On reviewing ‘Netherland,’ a novel by Joseph O’Neill, in the New York Times’ Book Review section, Dwight Garner reflected thus: “But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They’re all 9/11 novels now. It’s impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else — the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror.”
That last italicized sentence struck a chord with Alec Niedenthal a student at Mountain Brook High School ‘08 Birmingham, AL; that fact I discovered of course on his Facebook page. He wrote a letter that I have posted below that challenges the assumption that all great post 9/11 novels must come from the long list of novelists that have been writing for many years prior to 9/11. He also challenges the reviewer and the Book Review editor to look “right under your collective noses” as he points out that the novels that Dwight Garner yearns for “will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam.” And at the end he ever so slowly twists the knife - “Perhaps it would not trouble you to take a peek.” Nice. And here’s a piece that Alec wrote for ‘Sup Magazine.
To the editor:
I found Dwight Garner’s review of Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” (May 18) to be virtuosic in nearly every respect, but that is not why I write. Garner struck a chord with me, and probably the vast majority of younger readers, when he so impeccably communicated the longing for, the necessitation of that transcendent Great Post-9/11 Novel: “the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror,” he writes so consummately.
Don’t worry; we’re working on it. You’ve heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.
It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.
The literary call to arms sounded long ago (only many neglected to listen), and, Mr. Editor, well, we’ve been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don’t mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you’ll be more than impressed. We’re standing beneath the adit of our long-desolate cave, proffering a sheaf of papers that you might consider a manuscript.
Perhaps it would not trouble you to take a peek.
ALEC NIEDENTHAL
Birmingham, Ala.
