This kind of vulgarity, which has always been characteristic of Mr. Amis’s attempts to come to grips with serious themes, also helps to explain why the two pieces of fiction in “The Second Plane” miscarry. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which traces the terrorist’s thoughts in the hours before he piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, suffers from the same programmatic quality that afflicted John Updike’s novel “Terrorist.” In the absence of true empathy with a terrorist — empathy of the sort that Dostoevsky brought to bear in “The Possessed,” or Conrad in “The Secret Agent” — Mr. Amis can only recite Atta’s motives, as though checking off points on an outline. His fear of women, his “ferocity and rectitude,” are mentioned but not inhabited. The character only comes alive in Mr. Amis’s hands when he suffers from extreme constipation — that is, from the kind of petty bodily humiliation that has always lain at the heart of Mr. Amis’s comedy.

Even the above review, otherwise wretched and presumptuous about a whole lot of things, including the literary critic Terry Eagleton, understands that there’s something wrong with “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.” (Incidentally, the story is available on the Web.) We are reading it in class tomorrow, along with a hefty portion of The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.

Here’s a link to an interview with Wright conducted by my student Freddy Deknatel for The Daily Star Egypt. And here’s another piece that Freddy did for the Huffington Post.

A very useful interview with Wright, on his writings and his craft, is to be found in the the book The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton.

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