Bookplanet: a spate of 9/11 novels

'In the next few months a brace of important novels with 9/11 themes will be published, from McEwan's and Foer's to "The Good Priest's Son" by Reynolds Price, "The Writing on the Wall" by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "The Third Brother" by Nick McDonell and "Windows on the World" by Frederic Beigbeder. They join "Absolute Friends" by John LeCarre, the 2004 novel in which the old reliable spymaster himself takes a crack at traversing the post-9/11 world and its routine barbarities--some of which, it suggests, may have been undertaken by the putative good guys.
"Saturday" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" appear to offer opposite answers to that burning and urgent question: Did 9/11 really change the world in some fundamental, irretrievable way? McEwan's book, written in the British author's typically elegant, meticulous style, says, "Yes, it did." Foer's book, an untamed flurry of manic energy, says, in effect, "Uh, maybe not." Thus each novel demarcates the outermost edge of a perspective on Sept. 11. Either that day stands alone as the last melancholy outpost of a benign and predictable world, and only darkness and anarchy wait beyond; or it is one of many such days in any number of benighted places and times. McEwan's characters see Sept. 11 as a stone flung into a pond, with the ripples widening out like radar signals from a warning tower. Foer's also see it as a stone, but this time the stone is hurled at a cracked window in a rundown house. All of the lines in that jagged sprawl eventually lead into one another and connect, so what's one more crooked line, one more spidery path, one more wound?' More here.