Is “research novel” a genre? It shouldn’t be; the term sounds disparaging, as if the author has used some sort of trick to goose sales and written something that would apply to a subset of fiction readers. It should be a compliment to writers who’ve done a prodigious amount of background work without letting the hours of interviewing, reading and note taking make them lazy about the quality of their prose.
One novel to put in this category is David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. Another is Amy Waldman’s 2011 “The Submission.”
The plot sounds like no fun: Two years after the 9/11 attacks, an American-born Muslim architect wins a blind contest to design a Ground Zero memorial. The action begins with a jury of New York City elites selecting the winner, then seeing the name of the winner, Mohammed Khan.
“Jesus fucking Christ! It’s a goddamn Muslim!” a juror says.
Enter the rest of the novel and Waldman’s mountain of research. When former reporters—Waldman was one at the New York Times for eight years and covered the attacks and their aftermath—write fiction, it often reads like made up reportage. Not true here. Waldman’s used her reporter’s training to present fully alive characters from every angle of the 9/11 attacks but one, and it’s one that is best left out: that of the victims’. (To try to convey that would be presumptuous at best, impolite at worst. We all have our own sense of the horrors the victims went through that day, and the nuances vary with each of us.)
Although The Submission was published nearly four years ago, it’s become, if anything, more relevant in the years since. Much of it is about the place of Islam in our time, and the feelings toward Muslims in America. Waldman’s research is seamlessly woven into the story.
It is not, however, a didactic slog. Reading it is a pleasure. Waldman has the gift of phrasing Karen Russell has, and her dark wit and wry social observations compare favorably with Tom Wolfe’s. She also has a phenomenal ability for description, as in this brief passage in which little seems to happen (but much does) between a mother and her grown son:

He wandered downstairs. His mother was alone in the living room, working a needlepoint. In the white light of the sole lamp, the frozen set of her features made her look more marble than flesh.
“Sit with me a bit,” she said, and he did. He heard the clock’s listless tick. The rattle of ice being born in the kitchen freezer. His mother’s concentrating breath. He would remember it.