Swimming and Falling

Gerald Richter's 2005 oil painting "September"

Fresh from her pool, Claire gets a telephone call to inform her that the World Trade Center towers have fallen, and that her husband was in one of them.

“’Mommy, you smell like the pool,’ William sniffled a day — or was it two? — later. She had not thought to shower since the news. She would think often about having been submerged in water while her husband was consumed by fire. What did this say? It was like a myth, a dark poem whose meaning just eluded her.”

That’s from Amy Waldman’s “The Submission,” the novel the Eastern Illinois University campus is reading right now, and that’s what I call good writing.