SOURCE: Cowley, Jason. “The Sense of an Ending.” New Statesman 14, no. 687 (17 December-7 January 2001): 108-09.

In the following essay, Cowley evaluates the impact of the September 11 attacks in the creation of recent works of literature and fiction.

A condition of thinking about the future, Frank Kermode once wrote, is that we assume one's own time stands in an extraordinary relation to it. “We think of our crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.” Everyone who is anyone in the world of letters certainly scrambled to offer their interpretation of the apparently world-changing events of 11 September, a crisis more eminent, more worrying and more interesting than past crises, if Martin Amis and the well-known thriller writer Robert Harris, among others, were to be believed. The result was an inevitable overreaction, not to the event itself, which was desolating, but to its world-historical implications. But then, hysteria is...