9/11 NOVELS. Laura Frost's wonderful review of Don DeLillo's The Falling Man elegantly explores the odd sub-genre of 9/11 novels, which is rapidly coming into its own. Weirder than those books, however, are the novels that aren't about 9/11, but clearly feel the need to mention an event of such epochal importance, and so use it as punctuation, or plot device. The best of these, for my money, was Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children*, which was able to incorporate the attack as a major plot point, but kept it subsidiary to the characters and the overarching story. The worst, at least that I've seen, came in Ben Kunkel's Indecision, where 9/11 generates a spontaneous attempt at incest which actually made me laugh aloud. Your nominees? --Ezra Klein *The Emperor's Children was also one of the best books I've read in the last year or two. Book reviewers always talk about fiction being "closely observed," but I never really understood what they meant till Messud's novel.
