Word: novels
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...least remarked upon (and possibly least cared about) consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks is the utter disarray into which they have thrown the American novel. Used to be a literary novel was a taut, emotional family drama set in the Midwest about some sensitive kid coping with a crippling disease. Now books like that read like naive, escapist fantasies. These days it's supermarket thrillers that grapple with pressing geopolitical realities. Tom Clancy's world view has become more plausible and more relevant than Jeffrey Eugenides...
...some semisuccessful attempts have been made to accommodate the events of Sept. 11 within a conventional literary novel; Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules and Nicholas Rinaldi's Between Two Rivers slink to mind. But there's something missing, something about the paradigm-pulverizing force of the war on terrorism that is simply not conveyable in the old forms. For a glimpse of the new word order, you could do a lot worse than pick up Lorraine Adams' endlessly fascinating, curiously disorienting debut thriller, Harbor (Knopf; 292 pages...
There's no guesswork in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon; 38 pages), but there isn't much education either. Spiegelman is also a Pulitzer winner, as it happens, for Maus, a bleakly beautiful comic about the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers--the title is a bad poem in one line--is Spiegelman's very personal take on the destruction of the World Trade Center in 10 monumental (14 1/2in. by 19 1/2in.), full-color episodes. The attacks left Spiegelman in a traumatized, neurasthenic state. (MISSING, proclaims a poster, A. SPIEGELMAN...
...least remarked upon (and possibly least cared about) consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks is the utter disarray into which they have thrown the American novel. Used to be a literary novel was a taut, emotional family drama set in the Midwest about some sensitive kid coping with a crippling disease. Now books like that read like naive, escapist fantasies. These days it's supermarket thrillers that grapple with pressing geopolitical realities. Tom Clancy's world view has become more plausible and more relevant than Jeffrey Eugenides...
...some semisuccessful attempts have been made to accommodate the events of Sept. 11 within a conventional literary novel; Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules and Nicholas Rinaldi's Between Two Rivers slink to mind. But there's something missing, something about the paradigm-pulverizing force of the war on terrorism that is simply not conveyable in the old forms. For a glimpse of the new word order, you could do a lot worse than pick up Lorraine Adams' endlessly fascinating, curiously disorienting debut thriller, Harbor (Knopf; 292 pages...