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Generally speaking, a literary genre emerges gradually. The first texts reach a small readership just a few at a time. They require intervals in which other writers can discover them and then add their own contributions to the new aesthetic. It takes even longer for critics to begin acknowledging patterns in content or style that clearly distinguish them from earlier works. Yet the American 9/11 novel defied this evolutionary order; as the product of a historical event, it arrived with the event's same immediacy. Unlike other nascent genres, which might take years to be acknowledged as such, the 9/11 novel was instantly understood as a new generic frontier for writers to reckon with. It promised an opportunity - and, at times, an obligation - to put forth narratives that would shape our understanding of the next epoch in US and world history.
Given the rapid influx of literature, criticism, and (to a lesser extent) dissent that followed the terrorist attacks, it is perhaps a wonder that ten years later critics had still not produced a comprehensive assessment of the novels that deal with the subject. However, Birgit Däwes does not find this so surprising. She observes that despite the abundance of...