Volume 54, Number 15 · October 11, 2007
In the Terror House of Mirrors
By Sarah Kerr
The Unknown Terrorist
by Richard Flanagan
Grove, 325 pp., $24.00
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
Harcourt, 184 pp., $22.00
Certain oft-heard criticisms of President Bush's policies seem rich, too, with potential implications for literature. There is the call, after seven years of awful decisions based on faith, to reembrace realism. There is the frustrated insistence that words and how precisely and intentionally we use them matter: see the War on Terror, with its battle cry against a metaphor instead of a strategic military target. Two recent novels, meanwhile, bring us news from countries that have been dramatically affected by that war. Though they are quite different, both novels take up the weightiest political questions of the day, and allow themselves the expression, not always deemed permissible in fiction, of anger about recent events. Both would thus seem to be firmly 'reality-based.' Yet they're also fascinated by reality's seeming relativity, its elusiveness—or at least our tragic difficulty in apprehending it.
Review, 4235 words
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