ABSTRACT
Three novels, published after September 11, 2001, by Joseph O'Neill, Colum McCann, and Colm Tóibín are set in New York. They dramatically reimagine and observe wounded cityscapes in nonlinear timeframes that dislocate the events and reflect the difficulties in attempting to directly represent such traumas. O'Neill's Netherland highlights the experience from the 1990s to the aftermath, whereas McCann's Let the Great World Spin relocates the ordeal beginning in the early 1970s and ending with the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; Tóibín's Brooklyn detaches from twenty-first century New York entirely, though compellingly includes the occluded traumas of the Second World War. All three novels displace geographically: O'Neill's fiction charts journeys to Trinidad, London, India, Ireland and The Hague; McCann's protagonists venture to Ireland and to New Orleans; and Tóibín's heroine returns to Ireland. The more contemporary the setting, the wider the global migrancy that the fiction captures. These novels are anchored within a discussion of Jim Sheridan's 2002 film, In America, that establishes the primitive sublime after 9/11 and a postscript of Doireann Ni Ghriofa's work, A Ghost in the Throat, that suggests an important pivot in the literary manifestations of the primitive sublime in Irish writing.
