ABSTRACT
As Chapter 2 on The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent has shown, and as Chapter 3 on narratives of terrorist invasion confirms, turn-of-the-century “dynamite novels” invariably depict imaginary perpetrators, conspiracies, and reactions to them, even when they recognizably allude to real events. This distinguishes them from the majority of their present-day successors, novels published in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which make the attacks an essential element – or background – of their plots. 1 Works belonging to the first wave of so-called “post-9/11 fiction” 2 tend to focus on survivors, relatives of victims, or other residents of New York City whose lives have been altered in one way or another by the September 11 attacks. In these novels, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers characteristically constitutes a starting point, or point of rupture, for the protagonists, leading to a new life in a different world. This is especially true of the critical canon of American 9/11 novels from the mid-2000s. Notable examples are Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9/11 (2003), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to This Country (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) – all works by writers living in, or associated with, New York.
