Books |
Falling Man
Don DeLillo
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Fiction
So many politicians have stood on the pile of sacred dead at the World Trade Center that it’s difficult — maybe impossible — to get back to 9/11. The dead have been used, and we have been used, and now, even for those of us who were in New York that day, memories of what we did and how we felt about what we did are ragged and imprecise.
Pictures jar our memories. Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of the afternath take me most of the way back. But the pictures that stopped me cold then — and would surely bring my hand to my mouth and my mouth into an involuntary “oh” today — are out of circulation. One is of the man and woman holding hands as they jumped from a burning tower. The other is of a man in a white shirt, neatly framed by the bones of the building, plummeting headfirst to the distant ground at 150 miles an hour.
You remember those pictures. I’m sure of it. And I’m sure of this too: You do not thank me for the reminder. One more certainty: You will not thank me for recommending this book.
There is fiction, and there is serious fiction. Don DeLillo is in the second category. He’s won the National Book award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among others. This is a DeLillo novel that takes, as its main character, a man who walked out of the towers that lovely September morning — you may be sure that there are few, if any, laughs.
The book begins: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” If you put the book down right there — if you stopped reading this right here — you couldn’t be faulted. Who, willingly, wants to go there again? There’s no obligation. Why should we?
We should — okay, we might — because that was the day our lives changed. And not because “the war on terror” began in that rubble, because that’s the least of what’s at stake here. Our lives changed. Our domestic lives. The way we are with one another. Or maybe it was another day that changed your world for you. An event known only to you and whomever. Whatever, the subject is displacement of the major kind. It takes a novelist to explore dislocation that deep. If we could draft one for the job, this would, on the basis of his previous books, be DeLillo.
The “falling man” of this book is a performance artist who appears unexpectedly around New York City in the weeks after 9/11 and “falls” from buildings and bridges— until his safety device kicks in. But that’s not the falling man we think of. And that’s not the falling man who is at the center of this short (246 pages) novel: Keith Neudecker, the lawyer who got out alive, only to find himself in a free fall. Talk about levels. And echoes…
Keith is long separated from his wife, Lianne, and is not much of a father to their 7-year-old son. But covered in blood and ash, he makes his way to his old home, and is reunited with his family. Or so it appears. Keith is trapped inside himself. Everything feels different. And the only one who can find the words to penetrate that difference is an African-American woman whose briefcase Keith inexplicably carried out of the tower.
Like Coeteze, DeLillo doesn’t waste a word; this book is more sculpted than written. And so you take it slowly, letting each phrase sink in. “The eventual extended grimness called their marriage.” “God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both.” “She was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue.”
There are sharp perceptions: “First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first.” There are a dozen memorable characters: Lianne’s dying mother and her mother’s mysterious lover, the guys in Keith’s poker game, the woman downstairs who plays Middle Eastern religious music too loudly, his son’s friends with their skywatching obsession.
But mostly there is what Keith experiences — something you may have experienced when you felt nothing but strangeness and distance: “He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off his plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.”
The oddity of flesh. Of your flesh. And then of the people around you. Not a happy place to be. Start feeling that way, and you can fall — into yourself, and forever. DeLillo, clearly, can stand to go there. More, I think he’s saying that’s where we are now, all of us, falling, falling, falling into a new life we can’t dominate or define.
DeLillo takes us into the heads of the hijackers as well. It’s the weakest part of the novel. No, the weakest section might be the end — because no matter how good the writer, once you have moved into questions like “Why him and not me?” and then “Why me at all?” you are in a zone of major alienation. At every moment in “Falling Man,” it seems as if just about any character could go crazy — and some do. There’s no easy way to end that story.
So why read this book? Maybe because it tears the scab off obscured memory and makes the pain fresh. And maybe because you are the sort of person who sees pain as a kind of growth, as a path out of the ash and darkness and into something that could be the light.
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