The Submission

by Amy Waldman
This is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in quite a while.  I don't think I have ever read a book with some many unappealing characters.  The story is about a jury that is tasked with choosing a memorial for the site of the September 11th attack in New York.  One of the jurors, an independently wealthy woman who lost her husband on Sept. 11th, is the representative for the families of the victims.  How she can represent this group, when she is so out of touch with the life of regular Americans is questionable.  She is arguing vigourously for a garden design while many of the other jurors seem to favour a  large monolith.  She succeeds in convincing the jury to go for the garden design.  They then discover that the architect is a Muslim.   The jury thinks this might be controversial and decides to hold off announcing the results but a member of the admin. team leaks the news to a sleazy journalist who publishes the news and the reaction is swift and angry.

The book then discusses the lives of the woman juror, a man who's fire fighter brother was killed when the buildings collapsed and he is now trying to please his parents/replace his brother by being an advocate against the design, the architect, and a young illegal alien from Bangladesh whose husband was also killed in the attack

The anger leads to demonstrations, head scarves being pulled from the head's of young muslim women, the female juror feels threatened in her home and the architect has to move out of his home because he fears being attacked.

There are other characters in the book and it seems that all of them, while they seem to be seeking the right thing to do and justice are actually behaving more out of self-interest than honour and honesty.  The architect, who has never followed his faith fasts at Ramadan and grows a beard.  And, he is reluctant to explain his design or and refuses to respond when people ask him if the garden represents Islamic paradise.  This exacerbates the situation.  It does appear that his design idea might have come from a garden of a Mongol ruler that he saw being rebuilt in Kabul.  The head of the jury asks him to withdraw his design and he refuses, but after public outcry and the murder of the young Bangladesh woman he does that and leaves the U.S. to pursue his career worldwide.  Why does he refuse to defend his design or explain its source?  On the one hand he is correct in arguing that as an American citizen, born and raised, he is American and his design should not be questioned because he is a Muslim.  But, if he had been more forthcoming all the anger and turmoil likely could have been avoided.  The woman juror wants to meet with him, to get to understand his design, but it seems that she wants him to apologize for the Muslims who killed her husband and he won't do this, why should he?  He wasn't responsible for the act.

I think the only person who was truly honest and innocent in the book was the young woman from Bangladesh.  She is in the U.S. illegally which of course is a crime but she does try to do the right thing, trying to stand up to a wife beater, speaking out at the public hearing when she runs the risk of being deported.  She ends up being killed (before they are able to deport her and her son).  Her son is sent to live with family in Bangladesh.

At the end of the book the time is 20 years later and we are told that Muslims are now an accepted part of American life and culture.  A new design competition was held and the site is a field of flags.... and the widow juror regrets this choice.  The architect has become world renowned.  He did end up building his garden for a rich Arab.  When the widow juror finds that the garden has been built and that words of the Quaran are written on the walls (the original design would have had the names of the World Trade Centre victims), she is outraged and seems to take this as confirmation that is design was an Islamic garden and thus would have been an affront to the U.S.  She has learned nothing in twenty years!  She prided herself on being rational and trying to consider the needs of others but she is still irrational and racist.  It seems to me that she was disappointed in her marriage and how her needs were discounted by her husband and this anger spills out as a reaction to the design by the Muslim architect.

This was an upsetting but interesting book.