Those who argued that 11 September could change the direction of contemporary fiction soon had a facer. The Corrections, published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in the introduction to his new collection of essays, How to Be Alone,[*] Franzen acknowledges that 'within 48 hours of the calamity' he was giving author interviews once more: 'business,' he concedes, 'is business.'

LRB 19 September 2002 | PDF Download