as any for filling the scoop, for putting its contents into the cup. Perhaps it made her feel calmer — knowing that even this weird causality was sane, compared to whatever reasoning let someone crash a plane into a building. Three hundred fifteen grams. She filled the scoop with flour.
What’s happening? she asked herself. What’s going on in this world? She made her living as a gardener. All she knew about were flowers. Her botany textbook taught her the facts. There were reasons why things happened. Flowers bloomed because of light, water, minerals in the soil, pollinating bees. It all comes together rather well, said her prof. An amusing guy with a gentle sense of humor, he pointed out that nothing was simple. Plants were made up of water, minerals, proteins, chlorophyll and so on — but if you broke down all of these into their chemical components, if you watched them interact, you might find out that the chain of causality went on forever, that everything causes everything.
A lot of good that does me, Valerie thought.
Godawful things just happen.
When days and years returned to their normal order — if they ever did — she would say the same thing of this moment, of her native city and its suffering. It just happened. Gerard would explain the politics, but nothing more. Before her eyes, a single fire blazed and it was endless. Doused in one place, it flared up in another. War there, terror here. If you remove the grid of time, it is all one fire.
It calmed Valerie to imagine James beside her. Here, let me show you how I make this crust. She’d taught him to use semi-soft butter, and he’d objected, and she knew why. In cooking school he’d been told to use chilled butter for pastry, but listen, she said. Once you’ve made the dough you’ll have to chill it anyway, so what’s the diff?
“So show me how you roll it,” he replied. “How you get it from the board to the dish.”
“And then you have to try, OK?”
When his turn came, he made a mess of it. He looked chagrined.
“Nobody gets it right the first time,” said Valerie. “Or the second and third.”
“In class they’d call you an Easy Mark.”
“Just patch up the rips in the shell. Once you fill it up with fruit, who’ll notice?”
“You have a good heart,” he said.
She kept working and she imagined Andre sampling the tarte, but having spoken to Gerard, Valerie felt her eyes tearing up, her lungs about to fill with smoke. She could still feel her husband’s desperation, his fear crackling in the air. Stay low to the ground and stay where you are, said the 911 dispatcher to some frantic caller, said the slight breeze coming through the window, said everyone on earth with ears to hear. Watch yourself.
On va mourir, she thought. They’re going to die. She wiped the flour off her hands, then turned the TV off. Not watching didn’t help.
We can’t breathe, we’re going to suffocate, we’re up above where the plane hit, the smoke is rising.
Valerie could feel James beside her as she worked.
You have a good heart.
Putting his foot through a window, desperate for air.