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“How Do We Write about This?” The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

CATHERINE MORLEY
CATHERINE MORLEY
Affiliation:
Catherine Morley is Lecturer in American Literature in the School of English and Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester. Email: catherine.morley@leicester.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4: 10 Years After 9/11 , November 2011 , pp. 717 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Suzanne Goldenberg, “No Nobel Prizes for American Writers: They're Too Parochial”, The Guardian, 2 Oct. 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/02/nobelprize.usa.

2 Gray, Richard, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History, 28, 1 (2008), 134Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 141, 146.

4 Rothberg, Michael, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, 28, 2 (2008), 153Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 158.

6 Anthony Cummins, “Does Literature Sell 9/11 Short?”, The Guardian, 23 Feb. 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/feb/23/doesliteraturesell911short.

7 Pankaj Mishra, “The End of Innocence,” The Guardian, 19 May 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/19/fiction.martinamis.

8 Jay McInerney, “The Uses of Invention,” The Guardian, 17 Sept. 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/17/fiction.vsnaipaul.

9 Rothberg, 155.

10 Ironically, it is precisely this kind of “insular” fiction that the Nobel Literature committee has rewarded in the past, with Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck as clear examples. And of course Toni Morrison, the most recent American recipient, deals with the legacy of a particularly American institution: slavery.

11 Mishra.

12 Al Alvarez, “The Long Road Home,” The Guardian, 11 Sept. 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/sep/11/fiction.philiproth. In this interview Roth describes the greatest American writers as regionalists, singling out Faulkner and Updike.

13 Jay Prosser, American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections on History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), 7.

14 Both artists were heavily criticized for their commemorative work, which was perceived by some commentators as cashing in on the grief and trauma of the terrorist attacks.

15 Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadows of September,” Harpers (Dec. 2001), http://www.harpers.org/archive/2001/12/0075772.

16 Siri Hustvedt, “The World Trade Center,” in Ulrich Baer, ed., 110 Stories: New York Writers After 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 158. For an extended treatment of this topic see Alison Kelly, “‘Words Fail Me’: Literary Reaction to 9/11,” 21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, 1 (Autumn/Winter 2008–9), http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/english/21.

17 See McInerney.

18 Don DeLillo, “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, 7 Sept. 1997, 64.

19 See DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future.”

20 Other falling men in the novel might include Terry Cheng, Keith's friend Rumsey, the possible East German terrorist Ernst Hechinger and David Janiak.

21 One can certainly add Joseph O'Neill's Netherland to this pair of books – as Rothberg points out.

22 Although Franzen is keen to point out the similarities of his work to Tolstoy's War and Peace.

23 Lev Grossman, “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist,” 12 Aug. 2010, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000-1,00.html.

24 Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 26.

25 In a much-criticized press conference in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld referred to freedom as “untidy” and the looting in Iraq a result of “pent-up feelings” of anger and frustration.

26 Franzen, 266–67.

27 Lever, James, “So Long, Lalitha,” London Review of Books, 32, 19 (7 Oct. 2010)Google Scholar, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n19/james-lever/so-long-lalitha.

28 Franzen, 267.

29 Ibid., 295.

30 Again, this is not new – being reminiscent of DeLillo's Underworld, with its extended metaphor of the Internet and its famous refrain “everything is connected.”

31 Franzen, 267–68, emphasis in original.

32 Ibid., 268.

33 Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic (London: Tuskar Rock Press, 2009), 261.

34 The brutality of their lovemaking influences Nate's later encounter with a shy young man in a college dorm. Just as Doug contemplates the ease with which he could snap Nate's neck, so Nate considers killing his companion.

35 Haslett, 77.

36 Ibid., 93.

37 Ibid., 224.

38 Ibid., 162.

39 Ibid., 168.

40 Ibid., 261.

41 Ibid., 281.