The marking of the second anniversary of 9/11 coincides with the publication of three novels by French novelists confronting the horror of the terrorist attacks: Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Didier Goupil’s Le jour de mon retour sur terre, and Luc Lang’s 11 septembre mon amour. Despite their radically different approaches to the subject matter—for example, Beigbeder chooses an autobiographically-based, self-declared Parisian mondain as his protagonist, who contemplates the demise of his alter ego, World Trade Center victim Texan Carthew Yorston, from the top-floor restaurant of the Tour Montparnasse; Goupil paints a poignant picture of the vacuity of American capitalism through the story of a WTC survivor who, having been returned to “le plancher des vaches,” opts for homelessness rather than return to his erstwhile marital happiness; whereas Lang combines his autobiographical search for the American Indian with a reflection on his encounter with the events of September the 11th—these novels all have in common the mixture of admiration and revulsion that characterizes the French appreciation of America from Tocqueville to Baudrillard. That is, whether their starting point is “l’anti-anti-américanisme” (Beigbeder) or an assimilation of American westward expansionism with Nazism (Lang), these novels contain a succession of paradoxical value-judgments on the United States which, like the obverse and reverse sides of a coin, are at once inseparable and incompatible. Thus, in Windows on the World the narrator’s self-proclaimed desire for identification and commiseration with the victims of the World Trade Center through a quasi-superhuman défi de l’imagination (“Le seul moyen de savoir ce qui s’est passé dans le restaurant situé au 107e étage de la tour nod du World Trade Center, le 11 septembre 2001, entre 8 h 30 et 10 h 29, c’est de l’inventer”) belies a fear of human interchangeability owing to American-led mondialisation. Similarly, in 11 septembre mon amour, the narrator’s desire to explore “the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces,” as Baudrillard put it in America, contrasts sharply with an unrelenting critique of American hegemony owing to westward expansionism and the ensuing extermination of Native American tribal culture. Such a paradoxical discourse—in which, for example, the tendency to praise the youthful exuberance of the American spirit betrays a tendency to critique the Walt Disneyesque infantilism of American culture—results from the fundamental incompatibility of the aims of a contemporary novelistic ambition which, while self-consciously proclaiming its adherence to the currency of the realist aesthetic (cf. the epigraph by Thomas Wolf at the outset of Windows on the World), ineluctably falls to the temptation of the tokenism of the hyperreal.