M A I N   N E W S

Non-fiction scores over fictional accounts
Christine Kearney

Norman Mailer once advised another author to wait 10 years before writing about the attacks of September 11 because "it will take that long for you to make sense of it." The estimate by the prominent New York novelist and journalist, who died in 2007, may have been premature. As the world marks a decade since the attacks, literary circles are still waiting for a definitive work on the topic.

"The world has changed since 9/11 and our culture has changed but I haven't yet seen the book or the movie or the poem or the song that captures the people we are now and helps us redefine who we are in this new post 9/11 world," journalist Lawrence Wright told Reuters. Wright wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning account entitled "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11".

While publishers are bringing out a slew of new works, reruns of memoirs, survivor tales, Iraq war stories and fiction books tackling Sept. 11 and its aftermath, writers are still making sense of an altered era. Movies and television are often inspired by playwrights and novelists. But Broadway has yet to produce a significant play directly about Sept. 11 and no novel dealing with the attacks has been a top bestseller or come to redefine a changed collective psyche. Celebrated names such as John Updike, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Don DeLillo have all produced fiction stories. Many have written from either the militant's perspective or painted the post-Sept. 11 era with a broad apocalyptic brush.

Amis' "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta," (2006) imagined the last days of one Sept 11 hijacker while Updike's "Terrorist" (2006) centred on a US-born Muslim teenager set in a decaying New Jersey.

Neither won major awards. DeLillo's "Falling Man" (2007) concerned a World Trade Centre survivor and included several chapters told from the perspective of one of the hijackers. While applauded for its description of the attacks, it received mixed reactions. Non-American writers have also weighed in: H.M. Naqvi's "Home Boy," (2009), Chris Cleave's "Incendiary" (2005), Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" (2009), Salman Rushdie's "Shalimar the Clown" (2005) and Mohsin Hamid's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist".

Some were heralded for challenging orthodox interpretations of terrorism and of the attacks. But writers admit the process is slow. McEwan, whose novel "Saturday" (2005) reflected what he has called "a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the ... attacks", said back then it could be years until a definitive post Sept. 11 novel was written.

Others, such as Florida author Andre Dubus III, whose novel "The Garden of Last Days" was critically well received but sold sluggishly, said the public wasn't ready to embrace such tales. "My novel did very well until the word got out that it had something to do with 9/11 then it kind of fell off the radar," he chuckled. "It was like the kiss of death, it was like, 'Oh I am not reading about 9/11'-- and I can understand that." Dubus said he never set out to write "a 9/11 novel," and even cut his ending of the hijacker inevitably slamming into the twin towers for "treading on really sacred ground." "Were we ready to write about this? I don't think anyone was ready to read about it," he said. "As we get to the 10th anniversary, I have a hunch Norman Mailer was right. We are just at the cusp of being ready to look back with any degree of perspective that we need emotionally, to see it more clearly."

Some believe authors were subject to harsher reviews due to the sensitivity of the topic. Others, such as Amy Waldman, a former New York Times reporter, whose new novel "The Submission" imagines a jury that chooses a Muslim-American architect to design a Sept. 11 memorial, think it foolish to expect a single novel to capture the era. — Reuters