For the most part there is no narrator in “The Unspeakable.” The characters — survivors — speak for themselves, like the characters in George V. Higgins’s novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”* As an ex-prosecutor, Higgins knew criminals when he saw them and knew crime. The crimes he was concerned with in court had been investigated.

To the extent that “The Unspeakable” has a narrator, it is Robert Griffin, a psychologist who lives in Philadelphia. Below are his words. I’ll add more of them as the week goes by. — MCM

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Prior to 9/11, I was involved in activism, in a United Nations group, and the idea was that we would work, like the United States, on an international level.

So when 9/11 happened, and the subsequent change in atmosphere, it was really hard to speak about anything that made sense, publicly. Because it was kind of a unilateral United States world, and it was going to be violent, and it was going to be warlike.

Some people go through the trauma of their loss, and then also go through the trauma of finding out that things aren’t as they seemed, or that there’s problems that hurt in other ways. So the trauma is initially disorienting. Like, how do we fit in the world anymore. Am I a father? Am I a son?

[Of Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby was killed in the North Tower of the World Trade Center] He has grown over the years . . .

Whose grief is it? Whose loss is it? In some ways, the government has claimed the loss as their own. Folks were told how to feel, what to think about it. And it adds to their pain when it’s used for other types of policies that have nothing to do with it.

Conflict is a part of our nature. We have a way of identifying the United States vs. ‘them’ or ‘the other.’ And so that leads to all sorts of problems, where ‘the other’ is not considered in there as fully human. Beause it’s hard to get people to fight wars. People don’t hate on their own; they have to be given a story To go to war people need a story.

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* The book should be on most library shelves or available through bookstores. The 1973 movie starred Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle.