In October 2008 Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Academy and public face of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dismissed American writing as parochial and insular, remarking that American writers do not participate in the “big dialogue of literature.” In his interview with the Associated Press, Engdahl noted that American writers were “too sensitive to the trends in their own mass culture” and “too ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.”Footnote ¹ Many critics, of course, were outraged. Yet in the last few years this perception of American writing seems to have seeped into academic discourse, too, for instance in the recent American Literary History articles by Richard Gray and Michael Rothberg.

Leading the charge, Gray observes that much American writing produced in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has been immersed in the domestic sphere, with the unforeseen and “unknowable” assimilated into domestic structures. Basing this thesis primarily on novels such as Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), Jay McInerney's The Good Life (2006) and Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Gray observes that such texts “vacillate … between large rhetorical gestures acknowledging trauma and retreat into domestic detail,” effectively reducing moments of international and national significance into mere milestones in personal stories.Footnote ² A further flaw in such novels, Gray argues, lies in their representation of the so-called “other,” citing what he sees as the failure of John Updike's Terrorist (2008) to get under the skin of the bomber at its heart, Ahmad Mullaway Mulloy. Telling a tale depicting immense national trauma, Gray admits, is inevitably difficult. But he suggests that it is “border” writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Christine Bell and Bharati Mukherjee who offer the best way forward, exploring the “intercultural spaces” which illuminate moments of mutual transformation, a “reciprocity of influence,” and the “syncretic character of American culture.” In short, Gray calls for a deterritorialized, multiculturalist approach to the depiction of community, “otherness,” liminality and the traumatized subject in post-9/11 literary fiction.Footnote ³

In his response to Gray, Rothberg describes American writers as having suffered a “failure of the imagination,” claiming that what is required of writers is a “fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship.” According to Rothberg, the domestication of 9/11 is a political manoeuvre which fails to deal with the outward movement of American power, the ways in which American foreign policy is entangled in global networks: “The most difficult thing for citizens of the US empire to grasp is not the internal difference of their motley multiculture, but the prosthetic reach of that empire into other worlds.”Footnote ⁴ Rothberg uses Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel The Writing on the Wall (2005) to demonstrate his point, noting both the protagonist's and the novel's inability to think “on a global scale” or deal with the political crisis in any meaningful way. Indeed, he contends that while the novel sets up a clear opposition between the public and the private worlds of Renata, a linguist working at the New York Public Library, and seems to gesture toward a critique of the corrupted political landscape, it ultimately retreats into the personal world of the subject's emotional affairs. For Rothberg, this book is a classic example of the “depoliticizing discourse” that Gray had earlier identified. However, he also sees Gray's emphasis on the fiction of immigration as a potential step towards a “re-domestication,” taking into account its emphasis on native soil and the other's encounter with the American scene. A particularly successful depiction of the encounter with the immigrant, he thinks, is Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2008); even so, in its emphasis on the “homeland” it ignores international encounters and “risk[s] reproducing American exceptionalism.” To comprehend the extent of their nation's global reach, Rothberg concludes, American writers must direct their gaze outward to produce “a centrifugal literature of extraterritoriality.” And in response to 9/11, the American novel must offer a “cognitive map” to imagine “how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others.”Footnote ⁵

Both these diagnoses of the post-9/11 American novel offer perfectly reasonable observations, many of which have been previously acknowledged by scholars, literary reviewers and cultural critics. In 2007, Anthony Cummins, writing in the London Guardian books blog, went so far as to say that much of what we classify as post-9/11 literature actually sells the events short, presenting stories that would otherwise have been written and which clutch at heightened relevance because of their timing and setting.Footnote ⁶ In the same year, Pankaj Mishra observed that “most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency … [It doesn't] seem to have led to a renewed historical consciousness.”Footnote ⁷ Without doubt, many American writers, possibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the attacks, their spectacular nature and the apparent incompatibility of the terrifying images and mere words, turned inward to depict fractured unions and broken homes. Many novels, among them Updike's Terrorist, manifestly failed to understand or to offer a convincing portrait of the figure of the other. And many took refuge in portraying the effects of trauma, both personal and communal. Of course this is hardly surprising: in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, after all, many writers openly admitted their feelings of confusion and the futility of words in the face of such terrible (and starkly visual) events. So Jay McInerney, Arundhathi Roy, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, among many others, worried about the inability of language to capture the reverberations of the attacks. McInerney even reported that Norman Mailer had advised him against writing about 9/11, instructing the younger writer to “wait 10 years … It will take that long for you to make sense of it.”Footnote ⁸ McInerney didn't wait. Few did. And in the next few years, novels, memoirs and short stories poured forth, many of them immersed in precisely the kind of domestic, introverted scenes that Cummins, Mishra, Gray and Rothberg have criticized.

What is most immediately striking about the Gray–Rothberg exchange is the prescriptive nature of the discussion. Both scholars outline a specific trajectory for American writers in a manner which might seem to transcend the role of the cultural or literary spectator. Furthermore, each clearly sees literary fiction as an essentially political enterprise, advising writers to make the kind of gestures which would inevitably alienate a proportion of their readership. Ironically, Rothberg criticizes Schultz for her “abundant liberal platitudes about the horrors of the Bush regime,” yet his call for a very particular kind of literature smacks of those same values.Footnote ⁹ In urging writers to shift their focus from the visceral rawness of the 2001 attacks to the history and ramifications of the United States' entanglement in global affairs (above all in the Middle East), these critics are effectively asking American writers to turn their gaze away from home, away from the peoples and communities which have, up to now, dominated their fiction.Footnote ¹⁰ At some basic level, therefore, Rothberg et al. are asking writers to write about what they don't really know. Yet when they attempt to do this (as Updike does with Terrorist) the results are often weak, and they are inevitably pilloried for the limitations of their vision and their narrow individual portraits of “rage, envy, sexual frustration and constipation.”Footnote ¹¹

Perhaps most troubling, though, is the suggestion that fiction is no more than a political tool, through which writers can understand (and educate readers about) the United States' place in the world. Of course fiction certainly can play precisely such a role, but one of the joys of fiction is that its power goes well beyond the narrowly political. At the very least, this prescription is not only reductive but clearly ignores the way in which many writers themselves conceive of their art. Philip Roth, for instance, described the act of writing in 2004 as

What Roth touches on here, of course, is the inability of fiction to “solve” political problems; when writers do tackle burning issues of the day, those issues are inevitably absorbed into the fictional worlds which contain them. This assimilation of particular issues is, to all intents and purposes, a kind of cultural appropriation, inevitable in the deployment of factual events within the work of fiction. The act of the writer is the construction of fictions, no more and no less. Yet when writers use the stuff of history in the creation of stories, the “facts” they choose are necessarily subsumed by the writer's imagination and bounded by the formal limits of the novel, which cannot possibly do justice to the political, ideological and historical complexity of an issue such as American foreign policy in the Middle East. When Gray, Rothberg and Mishra bemoan the tendency toward the domestic and the individual in post-9/11 literature, in other words, they are merely highlighting one of the enduring and inevitable aspects of all literary fiction.

There is more, however, to this preoccupation with the individual and the domestic. Even in the mid- to late 1990s, writers were already preoccupied with stories that framed domestic events against the vast panorama of American history. As Jay Prosser rightly remarked, writers in the Clinton years often seemed hyperconscious of their political history, obsessed by the traumas of memory, and fascinated by the politicized ways in which the past is often documented.Footnote ¹³ To pick only the most celebrated titles, Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) or Philip Roth's American trilogy, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), are excellent examples of this kind of fiction, attentive to the details of the past yet self-conscious about the way in which the past is encapsulated. Similarly, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, brought to life in 1960 and bowing out in the 1990s, is deeply immersed in postwar American political history, and can readily be seen as a microcosmic version of a certain type of American identity, struggling to make sense of vast global, national and regional change. In this context, 9/11 was clearly not such a break after all; far from marking a watershed, the terrorist attacks were merely the cue for more of the same. Writers working after 9/11 have shared many of the themes that fascinated their predecessors a decade earlier, and fiction published after 2001 has exhibited the same kind of self-consciousness about the artist's reshaping of the past and engagement with the traumas of collective memory. For instance, DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) is preoccupied by the traumatic impact of a large-scale event on individuals and couples, but it also meditates on the role of the artist, the politics of reshaping memory and grief and even the redundancy of the artist in effecting change or bringing about illumination. The book is stuffed with references to the visual arts (not only the performance artist denoted by the title but the various mentions of Morandi's Natura Morta paintings, Nina's trips to the Met, and Martin's profession as an art dealer) and to creative writing (Lianne's Alzheimer's group and their creative memoirs). And in the end, the eponymous Falling Man, David Janiak, dies without having fulfilled his ultimate creative ambition. In this regard, DeLillo not only uses the recent past of 2001 but engages in a wider cultural dialogue about the role of art and the ethics of the use of history – precisely the same themes that have fascinated post-9/11 artists such as Kerry Skarbakka and Eric Fischl.Footnote ¹⁴

Both Gray and Rothberg raise serious questions about the role of art in a time of crisis. Is the role of art to offer an escapist palliative, or to interrogate the assumptions of power? Is its role a public one or is it more private, more personal? Both scholars offer a series of prescriptions that, in their view, would make for richer and more stimulating fiction. What both seem to overlook, though, is that many writers are simply not interested in writing angry polemical tracts about the roots of our modern discontents or novels which diagnose a changing US sociocultural landscape; instead, many writers prefer to examine how art itself expands to accommodate the traumas of recent history. This was apparent even in the immediate responses to the attacks: in his essay “In the Ruins of the Future” (December 2001), for example, DeLillo saw 9/11 as contributing to the failure of metaphor, the impossibility of a figurative language which could articulate the event in all its cultural and subjective enormity.Footnote ¹⁵ Siri Hustvedt makes a similar point in her short piece “The World Trade Center,” which reminds the reader of other crimes against humanity and describes place-names synonymous with massive loss of life as “words engulfed by the unspeakable.” Hustvedt notes the impossibility of matching the reality of the situation with words that conjure the image: “It might be easy to say, ‘Burning bodies fell from the windows of the World Trade Center,’ but it isn't easy to embrace the reality of that sentence.”Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, Ian McEwan described the impact of the attacks as evidence of the waning impact of fiction: “For a while I did find it wearisome to confront invented characters.” And Jay McInerney recalled that

But only for a while: soon enough, McInerney and his compatriots had gone back to writing precisely the kinds of fiction that are often accused of failing to move beyond the American subject, the domestic interior and the personal crisis.

All the same, I wonder if Gray and Rothberg are perhaps overlooking the fact that some of the novels they criticize do offer the kinds of interpretation they are looking for. DeLillo's Falling Man, for example, does present a considered encounter with the other, and does it in a meaningful way. By relegating Hammad to the periphery of the narrative, offering fleeting snippets of his life in Germany and in the United States, DeLillo performs a similar narrative trick to that he deployed in Underworld, in which the buried history of a missing baseball is linked to the lost black histories of mid-twentieth-century American life. In Underworld the story of Cotter Martin and his father is lost in a wash of white history, occurring at the edge of chapters informed by the records of military, diplomatic and social history. In an article preceding the publication of the novel, DeLillo described his method of inserting missing histories as a kind of “counterhistory”:

And counterhistory reappears in DeLillo's essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” albeit in the guise of “counternarrative”:

Thus, again, we see not an emphasis on explaining identity politics or the impact of US foreign policy, but a desire to salvage the small, fragmentary human stories which alone can illuminate the wider picture. And underpinning all this, of course, is one of DeLillo's characteristic preoccupations: the role of the writer, the artist, in the interpretation of history and the transmission of public memory.

There are other parallels between Falling Man and Underworld. Hammad, for example, is not so different from his precursors: by giving us a Muslim other at the edge of the white, domestic world, DeLillo subtly shows how these worlds are inextricably linked, and explores the ways in which Western and Eastern values touch and collide. This collision is embodied in the extended metaphor of organic shrapnel, which reaches its apogee at the conclusion of the novel.Footnote ²⁰ In the weeks after the descent of the towers Keith is haunted by the phrase “organic shrapnel,” a term used by his physician to describe the means whereby the body of a suicide bomber can become lodged within its victim. At the end of the novel, which recaptures recent history and swings back to the start of the book and to the morning of 11 September, Hammad in the hijacked plane metamorphoses into Keith in the towers like a piece of organic shrapnel embedding itself within the receptive body, thereby suggesting the intimate relationship between the United States and the Muslim East. Up to this point, Hammad and Keith have been growing closer over the course of the narrative, not just in terms of their physical resemblances (both men grow beards), but psychologically in their relinquishment of families and lovers to retreat into the self, and in their shared admiration of male companions. By bringing the two men together at the end of the novel, DeLillo implies the interconnectedness of East and West and the inevitable coalescence of cultures in a globalized world.

All the same, it is only in the last few years – indeed, after the “10 years” suggested by Norman Mailer – that American writers have begun to break away from the dominating themes of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and to move beyond the individual and the “parochial.” Two books widely acclaimed for addressing the wider, more global realities of a post-9/11 world are Adam Haslett's debut novel Union Square (2009) and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010).Footnote ²¹ Franzen's novel in particular was greeted by a critical fanfare, peaking with a portrait of the writer alongside the accolade “Great American Novelist” on the front cover of Time in August 2010. Interestingly, however, neither of these novels entirely abandons the domestic tribulations which so irritate Gray and Rothberg. Still, both books engage with an altered America, a nation more conscious of its international role and reputation.

Unlike Roth and DeLillo, neither Franzen nor Haslett is particularly interested in the shape of the novel or the expansion of narrative to accommodate contemporary historical events.Footnote ²² As Franzen remarked in an interview with Time magazine,

In getting to grips with “what's happening in the world now,” Franzen falls back on a title that recalls one of the Bush administration's favourite themes: Freedom.Footnote ²⁴ In this case, “freedom” refers to domestic, personal, professional and political freedom, explored through the story of Patty and Walter Berglund, an unhappily married couple struggling to come to terms with depression, adultery and the dashed personal and political idealism of youth. At the heart of the novel is the state of the Berglund marriage, with Patty becoming locked in a long depression. Indeed, much of the novel is given over to the history of the couple's relationship, as documented by Patty, from their college salad days through to their present-day estrangement. The events of 9/11 crop up intermittently, but the book offers no sustained treatment of collective or personal traumas and little narrative space is given over to the day itself. Instead, the novel addresses the theme of freedom and the preoccupation with territory or space by meditating on the entanglements of American businesses in the second Iraq war, and through the issue of Walter's increasingly extreme environmentalism.

Franzen blends domestic and national space from the very beginning of the novel, using the neat framing device of the neighborhood voice and the neighborhood space. Opening with the news that one of the “young pioneers of Ramsey Hill” (Walter), recently relocated from suburban St. Paul to Washington, has been the subject of unflattering articles in the New York Times, Franzen offers a portrait of the liberal-minded couple through the eyes of their neighbours and acquaintances. The concluding chapter of the novel, “Canterbridge Lake Estates,” also assumes the voice of the neighbourhood, again telling of the Berglunds' relocation – albeit this time to New York. Locked within these framing chapters are personal and domestic stories but also, perhaps more interestingly, vignettes of America's “untidy” freedom.Footnote ²⁵ Chief among these is the portrait of the Berglunds' neoconservative son, Joey, his intense relationship with his parents and his efforts to extricate himself from the family fold and their suffocating brand of liberal humanism. Something of a schoolboy wheeler-dealer, Joey launches his career as an entrepreneur by selling watches to the local Catholic schoolgirls, an enterprise which taints the precocious youngster in the eyes of his father but which copper-fastens his relationship with his courier, the long-suffering Connie Monaghan. Joey's ability to spot an opportunity takes on larger dimensions later, when he sells defective scrap metal parts, sourced in Paraguay, to the United States military in Iraq for the production of tanks and equipment. Joey is, at least initially, unsentimental about the war, viewing it solely as an opportunity to make his fortune and impress the daughter of his neoconservative mentor. In his quest to amass his wealth, he crosses the United States, moving from his home in Minnesota to Virginia, New York, Eastern Europe and South America, where he finally sees the light as he digs through his own excrement in search of his wedding band.

In the character of Joey, Franzen offers a compelling, if a trifle neat, embodiment of the nexus of small-scale competitive capitalism and international acquisitiveness that have often been seen as dominating American attitudes to the Middle East. So, driven by his impulse to impress Jenna, Joey launches into a discussion of the possibilities of freedom with her father Howard, a wizened think tank founder who “referred to members of the president's cabinet by their first names, explaining how ‘we’ had been ‘leaning on’ the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom.”Footnote ²⁶ This model of economic freedom appeals to the young man and eventually brings him into the fold, first composing fictitious research documents promoting American enterprise in Iraq, and then moving on to exploit business opportunities in overseas occupied territories.

Yet all the time, despite his efforts to extricate himself from his parents on a personal level, Joey finds himself increasingly linked to them on an economic one. In Washington, Walter has been pursuing his conservationist dreams of saving a particular breed of American songbird, the cerulean warbler, financially aided by a man with corporate links to LBI, the company Joey has been supplying with defective equipment. When LBI pull the plug on Walter's funding for his anti-overpopulation project, Joey uses his spoils of war to plug the financial gap. In a further twist, linking the local and the global reach of American capitalism, LBI provides lifelong employment for those dislocated from the appointed nature reservation – jobs manufacturing body armour for the military. As Thomas Lever has observed, “the songbird's freedom from attack is guaranteed by America's persistent attempts to impose ‘freedom’ on the rest of the world.”Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, Walter's explanation to his Bengali American assistant Lalitha of the sacrifice of his left-leaning principles in order to save the bird is irresistibly reminiscent of the neoconservative Howard. After all, Howard describes freedom as “a pain in the ass,” especially when abused by the less-intelligent, and tries to convince Joey of the necessity of manipulating the “shadows of the modern media” in “the service of a greater truth.”Footnote ²⁸ In securing the land for the reservation, Walter must do business with an “oil and gas man” and his “Bush cronies,” and agrees that a portion of the reservation land will be given over to coal mining. And when he is challenged by the “lefty environmentalists” opposed to the move, notably an elderly man, Coyle Mathis, who faces the loss of his home, Walter, too, claims the higher intellectual ground, describing the man as “stupid.”Footnote ²⁹

As various reviewers have observed, the central theme of the novel is the way in which one individual's freedom can curtail, or cause significant damage to, that of another. Joey's economic freedom, his “personal choice” to profiteer from a military invasion, may have led to the death of freedom-spreading American soldiers in Iraq, while Patty's indulgence of her sexual freedom has such a profound impact on Walter that it effectively ends their marriage. But the Dickensian plotting of the novel is a complex eco-system of its own kind, exploring the personal, national and global networks in which people, places and policies are interconnected.Footnote ³⁰ Howard's political proclivities may be utterly different from Walter's beliefs, yet both men are utterly convinced of their own messianic mission, and both dismiss, almost out of hand, “people who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident.”Footnote ³¹ Howard's conservatism and Walter's liberalism are mutually dependent: not only are the two characters linked through Joey – and beyond him, through a network of personal and professional associations – but the ideological creeds to which they cling so tightly are defined in opposition to each other, effectively becoming two sides of the same coin. And of course what this reminds us is that liberalism and conservatism, far from being diametrical opposites, have always drawn from the same wellspring: as Louis Hartz argued in his seminal The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), all American political ideologies are ultimately drawn from the same seventeenth-century Lockean heritage – even though, of course, neither Howard nor Walter realizes it. “Dude,” Joey says shortly before a game of cowboy pool, “you can't mix red and white like that.” “It's rosé, dufus,” replies his friend Jonathan.Footnote ³²

In Union Atlantic, meanwhile, Adam Haslett uses the metaphor of national and international banking networks and the worldwide banking crisis to illustrate the connections of the local and the global. Like Freedom, Haslett's novel is rooted in a domestic drama involving a dispute over a plot of land, in this instance apparently illegally purchased by the former GI and shady banker Doug Fanning. The narrative opens in Bahrain in the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, with the American crew of the warship USS Vincennes awaiting instruction after their notorious obliteration of an Iranian Airbus civilian airliner, which killed all 290 passengers on board. Sent on a mission to find cigarettes for the crew, Fanning is faced with the wrath of a local shopkeeper who refuses to accept payment for the Marlboros. Unrepentant, he tells the apoplectic man that he and his crew would “do it again.” And, indeed, at the end of the novel, roughly twenty years on, we see Fanning back in the Middle East, this time facing troops on the road between Kuwait and Basra, the so-called Highway of Death, where retreating Iraqi personnel were attacked by the US military in 1991. Running through these scenes in the Middle East, meanwhile, are narrative threads involving the potential systemic failure of Union Atlantic, a Boston-based mortgage and credit lender, and the tussle over Fanning's occupation of a piece of Massachusetts land. The underlying theme is the same one that animates Franzen's Freedom; by bringing together these threads, Haslett demonstrates that apparently very different networks (private, corporate, financial and military) are so interdependent that a single malfunctioning part can have knock-on effects for the entire system:

Such personal anecdotes, remarks the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Henry Graves, at one point in Union Atlantic, are poor explanatory tools, simplifying the workings of the economy into trite stories of “cause and effect.” In some ways, Haslett's book does show how cause and effect work. One moment Nate Fuller's father loses his job; the next, he kills himself. Wracked by grief, Nate is thrust into an exploration of his sexuality, which culminates in an abusive relationship with Fanning.Footnote ³⁴ But there end the “cause-and-effect” scenarios, for Haslett's net is much more tangled, more knotted, than it seems. Instead a matrix of associations underscores the novel's premise: Henry's sister, Charlotte Graves, is Fanning's neighbour and antagonist in his courtroom contretemps; her history tutee, Nate, is not only sexually involved with Fanning but linked to Fanning's boss, Jeffrey Holland, CEO of Union Atlantic, through his friendship with his son. This web of connections underlies the global banking mechanisms at the heart of the novel, which in turn stands as a metaphor for the disorderliness of human lives and American history more generally. The unlikely figure of Charlotte, a kooky and more than slightly deranged former high-school teacher, embodies this disarray. A rich repository of American history and lore, she is literally falling apart at the seams; her crumbling home, which “looks like a set from The Grapes of Wrath” with its stacks of books, newspapers and yellowing documents, is the antithesis of Fanning's empty white mansion.Footnote ³⁵ Charlotte's history lessons are unscripted and without syllabus, veering from sessions on federal income tax to Britain's involvement with the Middle East after the First World War. “When you get to my age,” she says, “the barriers between times aren't so strictly enforced.”Footnote ³⁶ These untidy historical borders are made manifest in her canine companions Wilkie and Sam, reincarnations of Malcolm X and Cotton Mather respectively. Charlotte's dogs are wild and uncontrollable; they pull and drag and frequently escape her clutches, representing not only her lost grip on reality but the explosive power of history, most clearly demonstrated in the return to Iraq. Reading “To a Historian,” Charlotte observes Whitman's “way of looking back at you”: “I project the history of the future.”Footnote ³⁷ Here, history itself is a disorderly matrix, negating linearity and containment.

For each of the characters in the novel, the power of the past to mould the present has a personal counterpoint. Each struggles with the grief of private loss. Henry grieves for a wife recently lost to cancer. Charlotte grieves for a lover taken by a drug overdose. Nate grieves for his dead father. And Fanning grieves for a mother who no longer needs him. Even the Union Atlantic whistleblower, Evelyn Jones, grieves over the recent gangland murder of a brother. A reunion with Fanning's superior officer from his Navy days triggers memories of an Iranian woman keening over the body of a dead child. “Grief's like an illness here. A disease,” Vrieger notes. For each of them, personal memories and losses shape the future. In Fanning's case, memories of the illegally destroyed airbus and his subsequent exoneration feed his hubris: “[He wasn't] the object of the machine. [He was] something different: an artist of the consequential world. A shaper of fact … the master of conditions others merely suffered.”Footnote ³⁸ Charlotte's memories and her willingness to get lost in history are a defense mechanism, a way of dodging the future (which her brother sees in an old folk's home), but also a means of maintaining an idealism dashed many times over by the workings of power: “she was a classic mid-century Democratic idealist, who'd lived long enough to see hope's repeated death.”Footnote ³⁹

The death of this idealism is crucial to the novel; this is a book that laments the knowing cynicism of the present, a cynicism embodied in Fanning and the abstract powers that protect him. In the Union Atlantic crisis, as in the debacle of the USS Vincennes, those most accountable will avoid punishment, for “the argument for the invasion of Iraq was hitting its stride now, and an event of this size could change the domestic and congressional equation. They didn't want distractions. That was the gist of it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As a counterpoint, Charlotte's self immolation is her final idealistic act, ambiguously linking her with the freedom fighters of the past she admires as well as the terrorists so feared by the city bankers. And the demise of the idealism for which she stands is nowhere more apparent than in the boardroom of Union Atlantic, the embodiment of rapacious capitalism. Here an Albert Bierstadt canvas of Yosemite hangs behind Jeffery Holland, indicating the irrelevance of such unified and idealized portraits of the American past. Tellingly, the Union Atlantic CEO has his back to the painting; he has, quite literally, turned his back on the idealism associated with the American West. For Holland, the painting is purely decorative. The Western idealism captured by the canvas stands no chance of survival, for the bank, and Holland, needs to look eastward to secure its future.

So that operations in Iraq can go ahead, Union Atlantic is saved by “a consortium led by JP Morgan Chase and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi,” as well as by the Dutch bank ING.Footnote ⁴¹ Here, perhaps, is the allegory of the deterritorialized America suggested by Gray and Rothberg, represented by the amalgamation of these multinational banks. For Haslett, however, the multinational conglomerate is a sign of a transformed America, a land that has lost the idealism of its early days. And here's the rub: just as America itself loses something when it becomes deterritorialized, so American literature, too, loses the sense of regional distinctiveness, the richness of the local and the personal, the joy of the individual and the specific, when it is torn loose from its roots in the domestic and the personal. That is precisely why neither Haslett nor Franzen, for all their interest in vast global networks, sacrifices the domestic dramas of everyday life. Their focus is simultaneously narrow and broad; while fascinated by the everyday, they both pay close attention to the geopolitical issues that dominate the headlines in the twenty-first century. Both novels are steeped in the American relationship with the rest of the world; both explore the ways in which globalization affects and alters the notion of home, identity and sovereignty. Yet, at the same time, both are immersed in the world of the white, suburban middle classes – the world famously and controversially dismissed by Horace Engdahl. And what this reminds us, of course, is the unarguable fact that 9/11 simply did not mark the great shift in American literature which so many thought it would. The American state-of-the-nation novel has always taken e pluribus unum as its structural mechanism, pinning the story of the evolving nation to the small-scale dramas of individuals and families. And in the twenty-first century, as in centuries past, that seems unlikely to change.