The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Splate Audio Book Club for Monday, September 26th.

I'm here in the studio at Yale University with a dear friend of mine, Kishwar Risby, who is an architect and art historian.

Hey, Kishwar, we're so glad you're joining us.

Hi, thank you.

And in D.C., Hanna Rosen is with us. Hey, Hannah. Hi. We are here to talk about Amy Waldman's new book, The Submission. This is obviously a 9-11 book. It's so deeply steeped in 9-11 that when I read it over the summer, I felt like I was having this kind of pre-experience of the 10th year anniversary.

And we're going to talk about, you know, the threads of religion and politics that run through the book.

But I wanted to start by setting the scene for it just a little bit. The premise of this book is that there is a jury in charge of finding a appropriate memorial for Ground Zero to commemorate 9-11.

The jury has a competition with all of the bells and whistles to find the best architect to do this project.

It is a blind competition in which the architect's identity is hidden. And in the opening

pages of the book, the winning architect's name is pulled from an envelope, and it turns out to be

Mohamed Khan. He is a Muslim. This is obviously a completely unanticipated development from the

point of view of the distinguished members of the judging committee. And we see

most of the beginning of the book from the perspective of Claire Burwell, who is a 9-11 widow of a very

particular sort. Her husband was a banker. He made a lot of money. She lives in a very affluent

suburb in Connecticut. And she's beautiful.

She fills the fantasies and imaginings of all the men in the novel or many of the men in the novel.

Yes, that's totally a good point.

So I wanted to start, Hannah, by asking you what you thought about Claire as certainly not the single protagonist for this novel because Waldman shifts perspectives among the characters. But she is very important to the development of the book, as of is Mohamed Khan, who goes by the nickname Mo. And what did you think of these kind of two central characters? Well, interestingly, I found myself more drawn to the sections about Mo than the sections about Claire. There was a lot of beauty in the sections about Claire, like her relationship with her children and how she dealt with their grief. To me, what was interesting about Claire is how she had turned herself into a public figure and the ambivalence behind that. Like she says about her husband, Cow, one time, that she found herself talking about him in terms of his qualities, but that it began to have no texture for her.

So in that very specific process of a widow turning herself into a public widow, I thought she was an interesting character.

And I think that's what works for this novel the best, I would say, is getting behind what's a very public unfolding,

a news story. It's almost like you're getting the backstory of a news story. And I think that's

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