Document Type
Article
Abstract
Following 9/11, V.S. Naipaul claimed that the novel's time was over, for only nonfiction "could capture the complexities of today's world." Nonetheless, a steady stream of novels began appearing seeking to frame a useful response to unimaginable terror and heartbreak including Colum McCann’s Let the World Spin, DeLillo’s Falling Man, John Updike’s Terrorist, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This essay examines several of these works to discuss how and why American fiction changed after 9/11. Specifically, it will analyze the disappearance of irony and social satire, replaced by a new emphasis on "bearing witness," a form of ethical consciousness that moves away from empty empathy. It will also focus on other shared elements including the multiple uses of memory to contain and confront trauma; the simultaneous striving for—and ambivalence towards—human interconnection; as well as the inability to communicate in traditional ways. Finally, the essay will address the many failures of 9/11 fiction: the frequent reduction of 9/11 to a familial tragedy (inward looking); the promotion of ethnic culture in a colonial, rather than post-colonial vein; and a return to preexisting literary patterns that are, ultimately, evasive rather than constructive. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad alone, I argue, is a notable exception to such shortcomings.
Repository Citation
Noonan, Mark. "Re-writing Ourselves in the Wake of 9/11." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–10. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/11