Over at the Huffington Post, Second Pass contributor Alexander Nazaryan makes the case for the novel he thinks best represents the first decade of the century:

No novel better captures the background dread of everyday life these days—terrorism jitters, credit-default swaps, mutant flu strains—than Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Like The Great Gatsby—to which it bears obvious resemblance—Netherland compresses the American experience into a critical mass, and then proceeds to pick it apart. . . . Netherland has been called a post 9-11 novel, but that isn’t quite true: it is a post-American novel, announcing the conclusion of what Time founder Henry Luce called in 1941 the American Century.