How Long Before a 9/11 Novel Comes?

There's an article going around that wonders when any one of several talented American authors will finally tackle 9/11 in a novel. Predictably, the article ends on an uncertain note:

When will the Great American Sept. 11 Novel be published? It’s hard to say. Novels about the Holocaust, for instance, came quickly after World War II, but it took a decade for fiction writers to really get a grasp on the Vietnam War. Maybe it will take a decade for writers to grasp the enormity of the event without trivializing it.

Apparently the authors of this article do not have a very keen sense of current events. Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers is not mentioned once. Now I know that there is a difference between "No Towers" and a novel, but the fact remains that Spiegelman is recognized as one of America's most talented authors and that his book on 9/11 has been greeted with immense attention, especially regarding how it deals with 9/11.

Leaving out "No Towers" was a major error because it may be our best indicator of what a 9/11 novel would look like. As Michiko Kakutani writes in her review of the book:

''No Towers'' is ultimately a fragmentary, unfinished piece: brilliant at times, but scattershot, incomplete and bizarrely truncated. What it does do is suggest one aesthetic approach for grappling with the enormity of 9/11. Thus far words alone have proven curiously inadequate as a means of testimony...

History suggests that artists need time and emotional distance to achieve perspective on events as momentous as Sept. 11. Tolstoy's ''War and Peace'' was written some 60 years after Napoleon's invasion of Russia; Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem,'' memorializing World War II, was not heard until 1961; and John Corigliano's AIDS Symphony did not have its premiere until 1990, a decade after the composer began losing friends to the illness.

In the meantime ''No Towers,'' however provisional it might be, feels like a harbinger of artistic works to come. Its frantic, collagelike juxtaposition of styles; its repudiation of traditional narrative; its noisy mix of images and words; its trippy combination of reportage, fantasy and paranoia all recall the most innovative works to come out of the Vietnam War, works like Michael Herr's ''Dispatches'' and Tim O'Brien's ''Going After Cacciato,'' which employed fractured, disjointed narratives and heightened language to capture the moral and combat ambiguities of that war, and which eventually helped to invigorate late 20th-century fiction.

It's true that no one has yet written a definitive work regarding 9/11, and as Kakutani suggests, it will probably be a while. Events that shatter an existing cultural or political framework, of which 9/11 appears to be one, tend to force writers and artists to find new forms of expression, and finding those new forms takes time. As the first of what will be many experiments, it is worthwhile to see the direction Spiegelman has taken in "No Towers".

Unfortunately, the exclusion of Spiegelman from the above article underscores the fact that graphic novels are not yet taken seriously enough (certainly some people, who claim that in due time graphic novels will replace novels, take them a little too seriously, but it's interesting to note that those people tend not to be the enthusiasts, but rather cultural custodians like Charles McGrath).

Graphic novels should be taken more seriously; not as a competitor to the traditional novel, but as a partner. If 9/11 is going to force writers to find new forms of expression then it seems sensible that graphic novels -- which utilize some novelistic techniques, eschew others, and invent other entirely new ones -- would be an immense resource to any novelist seeking to tackle 9/11.

So long as the conventional wisdom surrounding graphic novels -- that they are nothing more than bigger, more complex versions of the Sunday comics -- remains, this won't happen. Fortunately, novelists, writers, and lovers of all things literary have been among the first to embrace graphic novels as an stand-alone, worthwhile artform.