From an interview at BOMBLOG with the author of Atta, Jarett Kobek:

…what is strange about ATTA is that, although I call it a psychedelic biography, it’s well within the tradition of literary fiction, and most recent literary fiction has distanced itself from the wider world. There’s a disengagement with bigger topics on the part of young writers. The model is very small books about very specific things, much of it experiential. People have written books about 9/11, but it’s mostly older writers, people with a certain literary respectability. It’s odd that there isn’t more engagement from younger writers about how terrible the last ten years have been. Young people are the ones who will spend the rest of their lives dealing with the fact that the Bush years were so incredibly fucked up. But maybe that’s the consequence of a decade when everyone was yelling at everyone else to stay inside, stay inside, stay inside. And this shows in the scale of the books being published, both in the mainstream and on smaller presses.

NW I guess people took it as a given than there was no possibility for a real political horizon, apart from self-defense, fear, and the rhetoric of fear. As you say, stay inside.

JK Stay inside and you’ll write a book about sad people in sad apartments. Maybe fiction no longer has a functional validity. I don’t know if there’s a literary culture that can support something like ATTA beyond its obvious immediate audiences, but I should say that lots of people have been very kind and enthusiastic.

NW Maybe we have to build a public for that type of discourse, or find that public. There was an obsession, I guess, with subjectivity in terms of politics, and maybe that’s what led to this interiority that you’re speaking of. People thought actionable politics was just dead and impossible. People didn’t believe in a grand politics beyond the reactionary.

JK I wanted ATTA to engage a younger audience beyond forty-somethings gleaning potential insights about the perils of married life and parenthood from the latest 700 page book by Jonathan Franzen. It’s possible that it worked—one of the first reviews was five stars on Goodreads.com from a deranged Canadian teenager who calls himself Brosephicles. I guess he sits around playing Xbox 360 Live and then reads Deleuze and then goes back to killing the Borgia in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

…

NW Ultimately 9/11 emptied out the streets, but I remember that in the days just following, there was this moment of grace, three or four days where everyone was really there for everyone else. It was a beautiful moment. But the emotional assault followed quite quickly, you were supposed to be mourning, you couldn’t say anything that was against American foreign policy, suddenly you had to become a patriot.

JK I read an interview with J.G. Ballard where he talked about life in occupied Shanghai and receiving the sense of someone pulling the curtains back and exposing the entire mechanics of the theater of life: the fact that no one was in control and no one knew what was happening. Manhattan immediately after 9/11 was like that. But I think—and maybe I’m combining hobby horses—I think that one of the reasons why the Internet became so culturally dominant in the 2000s is that our entire society was telling itself to stay inside. The message came from all levels. Board up your houses, tape up your windows in the event of a chemical attack. And if no one ventures outdoors, where’s the natural place to go? One of the things that amazes about Occupy is that it feels like the first thing to happen offline in a decade.

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NW The Internet reminds me of what you call “post-pornographic society.” I understand this as having to do with a moment when we become digitized in such a way that we’re gone beyond real bodily interaction.

JK What disturbs and compels about pornography is not the sex, which is always a snooze, but that the medium addresses every social issue in the absolute wrong way. Not long after any social event or trend, a pornographic response emerges. It will be incredibly creepy and wrong headed, an underbelly view of public life via the worst excesses of capitalism in which the answer to every social problem is the commodification of desire. A good example is the 2008 election, where Larry Flynt produced a film about Sarah Palin, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?. An Obama lookalike nails the Palin lookalike. Or now that superhero films have become enormous cash cows, the porn industry has begun producing deeply distressing parodies. It’s part of a growing dialogue, with the language of pornography seeping out into the greater society. Characters in the new 90210 or Gossip Girl who will throw around terms that emerged from the pornographic lexicon. Blake Lively talking about MILFs. My next book is called If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? which is being published by Penny-Ante Editions in Los Angeles. It’s going to be a collection of short stories that are transcriptions of the incidental scenes from celebrity sex tapes.