The Quietus - The idea of using a novel's place in the cannon to properly review is certainly a grandiose thing to do for a new release. On the other hand, when people write about 9-11, things are going to get heavy. I have two complaints about the review. One, this list is missing Jonathan Safran Foer's excellent Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. Like Dave Eggers, Foer has disappeared up his own ass almost completely. Putting the trauma of 9-11 in the mind of a child searching for his father was effective and the novel excelled in spite of overwrought prose and Foer's obsession with typographical tricks. Though I will admit that adding "The Falling Man" as a flip book is as likely a reason it gets the snub as the terrible Tom Hanks movie.
My other complaint is that the author's take on Pattern Recognition is terrible. Not only is it likely Gibson's best-written novel, but it should also be celebrated for articulating the millennial future shock by writing a science fiction novel about the present. Cayce is supposed to navigate a world that is disconnected from the real world. Cosmopolitan, rich, and transnational, it is just a bit of unpleasantness that makes travel a bit different. The Blue Ant Trilogy is obsessed with defining the ways that the ultra-rich and the rest of us are working with completely different rules and scales.