Aliki Varvogli, Thinking Small Across the Atlantic: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life. Symbiosis 11.2 (October 2007)

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 11.2 (October 2007) pp. 47-59.

Essay Topics and Keywords:

The ‘9/11 novel’; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; Jay McInerney’s The Good Life

An extract from this essay:

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on The World Trade Center in New York, the consensus was, briefly, that fiction was no longer appropriate because it could not adequately express the horror of what happened. Now, six years later, the ‘9/11 novel’ is becoming a subgenre in American fiction, but also in Britain and beyond: not only has the event been processed by the culture sufficiently to make its way into fiction, but it has also acquired a global dimension which reflects both the troubled origins and the terrifying repercussions of that fateful day.

Aliki Varvogli

The author teaches at the University of Dundee.