At over 500 pages, it’s thoroughly researched and richly imagined, offering a blend of fact and fiction that makes the whole affair feel as strange and terrifying as it must have been for the people who lived through it. Trance by Christopher Sorrentino is a thinly fictionalized account of the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by a left-wing militia. And they prefigured the mood and concerns of Occupy Wall Street by revitalizing an intellectual and romantic interest in gritty, grassroots politics. Setting their novels in the recent past-the radical activism of the ’60s and ’70s-they spoke to 9/11 by raising tough questions about the insurgencies we’ve fought within our own borders.

At the same time, another group of writers began a more subtle inquiry into the kinds of extreme politics and personal trauma that entered our lexicon on 9/11. Question Two: What are the novels that help us understand Occupy Wall Street? Answer: Well, let’s start a new paragraph.Īfter 9/11 a number of white American male novelists-Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer (and Ian McEwan, a Brit)-famously grappled with the infamous terrorist attacks in their fiction. Question One: What are the great novels about Occupy Wall Street? Answer: They haven’t been written yet. Just how many decades is a matter of debate, but to use the gold standard, there was a 57-year gap between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the publication of War and Peace.īut we’re really asking two separate questions here. It takes decades for writers to mine a historical moment for all it’s worth.

Is it too soon for an Occupy Wall Street novel? OWS didn’t exist before last September. If you like typos, characters named Professor Sartorius, Admiral Orwell, and Sir Endymion Needham, and stunning revelations like “The flight from Beijing to New York was a long one,” then check out all 55 chapters and 2 appendices of Spiritus Mundi by Robert Sheppard. It was serialized on the OWS New York City General Assembly web site. Yes, there is already a novel about Occupy Wall Street.