ShareThisBy BOB HOOVER
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
As the choices for this year's National Book Award in fiction show, the fallout from Sept. 11 is beginning to find its way into print.
Two of the fiction finalists _ "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" and "The Zero" _ confront terrorism, while a handful of other novels published recently use 9/11 for their starting point.
As a fiction writer, Todd James Pierce felt pressure to consider the milestone event. He responded by writing a new story for his short-story collection, "Newsworld," winner of this year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
"My draft of the book was finished without that second 'Newsworld' story," Pierce, 41, said from San Luis Obispo, Calif., where he teaches English and writing at California Polytechnic University.
"And then after 9/11 happened, I thought the book needed to comment on how do people in an era where news is treated partially as entertainment respond to an event like that."
The title story is set at a theme park in Atlanta where the rides are based on major news events like Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis and the Cold War.
The central character of the piece designs exhibitions inspired by race riots in Los Angeles and the O.J. Simpson police chase.
The news-as-entertainment theme emerged from a visit Pierce made to the site of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999.
"In the six months after the shooting, from May till fall, there were more than 500 news magazine stories on the networks," Pierce said.
"At a certain point, it became very clear that the journalistic impulse to report what was happening, the sense that this was a genuinely newsworthy story had ended a long time ago. What was really happening was that these programs were turning Columbine into a drama, like a miniseries."
The "packaging of news like a film or TV series" is a recent phenomenon in America, said Pierce, instigated in part by the proliferation of other media.
"Go to the multiplex and there's like 4,000 screens and maybe nine million TV channels. There are no longer movies or TV shows that everyone watches. We've lost that as a popular literature and replaced them with news stories. They have replaced films and have replaced books.
His technique is reflected in his stories involving MTV, the treatment of the late Christopher Reeve, the aftermath of the Koresh cult violence in Waco, Texas, and Columbine.
"I really think that the TV industry has found it very profitable to package some of these larger stories as ongoing types of hybrid, news-entertainment stories," he said.
