This week marks 25 years since the 9/11 attacks. On 11 September 2001, two passenger planes hijacked by terrorists flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, killing 2,977 people in the single worst terrorist attack on American soil. In the two decades since, a host of writers (American and otherwise) have written poignant works of fiction involving the attacks. Below is a selection of the 10 most memorable ones.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid
British Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist grabs you by the collar on page one and refuses to let go. Part of this irresistible urgency is due to Hamid’s mastery of the dramatic monologue, inspired by Albert Camus’ The Fall. The fascinating Changez, a Princeton-educated Pakistani professor of finance, is narrating his life story to an unnamed, off-screen American. Across 200-odd pages, Hamid expertly dissects the hypocrisies of the American empire through Changez’s professional and personal lives. By the end we understand exactly how a young man who came of age in the strongholds of America’s liberal elite finds himself “remarkably pleased” as he watches the WTC burning on TV.
Bleeding Edge (2013) by Thomas Pynchon
For over six decades, Thomas Pynchon has been the pre-eminent archivist of American paranoia, as seen in immaculate, labyrinthine classics like The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). In Bleeding Edge, he whips up a madcap detective story set in spring 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow falls down the rabbit-hole of tech-paranoia while investigating ‘hashslingrz’, a shadowy cyber-security startup that may or may not be involved with terrorist funding. In Pynchon’s chaotically beautiful rendering, the early Internet and the dot-com boom fuel a new, stranger Wild West; one where money, vice and egocentric idiocy flow freely even as larger threats loom unnoticed on the horizon.
Windows on the World (2005) by Frédéric Beigbeder, translated by Frank Wynne
French writer Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel, Windows on the World, is a miracle of stream-of-consciousness writing. He alternates between two point-of-view—himself, as he eats at a Paris rooftop restaurant, and Texas realtor Carthew Yorstan, who’s eating at the tourist-style ‘Windows on the World’ restaurant on the 107th floor of the WTC. Each chapter is 3-4 pages long, and represents exactly one minute in real time. The novel starts at 8:30 am when the first plane hits the WTC, and goes all the way till 10:29 am when the twin towers collapse. Maintaining this patently insane time-dilation across nearly 400 pages is no mean feat.
Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan has always been excellent at presenting a microcosm of global crises through the personal and the intimate. Saturday (2005) sees him applying the same method to the post-9/11 landscape in London. The novel spans a day (February 15, 2003) in the life of 48-year-old neurosurgeon Henry Perowne who’s planning a family dinner—the detail immediately marks the novel as a kind of 21st century Mrs Dalloway. On page one, Perowne sees an aeroplane streak burning across the sky and immediately his mind travels to the worst-case scenario: could it be another hijacking? Later in the day he argues with his daughter over the impending Iraq war, and also runs into a disturbed stranger who punches him. That encounter, and much of Perowne’s anxieties through the day, represent the fragility of the Western middle-class existence post-9/11.
Oblivion (2004) by David Foster Wallace
Unlike Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes, Oblivion wasn’t marketed as a 9/11 short story collection. And yet, its most memorable stories use the attacks as a backdrop for Wallace’s excoriating critique of American society and media (prior to Oblivion’s publication, Wallace even reworked a couple of stories written before the attacks to make the connection clearer). In Mister Squishy, we meet a marketer’s focus group taste-testing a sugary new children’s snack even as a stranger climbs up the building with a backpack; could he be a lone-wolf terrorist? The Suffering Channel is an uproarious, often cruel send-up of American media. It follows Skip Atwater, a culture journalist working at the WTC, writing about an artist whose poop resembles famous objets d’art. And in The Soul is Not a Smithy, a curiously apathetic young boy witnesses a hostage crisis (mirroring the hijack that preceded 9/11) unfolding in his classroom.
Home Boy (2009) by HM Naqvi
Pakistani writer HM Naqvi’s debut novel Home Boy (2009) introduces us to an inimitable central trio, the ‘Metrostanis’: the protagonist Shehzad aka ‘Chuck’, an NYU graduate with a Wall Street job, and his friends ‘AC’ (Ali Chaudhry) and ‘Jimbo’ (Jamshed), gangsta rap-spouting flâneurs of the New York nightlife. The Metrostanis are as assimilated as a group of brown American immigrants can possibly be, and yet the tenuous nature of this social contract is exposed swiftly post 9/11. Suddenly, a dreadlocked Muslim man isn’t cool or enjoyably eccentric; he is a threat to be assessed, observed and potentially neutralised. Naqvi takes us into the hearts and minds of these young men, depicting their alienation and eventual despair with a remarkable lightness of touch.
Twilight of the Superheroes (2006) by Deborah Eisenberg
The titular story from Eisenberg’s 2006 collection Twilight of the Superheroes is perhaps the most anthologised work of fiction about 9/11. After Lucien and his nephew Nathaniel witness the towers crumbling to the ground from the balcony of the former’s apartment, they respond to the deaths in opposite ways. The other stories quietly place a dormant neurosis in the backdrop of its protagonists’ lives. Revenge of the Dinosaurs is about a young woman, Lulu, who’s trying to make peace with the impending demise of her terminally ill grandmother. She soon realizes that this anxiety has congealed with all of the fears she has picked up post-9/11.
Falling Man (2007) by Don DeLillo
In the wake of 9/11, Keith moves back in with his estranged wife Lianne as the two of them reckon that the familiar comforts of domesticity would go a long way in easing the psychic wounds (Keith narrowly survived the attacks). However, things are seldom this neat in a DeLillo novel, and Falling Man proves no different. One of its most powerful elements is his constant interrogation of the role art plays in processing collective trauma. The title refers to the famous ‘Falling Man’ photograph by Richard Drew that captured an unidentified 9/11 victim mid-air.
Netherland (2008) by Joseph O’Neill
Netherland’s protagonist is a Dutch financial analyst, Hans van der Broek, living in a ramshackle apartment near the WTC with his wife Rachel and son Jake. After the attacks, the couple is too scared and moves into the Chelsea Hotel, kick-starting the dissolution of their marriage. Alone with his diffuse melancholia, Hans starts to play cricket at Staten Island Cricket Club, thanks to the efforts of his new friend Khamraj Ramkissoon, a charismatic Trinidadian Gatsby of sorts whose tall tales and get-rich-quick schemes are the stuff of The American Dream, warts and all.
Burnt Shadows (2009) by Kamila Shamsie
The canvas of British Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is so broad that it almost feels like a disservice to include it on a 9/11 list. It begins in 2003 with an unnamed prisoner, naked and pensive in his cell at the notorious Guantanamo Bay, wondering “How did we get here?” We then back-pedal to introduce two families, two sets of characters linked by a Japanese woman named Hiroko, whose life takes us to some of the most consequential moments in world history—the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings, the Partition of India and, eventually, the 9/11 attacks. Shamsie’s great achievement here is to craft a through-line of American foreign policy across these momentous developments. Again and again, the arithmetic of nation-state loyalties bumps up against the insistence of individual human connection. Like the bird-shaped scars on Hiroko’s back (created on the day of the Nagasaki bombings), the past is imprinted onto the destinies of Shamsie’s characters.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.