Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder

• Born: September 21, 1965
• Birthplace: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: September 11, 2001; 2002

Locale: Manhattan, New York City; Paris, France

Principal Characters

Carthew Yorston, real estate agent

Frédéric Beigbeder, French author

Jerry, Yorston’s nine-year-old son

David, Yorston’s seven-year-old son

Candace, Yorston’s mistress

Lourdes, a waitress

The Story

On the morning of September 11, 2001, real estate agent Carthew Yorston takes his two young sons for breakfast at the Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. A divorced father, he is planning to let them skip school all week and spend the days exploring the tourist sights of New York City. After breakfast, they will go for a walk in Battery Park, ride the Staten Island Ferry, and end their day with hamburgers at a popular cafe.

Yorston admits that he has taken the boys to Windows on the World, an elegant adult restaurant, because they chose it; the guilt he feels after splitting up with their mother makes him incapable of saying no. Shortly after the divorce, he moved to Long Island, New York, and started dating a lingerie model, Candace, whom he met on the Internet. Yorston enjoys their sex, but he is wary about her recent talk of starting a family together.

As he and the boys settle into the restaurant, Yorston recounts details about the World Trade Center buildings, including their history, layout, and number of tourists who visit the towers every year. When his sons start fighting over the butter for their pancakes, he recognizes that he has no control over them—when he does try to reprimand them, they believe he is joking. He muses that if only he’d had a daughter, he would have known what it was like to raise a peaceful child.

From his table, Yorston eavesdrops on two stockbrokers’ conversation and determines that the couple is having an affair. Although a wealthy and successful man himself, Yorston cynically observes that these stockbrokers are trapped in their marriages and businesses.

At 8:45 a.m. Yorston and the other restaurant patrons become aware that a large plane is flying directly toward the building. They begin to panic. A minute later, the plane strikes the North Tower ten floors below the restaurant, trapping Yorston, his sons, and the others inside. For more than an hour, they believe they may be able to find a way to escape. They head down the stairwell but are rebuffed by thick black oily smoke; they follow two restaurant workers up the stairs toward the rooftop but are stopped by an impenetrable locked door. Lourdes, a kind waitress, calms them by describing how she survived the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For a while Yorston convinces his sons that this is all a theme park adventure and that superheroes will rescue them. He is twice able to reach the boys’ mother by cell—the first time, he assures her they will be fine, but the second time, a few minutes after the South Tower has collapsed, he admits there is no hope.

As it becomes apparent that they will not survive, Yorston thinks deeply about his failures as a father and husband. He concludes that the life of freedom he thought he was living has actually been one of loneliness. At 10:11, David dies of internal burns to his stomach. Jerry won’t leave him. Ten minutes later, shortly before the North Tower collapses, Yorston and Jerry leap out the window, holding onto David’s body.

Alternating with Yorston’s passages are the musings of a French writer named Beigbeder, who is a slightly fictionalized version of the book’s author. Using Yorston as a kind of alter ego and conceiving of him as an imaginary cousin, Beigbeder records his thoughts a year after the attacks. He explains that since September 11, 2001, he has become obsessed with the subject and feels compelled to write about it.

He spends his mornings having coffee at the Tour Montparnasse’s Ciel de Paris restaurant in the heart of Paris. Like Windows on the World, it sits atop a high, prominent building. There he broods over the hyperrealist novel he is trying to write about September 11. While the terrorist attacks are all he wishes to write about, no approach he contemplates seems to work for the subject.

Beigbeder reflects on the time he dined at Windows on the World, striving to recall details such as what the waitresses were wearing. He imagines what it must have been like to be there during the attack and to feel something as solid as a skyscraper rock like a boat.

His disparate thoughts on the subject lead him to a colloquy on many aspects of American culture. Beigbeder admits that he is consumed with the United States, including its writers, filmmakers, and musicians. In one discourse he considers the 1970s, the decade during which the World Trade Center towers were constructed and when the concept of the jet-setting playboy became popular. He wonders if the terrorist attacks can be seen as representing the end of a self-absorbed fun-seeking era and examines the way September 11 affected the rest of the world, particularly France.

Through his exploration of American culture and the attacks, Beigbeder deconstructs his own life, much as Yorston did during the hour following the plane’s strike. Like his imaginary relative, Beigbeder has lived a hedonistic, womanizing life. No longer proud of his playboy exploits, he delves into a critical examination of the choices he has made in his life. Ultimately he realizes he has written this book because, after September 11, there was no point in writing anything else and that the attacks are not solely the concern of America but of France and indeed of the world.

Bibliography

Anker, Elizabeth S. "Allegories of Falling and the 9/11 Novel." American Literary History. American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 463–482. Print.

Kowal, Ewa. The "Image-Event" in the Early Post-9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror after September 11, 2001. Kraków: Jagiellonian UP, 2012. Print.

Lacey, Josh. "Minute by Minute." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 10 Sept. 2004. Web. 29 May 2014.

Metcalf, Stephen. "Windows on the World: French Twist." New York Times. New York Times, 17 Apr. 2005. Web. 29 May 2014.

Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Print.