'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis

They were written across six years, starting with a column in Britain's Guardian on Sept. 18, 2001, and ending with one in the Times of London on Sept. 11, 2007. Amis has republished them together, with few revisions, to let us watch him learning fitfully, as we all did, from Sept. 11.

He stumbled through over-determined, under-informed generalizations and fragmented, contradictory insights about an attack as old as hatred but as new as using an "American passenger jet . . . symbol of indigenous mobility and zest," to destroy thousands of lives and shatter symbols of Pax Americana's peaceful commerce and omnipotence in war.

Amis is brave in again baring his earliest rationalizations, unfolding obsessions and dubious conclusions, but at times he's brazen in shoving our snouts into harsh realities that he thinks we've sanitized, ideologized or quietly forgotten with the passage of time.

So determined is Amis to make us taste suicide bombing's depravity that he traces intimately the perpetrators' psycho-sexual perversity, their "self besplatterment," the bloody "pink haze" forming above the bodies of World Trade Center victims who've plunged to their deaths. Even the film "United 93" captures heroic passengers' "state of near-perfect distress -- a distress that knows no blindspots. . . . the ancient flavor of death and defeat. You think: this is exactly what they meant us to feel."

He makes you ashamed of trying to feel anything else.

Amis' realism is harsh politically as well as morally: Wrong-headed though he considers the war in Iraq, he doesn't let its depredations eclipse those of Saddam Hussein, who "used familial love as an additional instrument of torture . . . as the interrogator applies himself to your mother or your three-year-old child."

Even Amis' New Yorker short story "In the Palace of End," about Hussein's torture house, is chilling, with a clamminess that puts it beyond surreal.