Richard Gray has been tireless in advancing a pluralist literary agenda and in different ways these two books exemplify his work. Both are aimed, at least in part, at the intelligent general reader. After the Fall is one of the Blackwell Manifestos, a series in which major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts or subjects. Past examples include Valentine Cunningham on Reading after Theory, Terry Eagleton on The Idea of Culture, and Lawrence Buell on The Future of Environmental Criticism. The idea is to provide lively, accessible books which engage a broad variety of readers. Some are more polemical than others; some more of a summation of where we are than a manifesto. Gray's topic, the impact and implications of 9/11 on American culture and literature, fits the bill all too well, 9/11 being generally seen as an intervention which interrupted American time in a definitive fashion. As Gray demonstrates, writers felt the inadequacy of language to deal with the event, fell back on the perennial American myth of the Fall, and responded to the key factors which made it distinctive: the fact of invasion, the iconic nature of the event, the role of the media, and in particular the ways in which practises of mourning or commemoration got hijacked by the war on terror so that memory gave place to revenge. The heavily imagined nature of 9/11 is highlighted, in that its most unsettling aspect was not its unexpectedness but the way in which it reflected American fantasies of dark avengers from the skies, towering infernos and ashen wastelands. The distinction between the imagined and the real thus became porous, and in some respects “the event” (language becomes gestural, as Gray notes) became something of a mise en abyme, an infinite regressus of mirroring images. American writers responded variously (but prolifically) to the question whether literature could survive and remain meaningful, and Gray (a tad pedagogically, but then this is a manifesto) sets out to assess how successful they were.

The Great American Novel may have gone to glory, but the Great 9/11 Novel stalks the text like a utopian apparition. Gray first considers writers who failed to come up with a decent answer to the question, largely because they are seen as falling back on old sureties, scrambling back into the familiar and the domestic (DeLillo's Falling Man, Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, even in part Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with its wished-for domesticity, myths, intertextual allusions and wasteland echoes.) Even the novels which approach the underlying issues more generally, or precede the actual event, do not make the grade. Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land fails because it has a happy ending, Lorraine Adams's Harbor uses the conventions of a thriller, Gayle Brandeis's Self-Storage is sentimental, and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner is melodramatic. Fictions that get it right (chapter 2) avoid the withdrawal into the domestic. Just why the domestic, the sentimental, and the melodramatic should not offer an adequate response to 9/11 is never explained. The world of women and children does not seem to be envisaged as a positive place for literary responses. By these criteria Uncle Tom's Cabin would have been judged a failure as a response to the crisis of the Fugitive Slave Law. Gray (in my view rightly) gives top marks to André Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days (the imagined encounter between a 9/11 terrorist and a lap dancer on the eve of the bombing) without, however, fully considering the ways in which the domestic ideal is implanted at its centre as the motor of the plot. For Gray, following Homi Bhabha's approach, the fictions which work do so because of a conviction that the hybrid is the only space in which the location of cultures and the bearing of witness to trauma can really occur, avoiding binaries (them and us, West and East, Christian and Muslim) in favour of a deterritorialized America. Thus Dubus's Puma Club qualifies as an interstitial space because many of its denizens are from the underclass and therefore occupy a separate space to the dominant culture. (Actually Dubus researched lap-dancing clubs thoroughly, with the help of a Guggenheim grant, and there is nothing “underclass” about most lap dancers or their clients.) Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (not The Return of the Fundamentalist) succeed because they approach crisis in a roundabout fashion using indirection. Thus Eisenberg ends her tale in paralysis, giving the reader the national sense of having lost the plot; Netherland employs multivocality; Hamid situates the reader at a crossroads in border territory; Dao Strom (Grass Roof, Tin Roof) gives us the sense of people lost among floating signifiers. Whether these fictions will sound enticing to the general reader may be a moot point, though Gray covers a great number of relevant novels with intelligence and clarity, supplying just enough description and context without a sacrifice of argument. He also expands away from 9/11 to discuss other writers who have similarly exploited the liminal and interstitial, some before and some after the event, with a particular focus on other moments of fall – the Korean and Vietnam Wars, for example. A final chapter opens the discussion out to consider dramatic and poetic responses, exploring drama as therapy, commemoration and witness, and poetry as a potential democratization of aesthetic forms. There is plenty to think about here and the volume thus fulfils its brief.

Gray's privileging of the sense of America as an interstitial space, a locus of interaction between contending national and cultural communities, is of course a welcome emphasis, given the extent to which many Americans seem to have abandoned any form of liminal fence-sitting in favour of tea-parties of a decidedly uncivil nature. Seeing culture as multiple, agonistic, and complex sounds like a good thing, though one wonders how such literature can generate strategic political opposition. Indeed politics does seem somewhat absent from the fictional response. It would be difficult to find an American 9/11 novel to rival the best Latin American 9/11 novel, Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile (2000) , haunted by the US-fomented coup in Chile on that date in 1973, with its thousands of dead. Gray does not mention one of the best candidates, Jess Walter's The Zero (2006), a sharp political satire, tightly plotted, brilliantly comic and wonderfully irreverent. (Television crews go “grief fishing”; they wear jackets emblazoned with “From the Ashes”; and there is a hilarious satire on the quest for compensation for trauma, especially the trauma of being a lawyer handling cases of compensation for trauma.) Nonetheless, Gray's volume is a good starting point for readers, both general and more specialized.

A Brief History of American Literature is an abbreviated version of Gray's 2004 History of American Literature (Blackwell), though it does not refer to the previous volume or provide any rationale for the cuts made. It is difficult to see what the point is. If the idea was to slim down some nine hundred pages to a more manageable weight, an e-edition would have been a much better solution. While the content that survives is just as good as in the longer volume, the structure remains essentially the same (minus the precolonial period, the early encounters with the French and Spanish, and suggestions for further reading). As a result the oddities and omissions tend to stand out more. The strength of the volume lies in the accounts of poetry, the South and Southwest, African and Native American writing, and other ethnic groups. Some hyphenated ethnicities, however, fare better than others. There are sections on Latino/a-, Native-, African-, and Asian-American literature but Jewish-Americans do not even appear as an index heading. Even from the content the general reader would not necessarily find out that Malamud, Bellow and Paley were Jewish. Yezierska is described as having fled Russia and as writing about ghetto characters, which is a fair clue, but Cynthia Ozick and Isaac Bashevis Singer appear in a section headed “European Immigrant Writing,” along with Nabokov. (Ozick was born in New York but comes in here because she writes about the Holocaust.) Antin and Cahan pop up along with Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of the character of Mr. Dooley. Henry Roth, despite the landmark importance of Call It Sleep, never appears at all, but then he did not get a walk-on part in the longer version either. In an arguably post-ethnic world this might not much matter, were it not for the lengthy accounts of other ethnic literatures and oral forms (Latino/a corridos, folklore, folk songs and spirituals.) While Gray's stated aim is to register the plurality of American writing, thus reflecting the transnational turn in criticism, and the continued invention of communities and imagined nations which constitute the literary history of the United states, Jews do not seem to qualify as having an imagined community in the way that other groups do. More to the point, the postwar boom in Jewish American writing and its Nobel Prize-winners is simply not mentioned, even though this was a significant event in literary history, and has recently spawned a fresh wave of transnational Jewish American writers, often not of European origin, but from the Middle East.

Genre always comes off poorly in national histories, and all the more so in chronological narratives, but at least in the longer version the index gave the reader a fair chance of following its path through the years. Here, Gray argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin works as a best seller because it draws upon several genres (slave narrative, plantation romance), but the reader will find no entry for these in the index and no discussion of them as particular American forms. The same is true of such significant American forms as diaries, travelogues, life-writing, captivity narrative, romance and even the short story, despite fascinating accounts in the text itself of early American diaries, and travelogues, and of the works of Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Some of the things which make American literature so distinctive are thus lost from view. Science fiction and the detective story do get sections to themselves, but the only sign of women's romance is Gone With the Wind, and Gothic does not make it out of the nineteenth century. Partly this is because the emphasis is squarely on great, or at least representative, books and writers, rather than on audiences. Drama is either revolutionary or modern; Belasco, Dunlap and their nineteenth-century ilk have been cut; and there is no sense of an “American Shakespeare” or even an American Boucicault. Susan Glaspell does not figure at all. Some of the omissions may not matter too much (Hannah Crafts), but Tillie Olsen, Marge Piercy, Josephine Herbst and Agnes Smedley deserved a mention, or at least as much mention as Ken Kesey. There is also a tendency to lump women together as women and to link them to nature. Wharton, Glasgow and Cather are grouped as exploring a particular area of the United States (New York, the South, the West), rather than along with other naturalists (Wharton's Ethan Frome), or thinkers (Glasgow's engagement with nihilist philosophy). Despite “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Alcott is a woman writer, writing about women or their condition (a good discussion of Work) rather than being related to the thinkers of the times (though her father and his ill-fated community at Fruitlands, the butt of her satire, is mentioned in the chapter on the Transcendentalists). Earlier errors have not been rectified. (Singer wrote Satan in Goray, not Gusay. Ozick's protagonist is Ruth Puttermesser, not Pottermesser.) There are some illustrations, though it is not obvious, as there is no sign of them in the Table of Contents, nor are they listed anywhere else.