What is a '9/11 novel,' and what makes one endure? Rereading this micro-genre reconnects one critic to a time of terror, empathy and humanity.
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This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise but most of the memorable books you’d consider “9/11 novels” aren’t really about the narrow timeline of Sept. 11, 2001. They’re about desperation and survival and the sensation of being alive after witnessing mass public murder. They’re about the strength of a city brought to its knees but never laid out flat.
Twenty years give us enough distance to assess what we have read about that time — what fiction can pull us back in while at the same time expanding our understanding of what happened, and to whom. At this dark milestone, what follows is an attempt, perhaps futile, to cull the long list of 9/11 novels before selecting — with trepidation — the best of the bunch. It is not a definitive roundup, and even if it were, it would be absurdly subjective.
It’s a great premise for a novel, one that touches numerous third rails. Waldman’s finest creation is the architect, Mohammad Khan. He’s an American native and a fiercely secular one at that, but the controversy awakens something in him, a stubborn individualism and a refusal to kowtow to ignorance. He goes out on a limb by insisting his work speak for itself, much as Waldman, a former New York Times reporter with a shrewd, subtle sense of satire, demands that artists be judged by their art.
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