From http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2082858,00.html:
"What makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist and other recent novels by Kiran Desai, David Mitchell and Jeffrey Eugenides so uniquely compelling is their intimation of a new existential incoherence, their suspicion that by abolishing old boundaries and penetrating the remotest societies on earth, capitalism and technology have left no "elsewhere", exposing the human self to unprecedented risks and temptations.
In The Inheritance of Loss Desai powerfully evokes the truth of this new spiritual homelessness: "Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narratives belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it." In such recent films as Syriana, The Constant Gardener and Babel even Hollywood seems alert to the fact that the human self, inescapably plural and open-ended, increasingly finds itself in a bewilderingly enlarged and unforgiving arena.
In comparison, most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency. The "reconsiderations" DeLillo promised after 9/11 don't seem to have led to a renewed historical consciousness. Composed within the narcissistic heart of the west, most 9/11 fictions seem unable to acknowledge political and ideological belief as a social and emotional reality in the world - the kind of fact that cannot be reduced to the individual experience of rage, envy, sexual frustration and constipation.
But then we haven't moved far in time from 9/11; the younger generation of American writers has yet to reckon with it. Recent novels may turn out to be only the first draft of a rich literature. Certainly, the conditions for it are already present. Writing in 1940, Rahv hoped that American literary life, which was largely determined by national forces, would be increasingly shaped by international forces. In ways still obscure to us, this has begun to happen as American power declines, and old collective assumptions of prosperity and security become unavailable. The present conservative stasis in America has its dangers. But it is unlikely to last. And, as happened after the first world war, uncertainty and confusion in the public sphere may quicken the sense of aesthetic possibility - or, at least, release literary novelists from the dominant American mood of 9/11 commemoration."
The older article by Pankaj Mishra on Indian fiction http://www.nybooks.com/articles/485 and his review of Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html? are also very interesting.
