Where's the Great Novel about the War on Terror?

That's the question the Atlantic recently posed.

From the article...

The American war writing tradition is a proud one, and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror—at least in the non-fiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11. These works run the gamut from personal testimonies of combat (Colby Buzzell's My War and Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More than You), to attempted explanations as to how and why these wars unfolded the way they did (Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown), to embedded press accounts by correspondents with infantrymen half their age (Sebastian Junger's War) or exiled Iraqi prostitutes (Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis.) There has been such a proliferation of non-fiction war writing over the last ten years that it's nearly impossible to talk to anyone in the publishing industry without hearing phrases like "war fatigue" and "market saturation."

Fiction has proven an entirely different animal. Almost a decade after the first bombs were dropped in Afghanistan, even the most avid bookworm would be hard-pressed to identify a war novel that could be considered definitive of this new generation's battles. The explanations for this vary from the esoteric—wars need to end first before fiction writers can fully capture their impact—to the pragmatic: People don't read fiction anymore.

In an email discussion about this issue, Eric Cummings, a literary critic who writes at the military blog On Violence, argued that a memoir-centric publishing industry has played the most instrumental role in stunting the growth of GWOT fiction. However, he continued, "The first draft of war literature tends to be memoirs anyway—it happened during both World Wars ... I'm sure [Iraq and Afghanistan novels] will come. And they will probably be better than the memoirs."

There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, took over a decade to pen. And those books seem almost rushed compared to a pair of Vietnam novels that were published in the last year, Karl Marlantes's Mattherhorn and Ken Babbs's Who Shot the Water Buffalo?, both of which took the authors over 40 years to write, rewrite, and publish.