Will we see a great 9/11 novel?

Of course no one needs to be reminded what today is.

About a month ago I was working on a review of a book about New Orleans and brought up the question of whether every novel about the city from now on would, if not directly dealing with the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, in some sense be in dialogue with that disaster. (The book, BABYLON ROLLING, was set in the summer before Katrina, as residents prepared for another hurricane, but the parallels were impossible to avoid.) You could ask the same question about books set in contemporary New York City, whether they explicitly depict some aspect of the day's events or just mention it in passing.

I think there will be a great 9/11 novel, although I'm not sure it will come out of those which have already been written. The best I have read so far, although I think their strength goes far beyond their willingness to confront this historic moment, are Jonathan Safran Foer's EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE and Julia Glass' THE WHOLE WORLD OVER. Glass' book takes place mostly outside New York City but follows a local couple who separates when the husband stays in New York and the wife moves to New Mexico to work as the new governor's personal chef. Her second novel is a model for how to use the September 11th attacks and their effects on people without it feeling obvious and inevitable. Safran Foer's sophomore effort, which I actually like better than EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, is a tale narrated by a young New Yorker coming to terms with his father's death.

I applaud authors who try to address it from this potentially myopic view, although I personally am not sure I can write about it yet (as you can tell from this increasingly uncomfortable post). I think there have been a number of strong contenders in the category of fiction, though, which is more than I can say for movies -- I feel frustrated and dissatisfied by films like "Shortbus" and "The Great New Wonderful" that use it to fuel certain emotions in the audience. (To be fair, I've read books that do the same thing.) It's hard for me to recommend books that intentionally seek this darkness out, but Safran Foer and Glass are masters.