There is no sign that the critical debate over the aftermath of 9/11 is abating and these two volumes in their different ways make valuable contributions to this growing field of criticism. Daniel O'Gorman takes his bearings from Richard Gray's charge in After the Fall (2011) that post-9/11 fiction had failed to engage with the contradictions and differences highlighted by that event. The key position against which O'Gorman constructs his argument is an us–them rhetoric. In place of this crude polarity he suggests versions of the “different within the familiar” (16). In his opening chapter he juxtaposes Judith Butler's concept of framing in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) with an examination of Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006). Butler examines how frames tend to exclude certain groups, for instance when applied to war situations, suggesting what O'Gorman terms a “link between media framing and state power” (25). The problem here for O'Gorman lies, first of all, in Butler's failure to specify the nature of this link and, second, in that her notion of framing paradoxically has the effect of reinforcing the very exclusions she is trying to bring into question. Eggers's work is presented as an unusual example of narrative and cultural framing which structures a hybrid work. Here, one of the most valuable general issues of the volume emerges. O'Gorman argues convincingly that most of his chosen fiction sets up a field within which different voices or textual dimensions play against each other. The point is not so much that they are projecting particular points of view, but rather that they are using their own complexities to challenge singular perspectives. In Eggers the most visible interaction occurs between US and Sudanese voices. When O'Gorman moves on to consider Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (2009) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011), the urban setting occasions a multiple gaze which undermines any notion of a singular reality and he rightly backs up his discussion by showing how Lethem has criticized the whole concept of American exceptionalism in his nonfiction. Like Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), Lethem's and Cole's novels are concerned with ways of seeing, where connections are sought rather than achieved. However, Lethem's use of textual ellipses and surreal elements pushes his novel much farther from realism. Paradoxically, Chronic City could be described as a 9/11 novel precisely because it includes no mention of that event. Instead it reflects constantly on the processes of representation in the culture, giving an “ironic, self-reflexive comment on the framing of reality in American political and media discourse following the attacks” (44). It should already be evident that O'Gorman's use of the term “framing” is more complex than a simple analytical concept. The word never quite loses its connotations of deception, which adds further to the ironies of his chosen novels. The problem of making sense of Manhattan in Open City, we are told, is even more disorienting than in Lethem since the Nigerian German narrator loses himself in his exploration of memory. Even here, however, we don't lose the national focus because O'Gorman argues that Julius functions as an “avatar for the United States” (58), in personifying the USA's suppressions of history and unwelcome practices such as torture. The third chapter continues O'Gorman's comparative method, this time juxtaposing Don DeLillo's Point Omega (2010) with Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men (2011) and Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds (2012), all three tied to the Iraq War. Here he applies the notion of “connective dissonance” proposed by the geographer Derek Gregory in The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) in order to show the complex mapping of terrain which takes place in these narratives. Specifically the focus falls on the wilderness as a trope to examine in relation to US cultural identity. Instead of its traditional function as a testing ground for character, it serves to disorient and to destabilize identity, most strikingly in Kunzru's account of a simulated Iraqi town in the heart of the American desert. “Spatial absence” (86) is a crucial effect running through all three novels in the ways that landscape blurs time periods, blocks cultural connections, and prevents characters from taking meaningful bearings from place. Mapping can be seen as a means of conceptualizing personal and cultural connections and this same issue is addressed next by O'Gorman in relation to three anglophone Pakistani novels: Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (2008), and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009). They all display a suspicion of totalizing representations of Pakistan and once again the opposition recurs between connection and separation. It is in a chapter like this one that O'Gorman's term “transnationalism” becomes particularly useful, not only for questioning perceptions of individual nations but also in its global reach. As Shamsie's title suggests, she takes bearings from Nagasaki and, in so far as she is writing for English-speaking readers, her representation of Pakistan is, according to O'Gorman, “overly didactic” (117). Fundamentalist characters have become an issue of controversy in Aslam, whereas Hamid questions American perceptions through a method of dialogue narration. The importance of the latter's use of second-person rhetoric cannot be understated because it challenges the reader so insistently to examine cultural preconceptions. Despite the many subtleties of their methods, O'Gorman finds an interesting reluctance in all three works to engage with religious issues in their narratives. He concludes his study with an examination of two works by Salman Rushdie – Shalimar the Clown (2005) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008). Extrapolating from Rushdie's many statements that history is narrated into being through stories, O'Gorman considers the “conflation of past and present” (154) in Shalimar and relates this effect to the particular “interstitial space” (155) of its Kashmir setting. The Enchantress is read similarly as a destabilizing work, probing the “boundaries between historical and fictional narratives” (159). Once again we are given instances of hybrid works, whose complexities reflect the cultural and political self-consciousness of the post-9/11 novel.

Scott McClintock's subject connects at many points with O'Gorman's, focussing on the “terrorist imaginary in contemporary fiction” (179). Taking theoretical bearings from Louis Marin's notion of “utopics,”Footnote ¹ he pursues the different spatial dynamics at work in a range of writing, commencing with the subject of Guantánamo Bay. The latter is read through the lens of Franz Kafka's story “In the Penal Colony” (1919) and is interpreted as a form of panopticon where the inmates' bodies are permanently open to visual scrutiny. The last section of this chapter pursues a largely legal meditation on the nature of detention, but says little about the writings of the inmates briefly discussed in the introduction. McClintock turns next to the subject of subaltern studies as related to Amitav Ghosh's novels The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Glass Palace (2000). In the first he traces out the twinned importance of rumours and oral storytelling; in the second he identifies a certain ambivalence towards regimes of control. Maintaining a judicious level of analytical commentary, in his fourth chapter McClintock examines the nature of “transnational political violence” (86) between Pakistan and India, again through comparison – this time between Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006) and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. The link between the two works is the disputed territory of Kashmir and one of McClintock's central areas of discussion is the fate of the sacred. He argues, for instance, that in Rushdie's novel America represents the “ambivalently attractive aspect of the secular world” (90–91). In Sacred Games a similar issue is tied to the declaration of religious pluralism in the Indian Constitution, while the novel draws on the tradition of noir fiction. Within the same novel McClintock draws out the signs of an apocalyptic plot, which he then contextualizes through the critical debate over secularism in Edward Said's writings. Shalimar the Clown, by contrast, ironically depicts the opposing forces in the Kashmir dispute as doubles of each other.

At this point McClintock redirects his attention to US fiction, initially to Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013). After an unduly long preamble on the public discussion of 9/11, he surveys the reviews of Pynchon's latest novel by Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and others, arguing convincingly that Pynchon was offering much more than a whimsical look at conspiracy theories. In fact, that novel demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of how official narratives come into being and of how computerized information systems function. A brief coda notes the historical evocation of the struggle between labour and capital in Pynchon's Against the Day (2006). McClintock's last chosen text, Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge (1974), marks a significant departure from his earlier focus on 9/11 and could hardly be described as contemporary without some special arguing. As usual when he turns to specific novels, McClintock's commentary is incisive and illuminating, not least here when he examines this novel's alternation of settings between New York and London. The opening episode marks a filmic transposition of the Vietnam War to New York and McClintock rightly draws our attention to the constant evocation of loops and circuits throughout the narrative. That is all well and good but then we have another jump in the discussion to recent revisions to the privacy laws in the USA. Via the conspiracy uncovered in Lookout Cartridge we loop back to the surveillance state and the post-9/11 USA. With all their differences, O'Gorman's study showing the more unified material, both books demonstrate the continuing self-consciousness over cultural representations in fiction published since 9/11.