How 9/11 altered the fiction landscape

The demonic choreography of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States instantly rendered Sept. 11 the most documented act of terrorism in human history. As the north tower of the World Trade Center burned, cameras already on the scene filmed the second plane soaring into the south tower. Those appalling images, infinitely reproduced, colonized the minds and imaginations of a generation.

Almost as quickly as the U.S. military geared up to unleash America’s retribution, the publishing industry jumped into active duty, too. A nation seething with rage and incredulity felt desperate to know how the attacks of 9/11 happened, who carried them out and why. Within days, previously published books — such as Ahmed Rashid’s “Taliban” and Yossef Bodansky’s “Bin Laden” — shot up on the bestseller list. Sales of Bibles, Korans, spiritual guides, prophecy titles and works on comparative religion ascended toward the heavens.

Advances in technology allowed the production and distribution of an unprecedented number of new books in record time. On Oct. 1 — while ground zero was still burning — students and professors at the New York University Department of Journalism published “09/11 8:48 am,” an anthology of accounts by survivors and witnesses.

But of course, readers wanted more — so much more. Journalists and scholars, politicians and photographers, along with spiritual leaders, self-help gurus and conspiracy theorists, all rushed to their computers. Dozens of 9/11 books appeared before the end of the year; as many as 150 more by the first anniversary. If paper could have salved our wounds, we would have been healed.

There was certainly an exigent need to record, analyze and explain Sept. 11, but it was not at all clear if there was a parallel need to fictionalize Sept. 11. Indeed, hours after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the novelist Ian McEwan confessed the limits of fiction. “Even the best minds,” he wrote in the Guardian, “the best or darkest dreamers of disaster on a gigantic scale, from Tolstoy and Wells to Don DeLillo, could not have delivered us into the nightmare available on television news channels yesterday afternoon.”