I’d been sort of resistant to reading Love Is the Higher Law, because as the cover photo of the Tribute in Light makes clear, it’s David Levithan’s “9/11 book,” and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a 9/11 book. But, well, it’s David Levithan, and I love how he writes, and I love how he writes about New York, and I ended up really liking this book. The book has four parts (the first takes place on 9/11, the second in the days immediately afterward; the third and the fourth are set a bit later), and in each one we get the alternating first-person narratives of three characters (Claire, Jasper, and Peter). Claire and Peter are high school seniors at the same school; Jasper’s about to start his sophomore year of college. All of them are New Yorkers who are in New York on 9/11, but none of them lose anyone: the most affected, in an immediate way, is Claire, who lives downtown— she and her mom and brother can’t immediately go back to their apartment/have to stay with friends. I think Levithan does a good job of capturing some of the emotional reactions of young people who were here in the city but didn’t lose anyone: none of his characters feel the tragedy/sorrow of 9/11 is theirs, but they do feel it belongs to them more than it belongs to the tourists taking photos at Ground Zero. (I was in New York on 9/11, and I was Jasper’s age: it was the start of my sophomore year in college. I was eight miles uptown, at 114th Street, and like Jasper, I was asleep, and woken up by my mom calling from elsewhere to tell me the news.)
Claire is in school when the planes hit: “This isn’t even something I’ve feared, because I never knew it was a possibility,” she thinks (5). Peter, who loves music, is outside Tower Records, waiting to buy the new Bob Dylan album. Jasper is in Park Slope; his parents call from Korea, where they’re visiting his grandmother: he walks outside and finds papers that have blown across the river, papers that flew out of one of the towers. He tries to give blood, but can’t, because he’s gay/has had sex, but before he finds out he can’t give blood, he’s waiting on line with a school friend who lives his neighborhood, trying to hold on to some normalcy amidst everything:
Did the fact that the World Trade Center had just been destroyed mean that I couldn’t act normal with Amanda? I genuinely didn’t see the point of looking somber and talking somber and thinking only somber thoughts. Who benefited from that? You have to imagine that the minute before that first plane hit, there were guys in the World Trade Center giving each other shit. (28-29)
Because of course life goes on, and what’s the same/what’s different is part of this story. Claire and Jasper and Peter are all connected: they were all at a party the weekend before 9/11, and Peter and Jasper were supposed to go on a date that night. They reschedule for later in the week, end up at Jasper’s place, end up watching the news. “It’s not very romantic,” Peter thinks, “except maybe if you take the long view and say that the two of us on the couch despite everything going on is itself a romantic statement” (50). But things are awkward, and Jasper doesn’t know what he wants/ and the date doesn’t really go anywhere. Claire, meanwhile, tries to find ways to channel her energy and emotions: there’s a scene of her walking to Union Square in the rain and watching a woman re-lighting people’s memorial candles, then joining in to help, that totally made me teary-eyed. I love these lines, from that scene: “It feels like the right thing to do, even though the light we make doesn’t change what’s happened. We are making our own temporary constellation, and it doesn’t spell a single thing” (77). I also love this, from a scene later in the book where Jasper and Claire run into one another at Ground Zero at night, and walk to Battery Park to talk:
If you were quiet, you could hear the waves. In Manhattan, you forget you’re surrounded by water, because you so rarely see it or hear it or feel its pull. But right at the edge, the air gains the current and the undertow. The water is black, but it carries any light that crosses it. (103)
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