They understood how this malaise would be a gateway to the domestication of imperial violence and the circular logic of compulsive capitalism: I exist to spend, I spend to exist. And in many ways, these novelists were perfectly placed to tell this story. They had all spent time in the industries that slowly helped the US encircle the globe: Gaddis, whose father worked on Wall Street and in politics; Pynchon, the one-time Boeing employee; DeLillo, the former copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather; and Wallace, the former addict, dependent of anti-depressants. In their collective biographies one glimpses a world where language was a system for control, for abstraction and for destruction. They were perfectly placed to interpret the new world order. What happened on September 11, 2001, however, blew out the fuses on this brain trust's supercomputer. In one hour, Osama bin Laden proved that a spectacle could be more powerful than any narrative, especially in a world in which signs and symbols travelled much faster than words and stories. It took years, and hundreds of thousands of words of journalism, much of it based on dangerous reporting, for the causes of these attacks to become clear to many Americans, by which time a much faster-moving system had already translated the attacks into something else. They were an assault on American values; they were a Muslim invasion of the homeland; they were the work of Saddam Hussein. Virtually anything, if repeated often enough in the wake of September 11, 2001, became true. To this day, one in five Americans believes Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Ten years on from September 11, 2001, a large number of titles in bookstores offer explanations and narratives about that day. There are novels and non-fiction narratives that come straight at the attacks, such as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which tells of a boy's search through Manhattan for his late father's last effects, or Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's 102 Minutes, which uses mobile phone records, emails and phone messages to re-create what happened in those towers. Other books have approached the day from more of an angle, such as Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which recreates the shaky post-attack atmosphere in New York, or Peter Carey's His Illegal Self, which evokes the interior logic of extremism. Very few of them are exploitative, which is perhaps to be expected. All narrate a tale in which whiteness is the neutral value. After all, novels and narratives are vessels for what we do not understand. And in a crowded media environment, a novel can clarify which questions to ask (as opposed to providing answers). Still, not a single one of these novels - not even DeLillo's Falling Man, which is the best of all 9/11 novels and unfolds on the day - offers a kind of unified field theory of the how and the why, the global heave of what happened. To get that, you'd have to read at least a dozen of the best texts written on the day.

The systems novel has been put to the test here and although it predicted the world we would live in, it cannot be used to capture it today. This end of the systems novel is, however, not such a bad thing; it marks a necessary end to a fiction about a kind of fiction. Even the best of those novels from postwar America, such as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, with its Shakespearean language and awful knowledge of war's lethal algorithms, was not a complete world. It was constructed to feel like one but it abstracted at the edges, as did DeLillo's White Noise and especially Gaddis's The Recognitions. In recent years DeLillo himself seems to have sensed the limits of this kind of novel - The Body Artist, Cosmopolis and Point omega are experiments in language that refract rather than recreate the warp of American power. The further one gets from the heyday of the systems novel, the less DeLillo seems like a practitioner. After all, they all presume a world in which the US is the centre; all of them narrate a tale in which whiteness is the neutral value; their leaps to the other side, the US within a US that does not see itself as part of a dominant narrative, are not nearly as broad as books that were being published around the same time, such as the early novels of Toni Morrison or the stories of Raymond Carver.. There is not much of a glimpse into how the rest of the world lived. In other words, as much as these novels reveal the systems that would enable the US to become an imperial power, they have imperial blind spots. The poor, the weak, the rest of the world, in many ways, are absent from their pages. It is this attitude - shockingly present in the lives of many thinking Americans - that explains how September 11, 2001, could have come as a shock to the US.

Its foreign policy has always been apparent first and foremost to the rest of the world, since within the US the focus was, especially in the postwar years, inward. Not surprisingly, the most critically acclaimed novelist of this period was John Updike, whose valedictory sentences managed to wrench sublimity from even shopping malls. In the wake of September 11, 2001, however, a whole generation of novelists has risen to the task of reconsidering what it means to be an American, a question that has always been at the heart of the American novel. These post-attack novels are not just about who is American but what the US's role in the world is and what its treatment of people who flood in its direction says about it as a nation. Writers such as Foer, Dave Eggers and Edwidge Danticat have grappled with the nation's history of violence, its casual treatment of its own citizens; Yiyun Li and Dinaw Mengestu have reminded us of what it is that immigrants find when they arrive in the US; Daniel Alarcon and Junot Diaz have written about the ways that the trauma of US-supported dictators and torture campaigns have endless ripples. Marines who have returned home after Iraq - such as Gabe Hudson and Phil Klay - are finally making the country's warrior class apparent in its fiction. As good as these fiction writers are, however, there is a limit to what they can tell readers, so it bears repeating: the end of the systems novel is a good thing because it is a chance to remind American readers that the most interesting things often happen at the margin. In this case the margin would be at the fringes of American power.

A whole generation of Pakistani novelists has emerged in the past decade - from Nadeem Aslam to Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid to Daniyal Mueenuddin, Uzma Aslam Khan and Mohammed Hanif - and they are telling the story of their nation in thrilling ways. They are at the crest of a large talent bulge. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has now spawned grandchildren and one sees in the emergence of reporter-writers, such as the Kashmiri Basharat Peer and Delhi-based Rana Dasgupta, artists who can channel the anxieties of their time into powerful narratives. Across Africa, important young storytellers are emerging at such a rapid rate that a magazine - Kwani? - has been restarted to give them a place to blunt their ambitions. Nigerian, Kenyan, Ethiopian and Zimbabwean writers are speaking truth to power. This may seem a far cry from September 11, 2001, but their voices will be necessary to create an open dialogue about what and who matters in their nations for years to come. A nation without storytellers is a nation at the mercy of the narrative of its government, its corporations or its church, and history tells us what happens in all of these cases. It is too early to tell but one can only imagine what kind of writers will emerge from Libya and Egypt and Tunisia now that those nations are out from beneath the fist of their US-backed dictators. It may take some time. It was almost three decades after certain Latin American dictators fell that writers who were outside the shadow of the boom began to emerge.

If Borges were alive today, he could perhaps create a hyper-book that would be the ultimate systems novel - something that featured back staircases between all of these literatures, something that allowed you to be in two places, two minds, two cultures, at once. Of course this, too, is a fantasy. Such a text will never exist. All we have is juxtaposition and narrative. The former reminds us of difference, the latter of the enduring value of dreaming and of questions. These are all important spades in the garden of today's literature. It is in the mulch of the systems novel that something new, finally, can grow.