Political Fiction and Jihad: The Novel Response to 9/11

Abstract

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responded to a distinct genre of political novels that include among others: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). The American novelists’ call to the phenomenon of, and response to, global jihad finds an echo in Western Europe and even Australia where Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2007), Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2003), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) explore, in different ways, the sociology of the modern city in an age of terror. What light, if any, does the contemporary novelist shed upon that distinctive, new, urban character: the Jihadi? After more than a decade of intellectual reflection on the events of 9/11, what do these novels tell us, more particularly, about secular, modern liberalism adrift in an interconnected, but by no means integrated, cosmopolitan world confronted with the gnostic certainties of the religiously inspired political actor?