Introduction: Fiction since 2000: Postmillennial Commitments

“Where is our fiction, our 21st-century fiction?” asked Zadie Smith, approaching the final two years of the period some critics call—cheekily or tritely, depending on one’s view—the “Noughties.” Characteristically for Smith, who, in her guise as critic, can be as didactic as she is dialogical, she proceeded to offer her own answer to the question. Somewhat pessimistically, she suggested that in the hunt for what’s distinctive about postmillennial fiction, “We glimpse here and there. Certainly not as often as you might expect, given the times we live in” (“Book” 4). Behind the tenor of Smith’s jaunty resignation lies a more profound concern with the scene of that unfinished argument about what distinguishes twenty-first-century narrative as an object of critical investment. Contributing to that scene of debate is the concern of this special issue. In so doing, its intervention is two-tiered, as it not only charts the novelistic emergence of specific artistic, political, and ethical objectives that allow us to distinguish that body of writing as singularly “post-millennial”; it also reflects at a metacritical level on the vocabularies by which we historically and aesthetically constitute twenty-first-century fiction as a focus of scholarly inquiry.

Inevitably, it can be tricky to obtain some critical purchase on a body of writing that’s so close to us, so immediate that it sounds contrived to say that we can retrospectively frame the first decade of the 2000s with the same coherence as we can, for instance, the 1980s or 1990s.¹ This special issue of Contemporary Literature refracts the period of novelistic production since 2000 through the optic of commitment. It brings together a distinguished international group of contemporary fiction scholars to explore how writers across the decade have placed questions of commitment at the center of their craft. The issue examines the political, ethical, and aesthetic paradigms for addressing fiction’s engagement with a decade whose world-historical events have dramatically changed the perception of how commitments function and what beliefs are for. Yet it also moves beyond the dominant tendency to map this literature via its responses—whether purposive or symptomatic, direct or oblique—to the traumatic legacy of 9/11.

For Richard Gray, culture—and especially, for his purposes, American culture—has found itself, in the wake of September 11, 2001, in a “liminal condition” made “more remarkable over the past few years” by “the encounter with terrorism and the experience of counter terrorism” (After the Fall 18). Rather than reduce art to a mere reflection or symptomatology of such a condition, novelists today have “the chance,” contends Gray, “maybe even the obligation, to insert themselves in the space between conflicting interests and practices and then dramatize the contradictions that conflict engenders” (18–19). But tracing that kind of intervention necessitates some reflection on selection, some alertness to the fact that “certain texts have already become hypercanonical in the discussion of 9/11 fiction,” as John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec observe, so much so “that it is time to look at other fiction of 9/11 in the future” (394). One of the ambitions of this special issue is to do precisely that. Its contributions, taken together, engage with the cultural ramifications of, without being critically determined by, the consequences of September 11, in order to map the formal and thematic domains of emerging writers whose concerns intersect with a more established generation but whose careers have flourished only since 2000. In pursuing these adjacent trajectories, our intention has not been to deny the enduring gravity of 9/11 as a difficult yet persistent locus of political and ethical deliberation for twenty-first-century writers; rather, we’ve sought to acknowledge, as Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn do, that “as time has passed, the approach to the attacks has become more nuanced,” insofar as “9/11 has come to seem less what [postmillennial] works are about than an event to which they refer, one element among many” (3).

This diversity of potential elements, however, can occupy one...