Remembrance

Last year on this date I visited the question of the 9/11 novel. I respectfully re-open that discussion as seems appropriate.

I still think (as I wrote last year) that capital-L Literature is far ahead of other art forms in reckoning, yet I read more and more reviews which flippantly confer status as a "9/11 novel" onto books that aren't up to the task. To pick on one -- not nearly the worst -- Claire Messud's THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN was the most recent novel where I felt labeling it as such added undue weight to the plot. Given that I wanted to shake the characters most of the time, I felt that their reactions to 9/11 and the catharsis they got out of it was somehow unearned. After fervently wishing they would change for two-thirds of the book, though, any Big Historic Event that actually affected them would probably have annoyed me in the same way.

I suspect when the great 9/11 novel arrives it won't be set in New York City in the early Noughties. How will we know it when it gets here? We will know, regardless.