The McSweeney’s Effect

Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National has a lengthy appreciation of McSweeney’s that isn’t as well-sourced as one might like: Managing editor Eli Horowitz gets a lot of room to expound on the amazingness of the journal, and only one author is cited as an example of a quality writer who got his first break there. Then again, the writer is Philipp Meyer, author of the excellent novel American Rust, and he describes the publication of one of his first short-stories there as a “life-changing thing”:

[I]t does this incredible thing for people like me, or people like me five years ago if that makes sense. Because a lot of publishers, for reasons of legitimacy, feel the need to include big writers. Or maybe it’s not even for legitimacy, maybe it’s just to put names on the front cover that will sell. And usually, to be honest, it’s the crummier work from those writers. They rarely, if ever, take risks on folk who they’ve never heard of. You might not have heard of them as the reader, but it’s almost always someone on the magazine who knew someone, someone’s old professor makes a call and gets the story in.

I think the standard complaints about McSweeney’s still apply, and though in my old age I can’t work up the same attitude toward the publication I used to, I’m still skeptical about their offerings, especially their books. Of course, I’m also still going to buy that newspaper issue, but you’ll notice that the PR page doesn’t stress the amazing-unknown-writers angle; the issue’s innovation is its design, not its corralling of lesser-known writers.

“Books Without Covers”

Dorothy Allison hasn’t published a work of fiction since her 1998 novel, Cavedweller, and she’s apparently tired of answering questions about when her next book, “She Who,” will actually appear. “I talk about it as little as possible,” she told Knoxville’s Metro Pulse earlier this month. But the interview also stresses that she’s just as concerned with rural poverty and abuse as she was in books like Bastard Out of Carolina. But taking jobs at places like Stanford, where she’s taught students from much comfier backgrounds than her, has adjusted her pool of characters: She tells the paper that the forthcoming novel is about what happens when a wealthy woman is thrown off a parking deck.

Allison has been struggling to get the novel finished since at least the middle part of this decade, but she sounds a bit more confident about its completion in a new interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times. The theme of the article is her stubborn persistence in getting her stories told, and she says she’s sustained by the notion that classic literature is defined by its “impulse toward justice”. It’s an idea I hadn’t considered, but which makes sense if you grow up, as she did, poor and finding Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin books cheap, with their covers ripped off. That’s the audience that Allison says she keeps in mind as she writes:

My job is to write as strongly and powerfully as I can, and, wherever possible, to read out loud in a southern accent, and hope for the best. There will come dark periods when people will not be reading the classics, but then we’ll stay in print, and there’ll be kids who find my books without covers, and it will pass along. I believe in the persistence of literature. It’s one reason I like books, I like paper. I like whatever cannot be destroyed by a nuclear pulse moving through the atmosphere. I like the continuity of story.

Links: From a Flask With Unknown Contents

Whiting Award winner Adam Johnson says the aspiring writers in his classes these days are being a little too cute with the subtleties. “‘What happened? What was it about?’ he asks his students. ‘I didn’t want to hit you over the head with it,’ they reply. ‘Hit me over the head with what?’”

Lizzie Skurnick on a star-studded event honoring Judy Blume: “Her controversy wasn’t based on her attention to the illicit. It was based on her attention to the ordinary.”

Tom Perrotta figures people don’t cheat on their spouses nearly as much as novelists suggest they do.

A comprehensive collection of Ernest Hemingway’s letters is nearing completion.

Cormac McCarthy has signed a few copies of The Road, and no, you can’t have them.

The Idaho Review, which has published a host of major authors from the West, celebrates its tenth anniversary with a 296-page issue. (via New West)

William Faulkner’s old residence in New Orleans is holding up well, post-Katrina.

Shanthi Sekaran: “When an Indian American writer portrays India, a reader will already have seen five other portrayals in other books and inject what they’ve seen before…. That leads readers to overlook other aspects of an immigrant experience.”

The owners of Chicago bookstore Women and Children First aren’t buying the statement that there are as many as 30 feminist bookstores in the country.

Daniel Alarcon on Americans’ disinterest in reading works in translation: “There’s a certain curiosity about the world that’s not matched by a willingness to do the work…. So what happens is that writers of foreign extraction end up writing about the world for Americans.” (via Bookslut)

A great wide-ranging interview in the Morning News with Tobias Wolff about writing programs, the state of short fiction, the novel he’s working on, the Richard Price novel he’s reading, and more.

Dear Stanford Daily: Here’s the thing. If an anonymous student tells you that Wolff regularly takes swigs “from a flask with unknown contents” in class, it’s pretty much imperative upon you to ring him up for a comment. Then he could tell you whether what’s in the flask is innocuous or not, avoiding any need for golly-who-knows-what-he’s-drinking weasel-wording. Regardless, you’re bound to get a story out of it, and telling stories is something he’s pretty good at. Give it a try.

The Whale as Albatross

Yesterday Linden MacIntyre’s novel The Bishop’s Man won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which is given annually to the best work of Canadian fiction. The folks responsible for the award caught a little flak earlier this year for placing two Americans on its judging committee, including novelist Russell Banks. If Banks himself was criticized for his role, he doesn’t bring it up in an interview with Torontoist, but he does have a few interesting things to say about what connects American and Canadian fiction, and where they diverge. For one thing, he says, Canadian authors don’t have the burden of a Moby-Dick to live up to:

I think you could say that American fiction tends to look back at certain classic American models and figures…. The novel particularly runs back to the 19th century and it’s a very powerful river, you can sense and feel it. Canadian fiction is more international in a way, it looks to British models, to American models, to Irish models. You see all the different international models showing up in interesting ways. Americans are still trying to write the Great American Novel, the White Whale Novel. I don’t think Canadians are trying to write the Great Canadian Novel in the same way. It probably liberates them and allows for a greater variety of fiction.

Perhaps, though I suppose that ambitious Canadian authors think as much about Margaret Atwood and Mordechai Richler as Americans might about Philip Roth and John Updike; and both countries could argue that Saul Bellow is a standard-bearer for their nation’s literature. And the obsession with nation-defining fiction may be similar in both countries: Though it’s hardly a scientific survey, it’s interesting that “Great Canadian Novel” and “Great American Novel” get pretty much the same number of hits in Google.

The Case for Cyrus Colter

Last weekend I was in Springfield, Illinois, attending a wedding, and pre-reception photos were taken on the grounds of the state capitol building. Luckily, I didn’t have to be in the shot as the bridesmaids and groomsmen tossed autumn leaves on the heads of the new couple, which left me free to consider the facade of the Illinois State Library across the street. The building’s frieze is etched with the names of 35 authors who were either Illinois natives or were closely connected with the state. Most of the selections are no-brainers—Gwendolyn Brooks, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, etc—but a few I had to look up later. My most embarrassing blind spot, easily, is Cyrus Colter.

Colter lived to the age of 92, but his writing career was relatively brief. He began writing fiction at 50, shifting from a career in law to write stories and novels about the lives of middle-class and working-class blacks, mostly in Chicago. When he published his first books in the 70s he was considered an inheritor of Richard Wright’s themes, but he was actually a contemporary: Reginald Gibbons, speaking at a memorial service for Colter in 2002, noted that “Cyrus belonged to the generation of Richard Wright (who was born two years earlier), but Cyrus did not publish his first book until the year Richard Wright died.”

I bring up this homework-y biographical stuff partly because its new to me—I was tasked with absorbing lots of “celebrate Illinois authors” material in school, and I don’t recall a single mention of Colter—and partly because what I’ve been able to track down of his work online makes me wonder why he doesn’t have a stronger reputation. (Best as I can tell, all his books are currently out of print.) True, The Hippodrome has an impossible premise—it opens with a man on the run carrying his wife’s severed head—but the opening pages capture all the delusion and rage that might come along with that predicament. Less lurid and more effective is “Overnight Trip,” which follows a stable working-class man—he sets linotype at a Chicago daily newspaper—who’s anxious about letting his wife leave for a shopping trip to Saint Louis. The opening paragraphs, describing Chicago in early winter, do as fine a job describing he city as Algren or Hecht or Bellow or anybody else whose name is chiseled on that frieze:

The street lights and the lights from the store windows shone gauzily through the rainy mist, as Amos slouched up Michigan Boulevard, peering now and then across the Chicago River to the matriarchal old Wrigley building, solitary, stark-naked white, and wet, against its glaring floodlights bursting up from the south bank. For just an instant the Taj Mahal flashed to his mind out of colorful travelogue movie, but right off he realized it was very, very different; it had a soft glow—with placid, waxen tints. Ducking his head, squinting, and turning up his coat collar at the same time, he leaned his long skinny Negroid frame shrinkingly into the weather.

All day long, at his linotype machine, he had been in low spirits, and the miserable night didn’t help any. Sometime during the afternoon he had vaguely decided to take the bus home, instead of the El. That way he wouldn’t have to transfer; and, too, there wasn’t so much commotion on the bus. He could think. Lately, he was always looking for opportunities to isolate himself—in order to think, to persist in this constant mulling over in his mind of matters that had, so far, completely foiled him.

The Chicago Writers Association is in the midst of launching a Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, and Colter is among the first group of nominees for selection. Online trawling probably isn’t the best way to get a grip on his work—for one thing, it suggests he’s got women issues—so any recommendations about where to start are welcome.

Have Memoirs Won?

Speaking with the Philadelphia Inquirer recently, Ben Yagoda said this:

“When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction’s day is done.”

Yagoda, a longtime journalist who’s written intelligently about the virtues of narrative nonfiction, has book coming out soon on the history of the memoir, so he’s clearly been studying the matter. I’ll be curious to see how he makes this argument, because it seems hard to defend. It may be that fiction is dying in comparison to memoir as far as sales go. But the point of fiction isn’t to “prove points” or “make cases,” at least not in any journalistic sense. Sure, sometimes it has a relevant message to deliver about current affairs, but if that were fiction’s chief virtue then fiction’s day has been done for a very long time. And yet the novels and story collections keep coming.

Inquirer reporter Dianna Marder spoke with a few other people for the story, shedding light on what Yagoda may mean in saying fiction’s day is done. One editor at a publishing house says that memoirs are appealing because Americans like “pulled up by your bootstraps’ stories in which odds or adversities are overcome.” So it may just be that Horatio Alger’s day is done. One professor says that “People don’t believe they can learn anything from fiction anymore,” while another says that “We’ve lost our faith in history books”; both imply that memoirs can give us our teaching moments and our faith back. Or, as Georgetown’s Maureen Corrigan puts it, “Memoirs are easier for book groups to discuss.”

None of which speaks to the elephant in the room: If memoir has overtaken the role of fiction, why are so many memoirists tempted to fictionalize and embellish their work? In the case of the most infamous fraud, James Frey, he added a note about his embellishments to later editions of A Million Little Pieces: “I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require,” he wrote in a note to the reader (PDF). What better way is there to prove points and make cases about yourself?

Yagoda doesn’t discuss fabrications in the Inquirer interview, and the Publishers Weekly review of his book suggests he doesn’t spend much time exploring the matter between hard covers either. (“Without dwelling too heavily on the genre’s most recent scandals….”) I can’t criticize a book I haven’t read, but hopefully Yagoda spends some time addressing the matter head-on, because those fabrications aren’t odd little outliers in the history of nonfiction narrative: They speak to what we expect out of both novels and memoirs.

The Whale That Wouldn’t Die

The latest issue of Soundings, a magazine published by MIT’s School of Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences, has a fine feature on MIT English professor Wyn Kelley, a longtime scholar of Herman Melville. Kelley positions Melville as an author who anticipated many of the social concerns of not just the 20th century but the 21st as well, and considers Moby-Dick as a novel that (paging Matt Yglesias!) speaks to a host of contemporary concerns about multiculturalism, environmentalism, religion, and more.

For instance, Kelley argues that Melville, via Ishmael, was more attuned to the cultural diversity of the city than he’s been given credit for:

Ishmael, she notes, serves as Melville’s guide to urban studies in Moby-Dick. “The presence of savages on the streets of New Bedford reminds Ishmael that cities grow out of conflicts between colonizers and natives. At the same time, the town’s shipping industry gives it a diverse, ever changing population; it remixes itself every day,” she writes in Melville’s City.

But Melville’s appreciation for multicultural urban life, as expressed by Ishmael, was viewed narrowly in literary criticism in the 1990s and early 2000s, Kelley says. At that time, “people were talking about Melville’s multicultural perspective in terms of race: the white male author who turns out to be a keen observer of racial divides and politics in the US. And Melville wasn’t alone. Read Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, and you’d think there were only two races worth talking about.

“My MIT students of other backgrounds have put up with this politely for years, but globalism, as economic and cultural and now literary theory, has made those ways of thinking passé,” she says.

Kelley spent a sabbatical year retracing Melville’s travels through Jerusalem and the Galapagos Islands to better understand the author, but she’s has also taken some lighter approaches to her work—including screening Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in class to show how long Moby-Dick’s shadow is. These days, she says, the book functions much like a wiki for American culture: “In the 19th century, the novel was a new genre, and Melville borrowed from other forms. Today, we add new science, new insights, and new media. Then as now, the text is a whole world.”

Philip Roth’s Art of the Deal

Maybe the reason critics seem so uncertain about Philip Roth’s new novel, The Humbling, is that it’s about uncertainty. Its hero is an aging actor, Simon Axler, who discovers that he has lost his ability to act. Actually, the first sentence says that what he’s lost is his “magic,” signaling that the novel will be about a search for a whole host of things that he’s trying to recover. Perhaps he’s lost his will to live, so he briefly checks himself into a psychiatric institution; perhaps he’s lost his capacity to love, so he pursues an affair with the 40-year-old daughter of two of his old friends in the theater.

It’s not giving away too much of the story to say that those two efforts don’t resolve Axler’s anxieties. The question for Roth is how to describe Axler’s inability to affect that resolution—how to evoke the ever-shifting instincts in Axler’s head without making him a merely wishy-washy or pitiful character. Some of this is taken care of by the plot; there’s sex and there’s violence, and both relate to Axler’s conflictedness. But Roth also tries to stress it by routinely describing relationships as transactional, having Axler regularly assess where he stands in an emotional ledger. As his (relatively) young lover Pegeen puts it: “It’s pursuing what you want. And not pursuing what you no longer want.” Pegeen herself is coming off a bad relationship with a woman who’s decided to have a sex change, and Roth wryly describes the shifts they’ve made: “If Priscilla could become a heterosexual male, Pegeen could become a heterosexual female.”

For a while, Axler figures he’s in the black, reveling in what he’s taken when he thinks about Pegeen’s father’s disapproval: “[M]y fame stole away his only daughter, the fame that Asa himself could never garner,” Roth writes, in a rhyme that echoes Axler’s kid-like giddiness. Later, though, as it becomes clear that he may have made a mistake, he thinks to himself, “I miscalculated—I didn’t think it through.” From there it’s a short trip through the see-sawing emotions that propel The Humbling to its end.

That ending is predictable—you know that old line about what needs to happen in the theater if a gun is introduced, and The Humbling involves the theater and a gun. And anybody who’s read Roth’s recent run of brief novels won’t be surprised to hear that this one is about aging and death as well. But his strategy this time around is different than it was in, say, 2006’s Everyman, which emphasized the grim finality of dying. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” he wrote in that book, which also contains one of Roth’s most brutal bits of dialogue, spoken by a gravedigger: “This is nice diggin’. No rocks. Straight in.” In Everyman, Roth suggests, we’re all speedily tunneling toward our inevitable end, and there’s little point in fighting against it. The Humbling is about the attempt to fight back, about desperately making bargains in the hopes of avoiding that end. But the only reward for that, Roth suggests, is humiliation.

Links: There’s a Fire

What does it take to make a debut novel successful? The Austin American-Statesman has a tick-tock on John Pipkin’s Woodsburner, from writing to editing to publication to indie-bookstore hit.

James Salter looks back on his career.

Robert Olen Butler has written nine screenplays in the past twelve years, but not one of them has been produced. In completely unrelated news, Olen’s new novel is titled Hell.

Audio, video, and transcripts from PEN America’s recent “Reckoning With Torture” event are now online. Among the speakers were Nell Freudenberger, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Jonathan Ames, and Paul Auster.

Don’t tell Auster his strategy of using nested stories makes him some kind of postmodernist: “There were certain kinds of books I was attracted to as a young person, two jump to mind. Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter. These fascinated me. You know full well these are fictions within fictions. The act of telling becomes part of the story.”

Poets & Writers has a list of the top creative writing MFA programs in the country.

Ben Greenman is a better speller than many of his peers.

And maybe it’s mean to make fun of Gore Vidal, but he does have a way of saying things that make such behavior understandable.

Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue

Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, a professor of English at the University of Ghent, takes a close look at a handful of 9/11-themed works of fiction in his new book, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it prompted me to rethink my reactions to the novels he discusses—I may never be a great admirer of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, but the book reveals how carefully DeLillo worked to mimic the ways that traumatic events unsettle our ability to tell stories. Dr. Versluys does much the same for the other books he covers in-depth, including Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir In the Shadow of No Towers, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World. Out of the Blue is an academic book, but it’s low on jargon, and provides some useful context for the debates about 9/11 fiction that are bound to emerge in the future.

Dr. Versluys answered questions about Out of the Blue via e-mail.

Much of Out of the Blue discusses 9/11 fiction in relation to trauma studies. Did you have an interest in the relationship between trauma and literature before writing the essays in this book? What led you to look at trauma as one of the main prisms you use to study this literature—as opposed to, say, through the prism of politics?

When I spent a sabbatical year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in 2004-5, the idea was to write a book on recent New York fiction. I have taught many courses on that topic both at Ghent University, my home university in Belgium, and as a guest professor in the Columbia summer school program. The way I had planned it, the last chapter would be devoted to 9/11 fiction. For reasons too intricate to explain I started with the last chapter, only to realize that in the short time since the terrorist attacks had taken place, a body of work had come out that was substantial enough to be the subject of a separate book.

The first text I studied in depth was Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman looks upon the events of September 11 through the conceptual screen of the Holocaust. That led me to take a closer look at trauma studies in general and Holocaust-studies in particular. I have always treated post-structuralist approaches to literature with a great deal of skepticism. But especially the writings of Dominick LaCapra (rather than the canonical Cathy Caruth) made me aware of the fact that in trauma studies post-structuralism – so often abstract and theoretical in its orientation – touches ground and provides a tool to talk with respect and deference about things that remain essentially unsayable. Nonetheless, I feel that, at bottom, I remain an old-fashioned humanist. I prefer to read novels in the grain, rather than against the grain. And while I am indebted to post-structuralism for its attention to language and though I take into account that language introduces fissures and ruptures, I also perceive it to be an instrument of healing and restoration.

You write that the 9/11-themed works you discuss “testify to the shattering of certainties and the laborious recovery of balance.” I imagine that novelists writing on subjects such as war, or totalitarianism, or even domestic abuse, might feel they’re doing the same kind of testifying. What, if anything, distinguishes 9/11 novels from fiction about those other kinds of traumatic experiences?

As a traumatic event, September 11 is comparable to other traumatic events. Paradoxically, though, one of the characteristics it shares with similar events, is that it is singular and irreducible. In the first place this is the case, of course, for the victims, their families and friends. No analogy is capable of capturing what it means to be trapped in a burning tower or to lose one’s parent, spouse or close friend.

In addition, 9/11 is arguably the first instance of what one could call global trauma. It was witnessed not only by the people in the direct vicinity of the WTC-towers on that bright Tuesday morning. It was also witnessed by millions and presumably hundreds of millions on TV, either live or in the many repetitions of the iconic images that everybody remembers. It is possible that in order to talk about this new kind of trauma, we will need a new vocabulary, a new or at least a modified conceptual framework. We know a lot already about indirect witnessing and secondary trauma, esp. with regard to second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors. We also know that a whole culture can undergo a sense of shock so severe that its collective assumptions are profoundly disrupted and that a catastophe can “create ‘problems of identity’ for individuals and communities well beyond its circumference of material destruction” (Gray and Oliver). So there is a lot of theory to go on already. Yet it seems to me we are dealing here with something that is different from what preceded. Notions such as those of authenticy or inauthenticity, the traumatic sublime, postmemory, trauma transference, empty empathy etc. – all notions that are current in trauma theory – may have to be adapted or revised to fit the new category of global trauma. Televised indirect experience raises new questions as to what is genuine and what is hype and it establishes new conditions for making memorializing into an act of approximation and not an act of appropriation.

You note that there are about 30 literary novels available currently about 9/11. Were there other 9/11 books that you considered writing about at length? I suspect you’ve already heard from people wondering why the book doesn’t mention, say, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

In order to keep the study manageable, I made the decision early on to deal only with novels in which 9/11 is not just a background event, but in which it plays an essential role in the plot development. Apart from the two novels you mention, there are more novels of merit in which 9/11 is part of the background: Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, to mention only a few. I deal with two such novels (Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December and Ian McEwan’s Saturday) in the epilogue to indicate that, as time goes by and the first shock wears off, 9/11 is bound to become “spectralized.” Its presence will become less and less visible, but for that reason all the more haunting. The direct treatment of the events on September 11 is bound to be replaced in the collective imagination by the indirect treatment. To study that phenomenon requires another book.

Your chapter on Falling Man ends with a provocative statement: Because the novel “allows for no proper mourning or working through,” you write, there’s a danger that “it can serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration.” Can you elaborate on how these movements might manifest themselves?

I borrow this idea from Dominick LaCapra. The point he makes is that a condition of collective grief that is considered irredeemable might be the breeding ground for a revanchist logic. If the nation does not learn to deal with loss, it might be tempted to restore normalcy “through the elimination or victimization of those to whom blame is imputed” (LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 65). This line of reasoning is related to the distinction between true and false witnessing, made by the psycho-analysist R.J. Lifton. False witnessing, according to Lifton, occurs when death anxiety is converted directly into killing. The example he cites is the massacre at My Lai. But it could easily be applied to the way the Bush administration reacted to September 11 and in fact to the ultra-conservative backlash that lasted till the election of President Obama. The novels I discuss argue for an ethics of responsibility, in which the complexity of the situation is fully presented and the simple binary logic of “us versus them” – so cleverly exploited by the Bush administration – is avoided.

Critics have been largely (though not uniformly) unkind to the books you discuss, and you elaborate on some of the reasons why. Writing about Falling Man, you note that “the characters are so thin that their whole existence boils down to mere nomenclature” and that “no narrative momentum is allowed to develop.” You note the “flatness” of Grandpa’s character in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the “soppy happy ending” of Terrorist. But you also point out many rewarding characteristics of these novels that you believe critics missed. Do you feel the negative critical reaction to these books is related more to their unconventional structures and approaches, or more to the way they are, as you write, “subversive of nationalistic imperatives”?

Let’s be clear about one point: the great September 11 novel has not been written yet and maybe it never will. To a point, the negative critical reactions are justified and understandable. No writer has yet been able to capture the magnitude of the event or the shock it produced. The unsayable remains unsaid. The negative critical reactions might, therefore, be understood as the result of disappointment. Here is an event that cries out for a definitive reading and it is not forthcoming. Nonetheless, there is much more to these books than some reviewers have spotted. My study is a tribute to the few writers who have been courageous enough to tackle an impossible topic. Even though they succeeded only partially, there is much insight to be gained from their efforts.

You note that nearly all the books under discussion have been written by white American men, and write that it’s an open question whether future 9/11 fiction will be “marked by more gender and ethic diversity or acquire a more outspoken international dimension.” What do think has made 9/11 the province of such a singular kind of writer thus far?

The answer to this question can only be pure guess work. Minority writers might have no need to deal with 9/11, as long as they are dealing with the traumas in their collective pasts. As to women, Anita Shreve and Claire Messud have been prominent in recording the dispersion of 9/11 in the culture at large as a spectral presence, a vestige, palpable but invisible.