In The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity, Arin Keeble draws upon the work of key scholars of 9/11 literature to negotiate their often polarized conversations, but also to organize and make sense of this rapidly proliferating body of work. Keeble navigates key critical arguments early on, considering the often contrary opinions regarding the genre's tropes – its domestic turn, its representation of trauma, its use of largely heterogeneous and elite main characters, and what some consider its lack of discursive engagement with the politics and international nature of 9/11. He engages with the discourse of much of what has been addressed in books like Portraying 9/11: Essays on Comics, Literature, Television and Film, edited by Bragard, Dony and Rosenberg (2011); After the Fall: American Literature after 9/11 by Richard Gray; Literature after 9/11 by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (2008); and Out of the Blue by Kristiaan Versluys (2009). His book complements and tries to make sense of this prior scholarly work and of the fiction itself, providing a chronological paradigm for understanding the first decade of 9/11 literature. While this is not a novel endeavour, what is new or perhaps reimagined is the way that he interjects Hurricane Katrina into his critical paradigm for understanding 9/11 literature, and, in doing so, reconsiders the epistemology of memory.

From his first chapter's discussion of Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) to the final chapter's analysis of Amy Waldman's The Submission (2011), he identifies and classifies the genre's tropes and discusses them on a cyclical trajectory during which public and private memory themselves are refigured. Borrowing from Michael Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), he terms this cycle of memory multidirectional, and uses this principle as an underlying framework for reconsidering the genre. Like others before him, Keeble looks at early narratives of 9/11 as disoriented and sometimes only seemingly apolitical renderings of domestic relationships and their rupture and resolution during a time of crisis. He recognizes early gestures toward politicizing or contextualizing 9/11 that are often overlooked as “reductions” to domesticity, but generally understands early 9/11 literature as itself victim to the trauma and conflictedness that so affected American identity. It is in this conflictedness that his particular notion of multidirectional memory seems especially incisive; it is specifically the discursive return to memory's cultural work which suggests that the previous framework for diagnosing the 9/11 novel – the trauma paradigm – is part of a hegemonic structure that reduces narrative potential in early 9/11 novels. While this notion is resonant of the work of John Duvall, Robert Marzec and others, what is different is this fundamental emphasis on the importance of this kind of hegemony – a thread that pulls through the entire book.

Like others, he draws upon the artistic response to 9/11 that emerged through television, film and nonfiction as he discusses cultural influences on the development and engagement of tropes in 9/11 fiction. What is especially fresh and central here is his assertion that Hurricane Katrina and its effects have marked a pivotal defining moment within the genre. In chapter 4, “The Road: Disaster, Allegory and the Exhaustion of the Early 9/11 Novel,” he compares Dave Eggers's Zeitoun (2009) with Cormac McCarthy's novel, arguing that Eggers's text is in conversation with The Road's both conservative and apocalyptic rhetoric (108). Eggers's nonfictional response to seeming apocalypse in New Orleans is a harsh criticism of what really, tragically happens to the marginalized in American society. This is a critical intervention, as it marks a prominent and marked end to the often domestic, dissociative and trauma narratives which comprise the nature of many early 9/11 novels. Keeble writes, “The Road operates as a culmination of the depoliticized or domestic narratives of 9/11 – the end of a mini-cycle of narratives that conclude after the backlash to Hurricane Katrina” (107). So while The Road seemed to reinforce the message of the (often politically hegemonic) Bush doctrine and its simplifications, the backlash of Hurricane Katrina on the heels of the novel's publication made especially reductive the national identity that had been grounded in what Jeffrey Melnick has called “unity scripts” of American exceptionalism and fantasies of melting-pot togetherness in response to the events of 9/11.

Instead, Keeble echoes what many have suggested, that though Katrina was often deemed a natural disaster, “it was [ultimately] the government that caused the catastrophe” (107). That this statement is part of a general cultural consensus is a critical moment within the body of 9/11 literary criticism; its intervention in Keeble's book indicates a cultural turn away from unity scripts in general. He writes that the genre's previous inability to offer political or international gestures toward self-reflexivity is waning as the result of the impact of Katrina. Keeble posits that 9/11 literature finally makes a beginning post-Katrina – just a beginning – to self-consciously reckon with America's troubled political, national and global identity.

This climate change in 9/11 literature introduces the spirit of change in the nature of our narrative memory of 9/11 and of American identity itself as still in progress. Keeble is one of the few critics to address issues of race head-on – or kind of head-on. He subtly reveals the inherent racial inequities in 9/11 literature (and thereby in the culture itself) even though his focus is on the marginalized and specifically class-related concerns. Though his work is admittedly less invested in race issues per se, his work opens up what has appeared to be a foreclosed space in the literature. Zeitoun clearly reveals the stark politics of race relations in America, and by inserting what this book communicates about the personal effects of Hurricane Katrina smack in the middle of his book – a horrifying event that dispossessed and traumatized an entire culture of people, dominantly African Americans – Keeble reminds us that, in absentia, much 9/11 literature registers the history of American inequity and injustice and as such seismographically registers 9/11 literature as symptomatic of larger, sometimes latent, societal issues.

He locates these issues on the trajectory of the continuity/discontinuity paradigm established by several critics of the genre. Keeble explains this framework in terms of Versluys's notion of 9/11 as a limit event that shattered our lives and came out of the blue, and David Holloway's notion that 9/11 was long in the making and part of a long history of political tension and hostility in America. Once this is established, he asks readers to look at novels that move away from solely registering trauma – novels like Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2009), Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2009), and Amy Waldman's The Submission (2012) – at those that feature complicated main characters from relatively disparate walks of life and represents their troubled, multidirectional, conflicted and metafictional responses to the events of 9/11. He looks for points of convergence in the binaries of much of the American political rhetoric immediately following 9/11 and traces a history of identity conflict seismographically revealed through these and the earlier novels. In doing so, he predicts a new wave of 9/11 literature that might continue to trouble earlier renderings of 9/11 and provide the kind of fiction that is less steeped in the internal conflict that has plagued American identity. By considering memory's multidirectional nature, Keeble suggests reimagining the narrative of 9/11 with a reconsidered perspective on the influence of media, political rhetoric and latent class and racial tensions on the way that we remember.