804 The American Century: Literature since 1945hybrid space, which seems to subvert the oppositions on which so much traditional
thinking about culture – and, for that matter, most political discourse – is founded.
Works like Falling Man, The Writing on the Wall, and The Emperor’s Children
locate crisis in terms of those oppositions – them and us, the personal and the
political, the private and the public, the oppressor and the victim – and then attempt
to accommodate the series of oppositions they construct into a traditional narrative
and mythic pattern in which, supposedly, they can be resolved and reconciled.
Eisenberg and Hamid, however, pursue a different course, locating crisis in a liminal
space where such oppositions are contested: a site where a discourse founded on
either/or distinctions is interrogated and even subverted. The New York City of
“Twilight of the Superheroes” and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, along with the
other territories encountered in these fictions, are culturally hybrid spaces where
engagements between different cultures are performative and identity is open to
constant renegotiation – so that, for instance, the questions “Who is the terrorist?”
“Who is the fundamentalist?” are less easy to answer than at first appears. The
historical layering and formal disruptiveness that characterize both narratives, the
geographical fluidity, the equivocal, interrogatory approach both take to issues of
just what is happening in the contemporary crisis and why – all these are symptoms
of a shared impulse toward an investigation of fault lines – on the actual sites where
identities, both personal and national, are contested. Our assumptions about the
agencies and identities at work here are constantly dislocated, necessitating a
continual process of reinterpretation, a process of questioning that, notionally at
least, is without end because it is this, the process of questioning, the performative
character of historical truth, that is the point.
A similar process is at work in Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. At first sight,
Netherland could be said to belong to a remarkable trend in recent American fiction,
away from postmodernism and toward social and historical realism. And it is true
that, like O’Neill’s novel, many of the most challenging fictions of the twenty-first
century could be described – at least at first sight – as participating in this trend.
The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen (1959–) chronicles the lives of members
of a Midwestern family and the network of dependence and blame, affection and
resentment that is the pattern of their daily lives. It is about an America where life has
come to be “lived underground,” and where the affluent surfaces only partially conceal
an almost bottomless spiritual dissatisfaction and disquiet. Look at Me (2001) by
Jennifer Egan (1962–) is a densely layered analysis of individual lives lived “under the
pressure of so many eyes” and a corporate world “remade by circuitry” that transforms
gaze into economic power. It is about America as a surfeit of commodities. The Time
of Our Singing (2003) by Richard Powers (1957–) intercalates the stories of a family
of mixed race with the story of race in the United States in the twentieth century. It is
about America as a site of racial collision and possible racial transformation.
Sightseeing (2004) by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (1979–) is a mosaic of stories set in the
variegated human and natural landscape of Thailand, focusing on trade and tourism
as sites of intercultural encounter. It is about America deterritorialized by being seen
from extrinsic vantage points. And Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson (1949–),GGray_c05.indd 804ray_c 05 .indd 804 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM