The term “post-9/11 fiction” is fraught with ambiguity. When we talk about works of post-9/11 fiction, do we talk only about those that take as their primary subject matter the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Do we include those that engage with the decade-long geopolitical aftermath of the event – the so-called “War on Terror” and all of its extensions: the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed the entirety of the Bush and Obama presidencies? And if we define post-9/11 fiction in such capacious terms, do we only include works that represent the post-9/11 moment as such or do we mean anything written after 9/11? If we restrict our definition to those works that engage with the post-9/11 period thematically, we risk ignoring crucial formal developments that might tell us more about what 9/11 meant for the fate of fiction. But if by post-9/11 fiction we mean something like twenty-first-century fiction, then 9/11 as a marker event begins to fade into the background and lose literary significance.

Georgiana Banita provides a balanced answer to these questions in her recent study, Plotting Justice, which takes up “the textual appearances and disappearances of the terrorist attacks as well as their narrative role” in works that have “an increasingly oblique association with the events … although their significance as post-9/11 fiction is never in doubt” (2). For Banita, the ambiguity that results from efforts to define a novel as “post-9/11” is welcome, because ultimately it is ambiguity itself that the novel offers in response to “the jingoistic, moralizing discourses that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks” (2). In the context of the “us-versus-them” rhetoric of the Bush years, fiction's capacity to undermine stable moral categories takes on a new political role post-9/11. Yet Banita sees post-9/11 “narrative ethics” as requiring more than mere ambiguity. Just as fiction disallows easy moralizing, it also resists the pragmatism that underlies some of the most egregious acts of violence of the period. As she puts it,

Plotting Justice therefore praises the “tremendously salutary condition called disorientation” (299). And at its best, the book traces this condition in sharp close readings using encyclopedic references to ethical criticism. Inevitably, however, there are moments when a work this committed to the ethics of lack of closure, generous rather than confrontational readings, and inclusive rather than exclusive work with critical theory ends up being itself more disorienting than a reader might like. Banita's work with ethics is equally indebted to Dorothy Hale and J. Hillis Miller, Fredric Jameson and Cathy Caruth, Emmanuel Levinas and Martha Nussbaum. In Banita's deft hands, all of these figures do impressive work illuminating specific novels. Yet Plotting Justice does not attend to the contradictions among these approaches. This is, of course, consistent with the ethical argument of the book, but it nevertheless can leave the otherwise excellent readings feeling scattered at times.

Ultimately, the major intervention of Plotting Justice is its unabashed willingness to commit to 9/11 as a transformative moment, not only in the thematics of contemporary fiction, but in fiction's form. While the precise concept of ethics that animates its inquiry may remain fuzzy at times, the notion that in the post-9/11 moment fuzziness can be seen as preferable to violent certainty gives definitive shape to the book's tracing of contemporary fiction's various forms of disorientation. If, as Banita argues, “a critical vision of contemporary literature that doesn't pay tribute to [9/11] is … virtually unthinkable,” Plotting Justice begins to offer a way of understanding how post-9/11 fiction may be formally, as well as thematically, indebted to its fraught historical context (12).