Foer's free-form, surreal prose style might come as close as possible to Oates' hallucinatory ideal. His novel includes blank pages, pages with a single sentence on them, pages of nothing but numbers and numerous photographs, including a series of doctored images made to look like a body falling from the top of the World Trade Center.
Other 9/11-related books, like Windows on the World and The Third Brother, by Nick McDonell, also attempt literal representations of scenes from Sept. 11. Some authors take a more figurative approach: McEwan's novel, which takes place long after 9/11, opens with a cataclysmic event that is assumed to be the work of terrorists.
Windows on the World has already been a bestseller in Beigbeder's home country, France, despite the tensions between France and the US. Of the attacks, Beigbeder recalled: "Many people here said, `It's their turn. They deserve it.' No one deserves something like 9/11. But if a catastrophe happens, we have to make it useful, so that we can try to make it never happen again. We have to understand it, and that is why I wrote this novel."
Using fiction and imaginary characters can sometimes make an overwhelming event feel human. But with so many people personally connected to those who were killed on Sept. 11, taking a reader inside a World Trade Center tower, as Beigbeder has, can evoke hostile reactions.
"I've had people say it is really obscene and disgusting to do that," he said. "But that is the idea of writing fiction about history. It is always shocking. We should not be afraid of writing about what is important."
Oates and Shapiro say that while there is no good rule about how much time has to pass before an event like 9/11 can be properly considered in fiction, the best novels that focus on cataclysmic events have taken years to develop. All Quiet on the Western Front appeared 11 years after the end of World War I, for example. One of the seminal novels about Vietnam, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, appeared in 1990.
Shapiro said of 9/11, "somebody has to come along and see something that happened at that moment in a way that is new to the people who breathed it, who felt it and who saw it again and again on television."
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