Indecorous Responses to 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and Jess Walter’s The Zero

Abstract

This chapter considers indecorous responses to atrocity as they are portrayed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and Jess Walter’s The Zero. Naydan argues that Hamid, Kalfus, and Walter, respectively, portray 9/11 as an event to be smiled at, celebrated, and capitalized upon in order to explore a space between utter grief and terrorist celebration of 9/11’s success at toppling symbols of American capitalism. Their representations of indecorous responses function to critique American capitalism, and they, too, help to establish 9/11 as a quintessentially late-late capitalist aesthetic moment characterized by paradox and uncertainty. Although a clear need for social justice and socially just ways of thinking and being emerges in 9/11’s wake, no clear path for twenty-first century citizens to attain it exists—at least not beyond that which reading fiction as rhetoric might provide.