THE INHERITANCE: An American Tragedy in Five Acts, by Janet Reitman
The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has come and gone, and it is fitting that “The Inheritance,” Janet Reitman’s richly empathetic, morally complex, many-windowed new book, was not published to coincide with it. For it is not a book about Sept. 11. It’s a book about how America reacted to it — and how that reaction changed us.
If World War II is said to have engendered the sunny, self-confident American, and Vietnam the cynical and mistrusting American, Reitman suggests that Sept. 11 and its spiky long tail gave us the fearful American.
What she extracts from her braided portraits of ordinary Americans living in the shadows of the fallen towers is a slow but steady drift in the national character — toward increasing suspicion, contempt, dehumanization, paranoia, conspiracy and nihilism. Thus emerges an origin story for the present.
Her subjects include a Marine veteran who struggles with his mental health after Iraq and finds new purpose in white nationalism; a lawyer who clings to an almost touching faith in the rule of law, defending Muslims ensnared in post-9/11 cases; a Black F.B.I. agent who surveils East African communities that remind him of his own immigrant family — before becoming a whistle-blower; and, finally, a government contractor who spends a lot of time in Afghanistan and too little at home with his son, who descends into extremism and worse.
These people — along with some minor characters — are not meant to serve as a representative sample of Americans. In the hands of a capable reporter like Reitman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, this group becomes a particle collider for the forces of the age. Reitman is writing an intimate history of post-9/11 America. Her subjects are the vessel; emotions are the thing.
Her approach shouldn’t seem countercultural today, but it does. She adopts a hero’s journey methodology, in which every character’s story is told through their eyes, often through their logic.
Reitman doesn’t apologize for sympathetically portraying characters with disagreeable views. She appears to operate on the faith that if some people are going to join ISIS, or the neo-Nazis, or the F.B.I. counterterrorism division, or a legal case to defend someone accused of helping Hamas, the record ought to reflect not just what happened but also what it’s like to be them.
There is a popular phrase online now: “Imagine thinking that …,” it begins. But of course this phrase is not actually about trying to imagine. It’s a rapid dismissal before imagination has a chance. The kind of work Reitman is doing takes this phrase and makes it literal.
Working this way, she subliminally pushes back against one of the worst ideas that surged after Sept. 11: Trying to understand others is endorsement or complicity.
Thus we get a view of how the big forces the country has been arguing about in these years joust in people’s hearts, minds and relationships. What happened to all the young men whose dads went to fight a “global war on terror,” leaving their sons YouTube and video games as their stand-ins? What happened when the dehumanizing that so many soldiers were trained to do overseas returned home, running into both a D.E.I. America and an America in the grips of a white nationalist upswing? How did gun culture, war in Ukraine, the Telegram app and military privatization interact to shape who Americans became? What’s it like to believe that Black Lives Matter while terrorizing Black lives?
Reading “The Inheritance” is a reminder of how hard it can be to make sense of the whole by looking at the whole. “Half the country seemed to want to vomit on the other half,” Reitman writes, recounting a dinner scene. But her insight is that the country is a fractal, and so if you zoom in from nation to state to town to neighborhood to block, all the way down to one human heart, you will still see argument and tension. People are divided against themselves. The battle is for their own basic nature. And from these stories you learn what tips people this way or that.
Toward the end of the book, Reitman is telling us the story of Emily, whose father was giddily swept up in the war on terror and who has followed his footsteps into the Navy but now wants to quit on moral grounds, her perception of that institution seeming to dovetail with Reitman’s take on the age itself.
In a letter requesting a discharge, Emily writes: “There are no good and bad people for me anymore. There are just people. … I cannot hold this view and simultaneously be part of an organization whose very existence is based on the idea that there are people so different than us that they deserve to die.”
THE INHERITANCE: An American Tragedy in Five Acts | By Janet Reitman | Random House | 430 pp. | $32
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