Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel

The vacuity and unintended irony of prominent critic James Wood's admonishing novelists immediately post 9-11 is striking: "Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast." It certainly is. Society hardly started to "buck and charge" helplessly on 9-11. Both long prior to that moment and fr...