London - IN the four years since the twin towers fell, American writers have distinguished themselves with the vitality of their replies to the killers. Britain has followed more slowly, and it is as a Brit and a newcomer to books, writing from a city where our own tragedy of July 7 is still very raw, that I offer a humble take on the state of literature since Sept. 11.

What startles is the furor which now greets each terrorism-related book as it comes out. As with the "war on terrorism" itself, it is getting harder to be neutral about its literature. While many readers and critics will delight in the next book that dares to imagine the unthinkable, many others will hate it with a vehemence that gives the writer, as Jonathan Safran Foer might put it, "heavy boots." Words like "exploitative" and "tasteless" are launched like righteous missiles.

Why such vitriol? Perhaps because many still feel that writing a contemporary novel should be tackled no differently from any other odious task. Like quitting booze or clearing out the garage, isn't it best left until tomorrow? Shouldn't writers wait around three dozen years, and then write a historical novel? If they take diligent notes now, they might even get the costumes right.

Those who try to write post-Sept. 11 novels now, the argument goes, are certain to get it "wrong." How can we know what we're feeling today, until we've had a decent time to forget that feeling and reassemble it from black box recorders, unsent love letters, and photos charred around the edges? This is called historical perspective, and it is like participating in the New York Marathon from a high earth orbit using a powerful telescope. You'll see the big picture and you won't get anything "wrong." Oh, and you won't get out of breath either.

But a novel is more breathtaking than a history lesson. "An author should be in among the crowd," wrote D.H. Lawrence, "kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment." He wasn't only talking about a vivid narrative perspective -- he implied that the book itself should be a participant in the world it was written for.

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Lawrence understood in the last century what many novelists are discovering in this: that there is a worse sin than getting a contemporary novel "wrong" -- namely, getting it right. Witness the critical reaction to some post-Sept. 11 books. A beautiful novel is "sentimental" (Mr. Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"). Colossal and erudite is "gratuitous and pretentious" (Michael Cunningham's "Specimen Days"). Idiosyncratic and questioning becomes "bitty and incomplete" (Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers").

It is as if expectations of books have risen after Sept. 11. The world today is to the pre-Sept. 11 world what falling glass shards are to a window, and the job of a novelist is to describe the new view through those glittering fragments. Yet somehow we expect writers, while they're at it, to show us how to glue the window back together: to give us meaning, hope, and even happy endings. It is extremely demanding and incredibly unfair.

It is also entirely forgivable.

To step up to a contemporary novel in these days is to step onto hallowed ground -- consecrated in Lincoln's sense of the word not only by the fallen but by the struggle of the living. Here, but also in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on the frayed borders of the world. Closer to home, there are fresh flowers on the graves in your city of New York and my city of London. The scale of the world's tragedy is heartbreaking: terrorism has matched a real dead body for every page of serious fiction published about terrorism this year. It is right to expect a special effort from novelists who choose such subject matter, when their every page is a pall.

To require respect is one thing, but to demand disengagement is another. One influential blogger recently asked "post-Sept. 11" writers: "Why not write what you really want to write, not something that's principally a fashion item looking for a quick buck?" This oft-repeated charge of exploitation finds a softer echo in the whimsical British tendency to file away such novels as Ian McEwan's "Saturday" or Salman Rushdie's "Shalimar the Clown" as "post-Sept. 11 fiction" -- as if terrorism will turn out to be a blip and a genre that addresses it short-lived.

It is true that wars, which are finite, finish with peace treaties, poems and a genre of novels. Sadly, terrorism has no end date. Death is here to stay and engaged novelists will continue to call death by its modern name, in the knowledge that to do otherwise would consign their books to the realm of fantasy.

But if death is here to stay, so is life, and the public's liking for novels in this changed world will rightly depend on how much life there is in them. All polemic aside, a bomb is an ear-splitting statement, but for readers books are louder. Books make death a bullhorn through which life yells triumphant. So readers are listening for the laughter in these new books, and the love: they're listening for the reasons it's still good to be alive in this waning human culture squeezed like a seam of coal between giant stone religions. Because -- readers know -- it is precisely that love and that laughter that, though delicate, must now be crushed under the tremendous pressure of hate and transformed in our time, either to dust or to diamond.

Op-Ed Contributor Chris Cleave is the author of "Incendiary," a novel about an imagined terrorist attack on London.

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