The death of the novel has been heralded by everyone from Tom Wolfe to, most recently, VS Naipaul. Says Naipaul: “It’s safe to say that no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way.” In Saturday’s online edition of the Guardian, novelist Jay McInerney states a case for long-form fiction, cataloguing a history of its assailants, assessing the relevance of such post-9/11 books as Chris Cleave’s Incendiary and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, proclaiming a collective need “to have a novelist process the experience [of 9/11] for us,” and ultimately questioning a literary establishment that has thus far been largely unaccepting of books inspired by the events of Sep. 11. Says McInerney: “Some of Foer’s reviewers … raised the issue of exploitation, as if the question were not so much ‘can novelists do justice to this subject?’ as ‘should they attempt it?’.”

Related links:
Click here for McInerney’s piece in the Guardian
Click here for a piece by Chris Cleave that ran on the op-ed page of the Sep. 11 edition of the New York Times