John Freeman's essay, "Rise from the ashes," in the Sydney Morning Herald, examines the end of the "Systems Novel" (novels from the likes of Gaddis, Pynchon, Delillo and Wallace, that ". . . took a great deep breath and attempted to capture all the systems of modern life at work"), and the rise of new generations of writers at the "margins of American power," in the wake of September 2001:
[A]s 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.