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For Rolling Stone‘s outstanding 9/11 issue, which came out just after the attacks, David Foster Wallace wrote about the events from his perspective in Bloomington-Normal. A recording of Wallace reading the essay is available here (mp3). I think that people who went through the day outside of New York and DC–which is to say most of us–will find his experience of trying to connect what was happening to the view of it on television terribly familiar. This was the point where I realized for all the heat about DFW’s crazy postmodern craziness, his moral outlook is more straightforward than I’d assumed, and that it would only become more so. Perhaps he was also realizing this about the same time. If so, he would not have been alone.
In his debut novel, Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris caps the denouement, the dissolution of the advertising office that makes up the world of the book, during the first week of September 2001. He then skips forward to a coda set in 2006.
