Flak Magazine: Review of Before and After, 1.16.02

Look at the cover of "Before and After: Stories from New York" and you see a picture of the city's skyline at night. The two main towers of the World Trade Center sit off to the left of the photo, surprisingly unobtrusive for all their height and bulk. Flip the book over, upside-down, and the towers are suddenly conspicuous: burning, collapsing and hemorrhaging great mountains of smoke into the morning sky. Somewhere, deep within the grey and white clouds of soot and ash, people are dying.

"Before and After" is a two-sided chronicle of a city turned upside down.

It's a heartbreaker of a book. Its 60+ stories are all tightly wound and cleanly written. The first half of the volume contains an eccentric bunch of strange and beautiful yarns about a city that already seems to be submerged in the gauzy film of history: New York before Sept. 11, 2001. And the second half — all its pages printed upside down relative to the book's first part, so that both end at the book's exact center — is filled with chillingly sane accounts of some of the most wicked madness Americans have ever experienced.

The stories of "Before and After" feel very old-fashioned — which is to say they're emotionally engaging, they're clear, they're direct, and they're pungently powerful. It's probably not going out on a limb to speculate that strong editing beat these pieces down into a style that is consistently readable and engaging, without losing the unique voices that power their considerable emotional attraction.

And in contrast to many of the more slapdash (and exploitive) post-Sept. 11 books, "Before and After" feels like it's been a long time in the making. Part of that stems from the long gestation on the "Before" half of the book. But even the "After" section is written in a measured tone that conveys even the most gut-wrenching of events with matter-of-fact clarity and thoughtfulness.

With its dignified comportment and real literary firepower, it's a bit surprising to discover that the origin of "Before and After" is the Internet, rightly reviled as the fetid swamp that gave birth to 10,000 lousy weblogs and barely a scrap of good original writing. The editor of "Before and After," Thomas Beller, culled the book's stories from his formidable website, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. The site, which pegs New York stories to a sprawling online map of the city, has been around since June 2000, posting first-person essays that capture the soul of one of the world's most dynamic cities.

The pre-Sept. 11 stories of "Before and After" paint jewel-like sketches of a complicated city. The city is sweet and sour in "The Man Who Forgot His New Books On the Subway Platform at Lincoln Center." It's violent in the rivetingly low-key "The Dynamite Brothers Meet the Slapper." And it's full of great socks in "My Secret Socks Life."

But after the attacks, the tone changes. "The Ashen Guy" is as surrealistically discomfiting as a Don DeLillo story — but it's an eyewitness account. "The Numbers" tells of a survivor's nightmarish decent from floor 70 of Two World Trade Center. And the vivid "Terror at the Local Deli" describes the sudden freezing and shattering of a friendship between a Jew and a local group of Palestinians. It describes what may be the most hateful hug ever recorded, and it's gut-wrenchingly sad.

"Before and After" does something wonderful — it captures the soul of a city with details and specifics, not broad, stumbling, invariably oversimplified adjectives. The stories it tells are told with clarity and passion, with humor and precision, with nuance and grit. This little book packs quite a wallop.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)