Sherry Chandler » On the novel’s ascendency
On the novel’s ascendency
From Tom Junod’s The Man Who Invented 9/11, a review of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man originally from Esquire, currently online at Powell’s:
Indeed, Falling Man, as both a post-9/11 novel and a novel by Don DeLillo, offers the best test-case yet for the idea that when the planes hit and the buildings went down we entered the “age of nonfiction,” when journalism, even journalism as modest in means as one of those Portraits of Grief [in the New York Times), is able to grasp what’s happened — and, more to the point, what’s happening — to us more than fiction can, even fiction by our most accomplished and ambitious writers.
I was struck by this statement in light of the conversation we’ve been having about the novel’s ascendency in literature today.
Is it possible that what the people need after an event like the attacks of September 11 is not a novelistic examination but a poetic one?
Or must we state, after Theodor Adorno, that any literature after 9/11 is barbaric?
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