And Now, Martin's Turn

Well, we've had Ian McEwan's Saturday, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jay McInerney's The Good Life and are awaiting John Updike's Terrorist. And the next writer on the block attempting to write about 9/11 is none other than one-time enfant terrible Martin Amis, with his House of Meetings, a novella and two short stories, one of which "imagines the final movements of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 11 September attacks in America." His publisher says: "These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence." Oh dear.