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I find that happens a lot, though. Strangely enough, it seems that often imaginative leaps find their echoes in reality. I'd known I was going to write about a terrorist for many years. I've been collecting stories on Mideast terrorism from the New York Times since 1995. I have the first article where bin Laden is mentioned by name, in a story about how Saudi businessmen seem to be underwriting terrorism. I wanted to include a terrorist because terrorism of this nature is a byproduct of image culture. It's completely dependent on the media. It seemed like a strange, almost funny twist on the idea of a fashion model, whose stock in trade is her image. In a way, what could be more different, and yet the two bizarrely have much in common.

How do you see this kind of terrorism as being dependent on the media?

It's all about the pictures. Typically, these terrorists commit a small act -- although Sept. 11 wasn't a small act -- and that bounces around and reverberates exponentially through the airwaves. And I'm not the first; [Don] DeLillo's written a lot about this. It's such a modern phenomenon, it's such a figment of media-saturated life that it was just inevitable that it would be part of my book. I was also conscious of and interested in the fact that so many people hate America, and that the very things that make our country satisfying to live in for us are the source of a tremendous amount of anger and resentment elsewhere. Terrorism was just part of that picture. It seemed clearly to be a factor that was going to be important, so that's why it was there, but it's not like I saw any of this coming -- my God, I really didn't. But I imagined that it could, that some enormous event could happen.

You did say that you had an apocalyptic feeling writing it.

I did, although Z, which is one of the names the character uses, says some things to Charlotte that I think I found more eerie than the part in the book where he reminisces about the first World Trade Center bombing. He says these things that really freaked me out when I went back and reread them. He says, "Things won't go on as they have," meaning life in America. He says something like, "It will end in an explosion of violence you can't possibly imagine, sheltered and spoiled as you are."

I was just imagining. I also think many people wondered and worried when this effervescent moment would end, and for me that's the form that it took, maybe because I was already interested in terrorism, maybe because I was doing all this research on terrorism. My research consisted mostly of reading the newspaper really, really carefully over many years. And there was no escaping the refrain, which was these people hate us, they're gathering resources, there are tons of them here already. And sooner or later, they're going to get it together. Certainly people who had reason to know that knew that. Little things would bubble to the surface now and then. But I was not trying to predict anything, believe me. And let's remember that my terrorist doesn't remain a terrorist at all. He's somewhat won over by American life, although it's more complicated than that. He no longer believes in the conspiracy that he thought existed here and that he came here to destroy. He winds up embracing American life.

That's something that seems to have surprised a lot of Americans, that the terrorist sleepers who pulled off the Sept. 11 attack could live here among us and not be seduced by American life.

I find that idea so nutty. The logic is, "But they went to Wal-Mart! How could they still want to kill Americans?" I feel more like, they went to Wal-Mart and guess what? I don't mean to be flip about it, I'm just saying that the idea that visits to some fast food restaurants and a couple of lap dances is going to be enough to wrest someone away from what was clearly a consuming and complex network of action and belief with which they'd been intertwined for so long, that seems really simplistic and having a little too much faith in the power of our way of life.

Still, people in other cultures have been complaining for years that their young people have abandoned all traditions for Michael Jackson and Adidas, that American culture is too seductive. And foreign correspondents will talk about how someone overseas will curse America with one breath and in the next talk about how he wants to move here.

All those things were things that interested me with this book, the way that the rage and the desire are so commingled. They're really two sides of the same coin, the desire for American life and the resentment of that desire that then hardens into hatred. The sense that there's so much here, but one is excluded from it, so the desire to have it winds up turning on itself. The big difference between those guys and mine is that mine is on his own. He's not part of a network of anything anymore. He's a lone agent, and that makes it harder for him to sustain the zealous commitment that these people had to sustain. For them, they were in our world, but they weren't really. And I think what you might call the co-optation, the seduction of American culture is part of what they're so enraged about. So I think their defenses against that would be really high. They feel that the impact of American culture and the seductiveness of it have ruined other cultures. They also have each other to answer to. I wouldn't think that defections would be taken lightly.

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