All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

The most effective horror literature unfolds gradually. Daphne du Maurier knew that, which is why her short story, The Birds, is still being read and was enshrined in a movie by another expert in the genre, Alfred Hitchcock. 

Jung Yun knows that too. In her latest novel, All the World Can Hold, she makes her readers grasp the true horror of September 11, 2001, beginning with unobtrusive details that bloom into world-changing magnitude.

When cruise ship passengers make their way from New York to the changed embarkation point in Boston on September 16, 2001, most of them are relieved to learn the satellite signal that provides TV coverage has stopped working. Franny and Tom are perhaps the only New Yorkers on board and Tom is distraught when he discovers the news blackout. Franny has a traditional celebration planned for her mother's seventieth birthday, a significant milestone in Korean culture, and her attention is riveted upon making that a success. However both she and Tom are concealing secrets from each other. Tom has a highly personal reason to monitor the news from New York while Franny was so close to the World Trade Center that she heard the cracking of the South Tower before it collapsed. Still in shock, she has told this to nobody in her family, not wanting to spoil her mother's chilsun ceremonial banquet.

Doug, an over-the-hill Hollywood star, is an essential part of the ship's entertainment, which is centered around the cruise ship series that made him famous. Many of the passengers have signed up for this voyage simply because it gives them the chance to relive what they watched and enjoyed for years. When one of his costars fails to show up because of a brother who seems to have vanished in 9/11 rescue efforts, Doug breaks character during an introductory speech and pays homage to the tragedy. He's sternly warned never to do that again. Instead he begins to focus on his own secret, one that ruined his career and damaged his life.

Lucy shows up aboard ship incongruously dressed in business attire, since she came straight from a job interview. Invited by a roommate at the last minute to take the place of a no-show, she accepted on a whim and now regrets it. She's waiting for follow-up phone interviews with tech firms, ones that may never happen, thanks to the errant satellite signal. She has to get those calls to justify her expensive education and to surpass the Black working class life of her parents.

At a time when America’s individual concerns are being overtaken by shock and grief, the passengers are enclosed in a bubble of privilege and isolation, with their private lives taking center stage. It's not until they reach their destination that Yun strips them of their individuality, in an essay that turns the passengers into "them." "Their desire to explore...is at odds with their growing awareness of what they left behind." TV images, news reports, and "strange, uncanny stories" take control of their vacation and when they begin their voyage home, their private lives turn into cases of dynamite. 

Jung Yun has once again transformed what feels like ordinary life into the places that usually go unexplored. In O Beautiful, her previous novel (Asia by the Book, December 2021) she unwrapped the racism and misogyny that lurks in the American heartland. In All the World Can Hold, she makes it stunningly clear what 9/11 took from America and what its legacy has been, "about the beauty lost and the chances that would never be taken." She follows her closing chapter that gives a glimpse of Manhattan's southern edge, where "a thin spire of smoke" punctuates "the faint amber glow of morning," with another essay where the passengers again become "them" as they confront the aftermath of 9/11 that will follow them into this new century.