I noticed a smart piece about the fiction of September 11 on 3 Quarks Daily yesterday and figured I’d write to the author to tell him about our recent show on the same topic. His name is Josh Tyree, and he sent back a just-as-smart response:
The Open Source program on Sept 11 fiction, which I just listened to in full, was fascinating. I would add something that I think is vital, and which none of the guests addressed. I would be very surprised to find much good fiction emerging about the attacks themselves or the personalities of the hijackers, or the experiences of people inside the towers. But I would be even more surprised to find that the great fiction of our era wasn’t touched or brushed with an overall zeitgeist unleashed by September 11. This is an important distinction, I think, because the assumption on the program was that fiction had to be about 9/11 to be “about 9/11,” if you see what I mean. We should accept the fact that these books are “September 11 fiction.”
I would expect to find the effects of September 11 in any number of works of fiction that on the surface have nothing to do with the attacks themselves. Sometimes, that effect could be tangentially related to the actual events, as in Eisenberg’s stories. At other times — I would say the majority of times — the feeling would be a kind of dye that has accidentally seeped into the fabric of stories and novels. In historical fiction, there has already been a pretty clear shift — in novels such as Susan Choi’s American Woman and Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, both fine books — to dealing tangentially with the topic of terror without talking about Sept 11 at all.
But on an even more basic level, perhaps the most seemingly unrelated subject matter, of the most domestic and intimate nature, might have traces of the event that have, to nod toward something Eisenberg writes, drifted down into people’s drinks. If I were to try to summarize my gut-level feelings in a critical comment, I would say that some very good writers haven’t realized that they don’t need to “address the attacks” in order to have something to say about them, while some very good critics are not yet ready to deal with the plain fact that things are changing.
Josh Tyree, in an email to Open Source, September 11, 2006.
“I would expect to find the effects of September 11 in any number of works of fiction that on the surface have nothing to do with the attacks themselves.” Moreover, the readers of post 9/11 fiction are changing… I just finished reading two chapters of Qutb’s ‘Milestones’ a few minutes ago, read Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ a few months ago, and read Karen Armstrong’s biography, ‘Muhammad’ before that… I would never have read any of these without the 9/11 event. If writers have to take into account their readers’ interests, knowledge, and experiences — and they do — fiction must move into new areas. It did during the Cold War when John LeCarre’s ‘Smiley’ series became legendary, just to name one example, and it is doing so again!