A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Joyce and Marshall Harriman are in the midst of a contentious divorce, but still sharing a cramped, overmortgaged Brooklyn apartment with their two children. On the morning of September 11, Joyce departs for Newark to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall, after dropping the kids at daycare, heads for his office in the World Trade Center. She misses her flight and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other is dead, and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, foreign wars, and the stock market collapse, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.