The Novel of the Century Turns 25

Nine days after the Twin Towers fell, the best novel of the 21st century made its debut. The two events were unrelated, yet it is not difficult in retrospect to draw a line between the attacks of September 11 and the diminishment unto death of a beloved storytelling form. Just as that Tuesday inaugurated the West’s suicidal crisis of confidence, so the publication of Ian McEwan’s Atonement may well have marked the literary novel’s last dazzling peak. The comparison is not as absurd as it might seem. In America and Western Europe, the disaster that was the War on Terror produced political and normative “security” banalities and an ongoing wave of Islamization. In those nations’ bookshops, it yielded nervous tomes wed to multicultural clichés.

Atonement, by contrast, is a work of old-fashioned faith: in love, in conscience, and in the possibility of redemption. That it is also thrillingly postmodern — before postmodernism’s inevitable plunge into incoherence — is a further source of brilliance and delight.