Comedy of terrors

When friends asked Ken Kalfus what he was working on in recent years, his reply must have seemed awkward. “I would just say it’s a novel about divorce and 9/11, and it’s a comedy,” he says, chuckling, on the phone from his home in Philadelphia. It’s easy to imagine the stunned silence or embarrassed giggle at a book party, drinks clutched ever tighter. But A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, his follow-up to three critically acclaimed books—two story collections and one novel—manages to deliver on this promise of darkness and light.

It’s the story of Marshall and Joyce Harriman, a Brooklyn Heights couple going through an ugly divorce when the World Trade Center falls, anthrax scares hit and the country braces for war in Iraq. But somehow the novel is not as heavy as all that. A sly moralist, Kalfus sends up the ways many Americans responded to the attacks, and with each unexpected snicker a veritable sandbag drops from the book’s weighty themes.

“The way we were describing ourselves in the months and years that followed 9/11 wasn’t quite right,” the New York–born author says. “Victims were being made the objects of veneration and everyone was a hero. But these characterizations dehumanized those who were killed. I felt some distance was needed to understand what really happened. I wanted to write a funny, ironic story about real people with messed-up lives.”

Marshall and Joyce are nothing if not messed up. They still live together with their two young children, and their petty hatred for each other nearly eclipses the current events. In the first pages, Joyce watches the towers, where Marshall has an office on the 86th floor: “The building turned into a rising mushroom-shaped column of smoke, dust, and perished life, and she felt a great gladness.” Marshall, in the meantime, is similarly pleased when he believes Joyce was on one of the doomed flights. Alas, they both survive and their own war continues.

Given the hallowed place September 11 occupies in our public consciousness, it is refreshing to read about the visceral reactions of flawed people. Both Marshall and Joyce are full, fleshy beings with severe shortcomings, and Kalfus treats them both tenderly and unsentimentally. “People have complicated lives,” he says. “Not everyone’s life is going to be so neatly defined by the way they die.”

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco , $24.95) is out July 3.