IN THE days and weeks after 9/11 a number of writers asked what the future of fiction could be after such a rupture. The comments echoed philosopher Theodor Adorno's comment: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”Ten years on it is abundantly clear that fiction does, of course, have a future. Some novelists have tackled the events of that September day head on; others have used the episode as a spur to look at the Western world shaken out of its complacency. The quality of the output, as in all areas of fiction, is highly variable.Jay McInerney's “ The Good Life ” was a rather crass before-and-after view of a couple forced to re-examine their relationship following the events of 9/11; Jonathan Safran Foer's “ Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ” had a number of touching moments but was ultimately too long to carry itself. Don Delillo's “ Falling Man ” was a strange sort of novel which lacked the density of his other work, but it did capture some of the most chilling elements of the events: “By the time the second plane appears,” Keith comments as he and Lianne watch the endlessly cycling video of the attacks, “we're all a little older and wiser.”There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story. Mr McInerney's book is the poorer, I think, because his characters seem so paper-thin beside the burning towers and anguished souls the television footage depicted. For this reason non-fiction has often been the better medium to convey the most moving and poignant record of the day.

The second is that all fiction of every genre hinges around some kind of crisis, internal or external, that a book has to see its way through. This can take many forms. But 9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it's a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.



That is probably why many authors have taken 9/11 as a jumping-off point to look at a group or type of person they had not thought to before. Martin Amis wrote a short story in the voice of one of the 9/11 hijackers. John Updike's “Terrorist” traced the world of a would-be suicide bomber, for example. The setting for that book, like Updike's other work, was suburban middle-America, and many of the characters were also recognisable from earlier books, but his central figure, a teenager who becomes radicalised, sits uneasily in this context—uneasy both for the character and sadly the novel too.



The third thing that makes it hard to write a successful novel about 9/11 is simply that it's too soon. Ten years on that may sound limp, but I think it's true. “Catch 22”, one of the best novels of the second world war, was not written until 1961. And because 9/11 was a day in the life of the world, as opposed to many years, the imprint of personal memories is still very strong. It is hard to relay an event that many people still remember so clearly—even if, by contrast, those vivid impressions are one reason why 9/11 books have such an audience.



None of this means that people can't or shouldn't be writing about 9/11. But I think it explains why some of the better books take 9/11 as one element rather than the centre of the story: they dare to make such a momentous day a backdrop, and they don't pretend to understand it.



One book that does this particularly well is Joseph O'Neill's “Netherland”. The first chapters of this are the best I've read about 9/11, because they conjure the strange and extraordinary exhilaration of those early days after the attack, the heightened sense of existence that accompanies being present at the moment the world was transformed, however tragically. There's also a lot I didn't like about the novel—the main character was somewhat unappealing, there are large chunks about cricket (yes, in New York) which became a bit wearing. But Mr O'Neill makes something of that post-9/11 haze into a real thing: he evokes the atmosphere, not the events.



Claire Messud also does this well in “The Emperor's Children”. It is more directly centred on the events of that year, but her novel nonetheless carries the realism of lives that have to keep being lived—she recognises that frippery that does not suddenly turn serious because a country is under attack.



Others have tackled the world that emerged from 9/11 more obliquely, rather than the events of the day. Lorrie Moore's “A Gate at the Stairs”, for example, is a beautifully written book that captures the wariness, mistrust and everyday racism that pervaded the years after 2001. In Kamila Shamsie's “Burnt Shadows”, September 11th becomes a pivotal event at the end rather than the beginning of the book.



One of the interesting things about fiction since 2001 is that the event was such a fissure in the history of the world that it dates books in a particular way—it is immediately clear whether a book is set before or after 2001. There are glancing references to it even in books of different genres, or where the events have almost no bearing on the plot of the novel: 9/11 gets a walk-on part in “One Fifth Avenue”, a chick-lit novel by Candace Bushnell, who also wrote “Sex and the City”. And in Lionel Shriver's “Double Fault”, an American woman in London has a personal crisis and spends several days embedded in her own world; when she emerges it turns out that she has totally missed the news of September 11th.



9/11 will continue to be a marking point for novelists, as in other spheres. In this sense again it plays a similar function in fiction as the second world war—writers use the war as a setting for as many romances and thrillers as they do for literary novels. And this is turf that even debut novelists, and those too young to have any personal or parental memory of the war, continue to tread: Owen Sheers's “Resistance”, one of the best debuts of recent years, is an original and brilliantly executed work of fiction played out in wartime Wales.



Some people say that the world had already changed, but the West didn't wake up to that until those planes hit the World Trade Centre and other American targets on September 11th. That may well be true. But that waking is a gradual process—and just as politicians, policymakers and others are still grappling with the fall-out from those events, and the ensuing war on terror, so novelists will continue to dissect the wreckage.