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 Love and Death
by Tobin Levy
Nearly four years after 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Center is referred to with a hushed solemnity that borders on the otherworldly. Perhaps that's why there's something obscurely cathartic about French author Frederic Beigbeder's 2002 best-selling novel Windows on the World, which is just now being published in America. In it, Beigbeder commemorates the event by peopling the famed restaurant atop the World Trade Center with fictional victims who have histories rife with sexual indiscretions and a complicated internal present. During the last hour and fifty-eight minutes of their lives, they think not only about life, parenting and death, but also about sex.
There is an adulterous couple enjoying an early-morning rendezvous, a kind-hearted waitress and several young execs. Then there's our anti-hero, Carthew Yorsten, who's treating his two young sons to breakfast (in actuality, there were no children at Windows on 9/11). We immediately learn that Yorsten is a deadbeat dad with a penchant for models, X-rated movies and mutual masturbation. His actions and private musings, which are imagined, minute by minute from 8:30 to 10:28 a.m., alternates with the similar musings of a writer — an ill-disguised version of Beigbeder himself — sitting in the highest building in Paris, writing about 9/11 two years later.
It's a surprisingly compelling tale, especially because we know the outcome before it begins. Beigbeder seamlessly weaves history, philosophy, politics and cultural observations into the reimagined tragedy. Still, it’s the relationship between carnality and mortality that's most resonant, even though one particularly harrowing sex scene was edited out for American consumption. We spoke with Beigbeder about his concept of "apocalyptic hedonism" and the difference between the ways in which the French and Americans deal with pleasure. — Tobin Levy
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