Falling Man (2007)
Don DeLillo
***1/2
Atmospheric
DeLillo is good at capturing a scene and how it feels. He did it with college suburbia in White Noise. He did it with a marriage relationship in The Body Artist, and with Americana in Underworld. For his latest novel, he returns to the Big Apple and again uses historical events as his jumping-off point. The event? The falling towers of 9/11 and the emotional aftermath for New Yorkers. And the style that DeLillo develops is stream-of-consciousness, purposefully fragmented, confused and searching. Through his words and through this novel, you'll get as close to understanding those who were left as if you spoke with them yourself. Maybe even closer.
Poignant
I think DeLillo is well aware that we've all seen—or heard—our share of post-9/11 articles, books and movies. That's why his account mostly lets us into the minds of those who were directly affected that day, those who fled the towers, those who lost friends or family, those who participated in the terrorism.
Keith is a lawyer who made his way out of the tower, carrying someone else's briefcase. His wife, Lianne, is surprised by his sudden return home after their separation, and their son Justin continues to scan the skies with his binoculars for "Bill Lawton" and more planes.
Keith ends up in a short-term relationship with the owner of the briefcase, connecting with her like Max did with Carla in Peter Weir's survival story Fearless. He becomes addicted to poker, the game he played with some coworkers who are now dead. Lianne leads a group of senior citizens who want to write about the planes. And she lashes out at a neighbor who plays middle-eastern music too loudly. Nina, her mother, breaks off her long-time relationship with a German friend who reacts too coldly to the unfolding events.
There is no hero to this story. If anything, the hero is the detached, yet sympathetic presentation of what is going on in these peoples' minds, going on when they were lurched to their feet as the plane hit their tower, going on when they huddled down the staircases and out into the ash and smoke, going on when they began to rework their lives and the relationships they had left.
Meaningful
Life has changed, DeLillo is telling us, and it's not just that the metro now skips several stops in midtown, or that a child's habits seem suddenly momentous. When a man begins appearing unexpectedly in various parts of the city, dressed in a suit and dropping from heights, suspended only by a harness, his reenaction of the Falling Man becomes an unspoken means of communal coping. The fact that we are never allowed into his head, though we do enter the thoughts of one of the terrorists, reinforces the necessity of listening, of understanding others. We couldn't keep something terrible from happening, but what can we do now? And how should we feel about God?
Back in 1977, DeLillo's novel Players included a character named Pammy, who worked in the newly-built World Trade Center towers. To her, "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." Underworld featured the towers on its cover. And here, DeLillo draws on a famous picture of the World Trade Center in fog for his cover, with the towers pushed out of sight onto the back of the book. In their place are a set of double lines rising from the clouds, evocative of the iconic light shafts that shone for weeks during the fall of 2001. This is a book about remembering, and moving on.
In this novel, you can feel that their absence means more to him, more to these characters, than even the loss of lives and a kind of national monument. This loss becomes a metaphor for our inadequacy, for our longing for things to be right, for our humanness. And though DeLillo shows us imperfectly, we have to agree with him: this is our story, too.
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