Liberal realism fails to render the Islamist militant’s inner life

Evidence

The ubiquity of the liberal view is reflected in the fact that, in the end, Aslam’s attempts to render the inner life of an Islamist militant hardly differ, in their awkward lacunae, from Updike’s labored, hamstrung efforts. … The question, therefore, is whether what is needed to world the post-9/11 novel successfully is something more sly, more elusive, and more oblique. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 438

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to distinguishing contesting novels (Hamid, Naqvi) from reinforcing ones — Morey flags that even sympathetic liberal realists reproduce the same incapacity as a writer like Updike.
• QUESTION: What formal move makes Hamid and Naqvi ‘sly, elusive, oblique’ where Aslam and Shamsie are not? That is the hinge the reader needs to name.