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Review: Don Delillo - "Falling Man"
It turned out, sadly, that Don Delillo was right, some ten years in advance. In 1991, he published Mao II, in which a novelist named Bill Gray-closely modeled on Delillo himself-despairs at the increasing irrelevance of the novel. The novelist, Gray argues, used to have an important voice in society at large, a voice that could shake a sleeping public in its bed and perhaps even transform it. But now the novelist is in a new age of terrorism, and it's the terrorists, not the writers, who make "raids on consciousness," as they did in spectacular fashion on September 11 th . Delillo has been writing his own raids for more than thirty years, and he knows his audience's consciousness. His concerns are always American and usually enormous. His first novel is called Americana (1971); End Zone (1972) is about football; Great Jones Street (1973) is about rock and roll; the main character in Libra (1988) is Lee Harvey Oswald; Underworld (1997) is an 800-plus page monument to the Cold War. In each of these works, there are always large systems at work, government conspiracies, mysterious toxic clouds, the media, fame, crowds, history. Delillo's dissenting insistence that these systems can be found out and analyzed-though he does not usually suggest that they can be dismantled or neutralized-usually works in his favor; only self-styled literary mavericks now bother to dispute that White Noise (1985) is an out-and-out masterpiece. But his paranoia is judged by some critics to be his irredeemable flaw. James Wood has argued that Delillo's work proves, once and for all, the incompatibility of political paranoia with the novel, and Martin Amis cut Delillo neatly down to size in a review of Underworld, calling him America's "poet of paranoia . " But paranoia is not a monolith. After all, there is Orwell's paranoia, and there is also Woody Allen's paranoia. Delillo's particular brand of speculative, look-over-your-shoulder anxiety has been a blend of stone-faced historical investigation and a mischevious game of connect the dots, and critics tend to ignore Delillo's more lighthearted phobias. Let's try connecting some dots: Mao II is supposedly his tenth novel-Delillo insists on this-and his description of terrorists as performing "raids of consciousness" came ten years in advance of the raid itself. But it's not his tenth novel. In between Running Dog and The Names , he co-wrote a novel called Amazons under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. Delillo has never publicly acknowledged writing Amazons , and its name does not appear in the front of his other books. So Mao II is actually his eleventh novel. September 11 th . (One wonders which government agencies had a hand in that one-and just how much did Delillo know?) But like a mild joke thoughtlessly made at the expense of the recently deceased, the game sours almost immediately. September 11 th , the subject of Delillo's new novel Falling Man, is still much too close, both emotionally and politically. Al Qaeda's raid on the American consciousness claimed more than 3,000 lives in Delillo's hometown. One imagines him watching, horrified, as his paranoid nouns and adjectives exploded into events, became verbs. In Falling Man, he has jettisoned the associative mania and written a thorough, impassioned treatment of the facts at hand. Of his historical novels, Falling Man is his least paranoid to date, because a paranoid isn't paranoid if his suspicions have been confirmed. His characters are a small group, comprised of a single family and a few acquaintances. There is Keith, who is in the South tower when it is hit but opens the book on the streets of New York , running away. There is his estranged wife, Lianne. They are trying to reconcile. Their young son, Justin, spends time with his friends scanning the skies with binoculars, looking for more planes. The kids have misheard a name that keeps repeating itself on television, and so they are convinced that a man named Bill Lawton is behind everything. The final familiy member is Nina, Lianne's mother, and her lover Martin. Elsewhere, there is Florence Givens, a woman who is also in the South tower and meets Keith; a group of Alzheimer's patients who attend a weekly writing and discussion group run by Lianne; and there is the Falling Man, a performance artist who hangs upside down above New York City sidewalks, held in place by a safety cable. Delillo moves these characters in various directions-Delillo's characters are never free from their author-but his primary movement is one towards forgetting, away from remembrance. This is a dramatically counter-intuitive approach to tragedy. Conventional wisdom desperately insists that a tragedy must be remembered. It is this conventional wisdom that justifies Holocaust memorials, or oral histories, or much of the art that has been made about September 11 th in the last six years. Remembering has nearly attained the status of a moral imperative; if we forget, we erase those who are gone, as though they had never existed in the first place. If we forget, we kill them a second time. At first, Delillo's characters seem to share this worry, particularly Keith, who picks up a briefcase on his way out of the North tower-he's not sure why he does it-and then feels an enormous obligation to return it. When he finally tracks down Florence Givens, the owner, the two are attracted to each other by the mutual miracle of their survival. Keith says he felt silly making such an effort to locate her: "I thought why am I doing this without checking further because is this person even alive?" They discuss their employers, which floors they worked on. Florence mentions that her company used to be called Royer and Stans until Stans got indicted. Keith knows that there is a sonic toothbush and cigarettes in her briefcase. The scene is filled with memory in small increments, the kind of thing that brings people to tears at funerals when they remember that so-and-so loved cheerios or wore suspenders instead of a belt. Before long, the two have shared life stories and a bed, slow exchanges of self, as though each were a developing photograph of the other. As Keith leaves her apartment for the last time, she tells him what the purpose of their encounters is: "You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I'm the story." But it's not long before Keith begins forgetting the story-"His experience with Florence was brief, maybe four or five encounters over a period of fiteen days. Is that possible, only that? He tried counting the times, sitting in a taxi at a stoplight, staring at a billboard." Delillo does not resist Keith's failing memory. In fact, he wants to forget. Falling Man is suffused with frequently obvious forgetting. Only 16 pages into the novel, Keith is in a doctor's office, having bits of glass removed from his face. The doctor decides to make conversation:
"Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don't want to hear this."
It's an indelible phrase, a dead, arresting weight at the end of an increasingly kinetic description, "organic shrapnel," one that seizes the reader's eyes working their way down the page and demands a pause. It's meant to be remembered, particularly as something read. But within fifty pages, Keith thinks of something, "out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel. Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again." Later on, Lianne will realize the crucial difference between Keith and herself: "She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not." In Falling Man, as in the world, people feel that remembering makes them safe, and Keith's willingness to leave his memories of tragedy behind rather than entombing them in a monument or diary leaves him in danger. But as we will see, it will also allow him to engage September 11 th on productive terms, because September 11 th will have already been made absent to those who insist on remembering. So why forget? Forget because the thing that we try so desperately to remember-with documentaries, novels, the soon-to-be largest building in New York-isn't worth the effort. In Delillo's mind, we remember the image, not the event. September 11 th has a unique status among American tragedies in that it is defined by an image: two smoking towers in front of a blue sky. Pearl Harbor , Hurricane Katrina, the shootings at Virginia Tech-no image defines these as powerfully as September 11 th is defined by the two smoking towers. It's an image that first comes to mind when someone says "September 11 th ," even to the exclusion of lost friends or family, stories of loss, the "where-were-you-when-the-planes-hit" moment. But in the process by which an event is translated into an image, one loses something essential. Delilo's practiced obsession with visual media comes in handy as he tries to identify this something. It becomes apparent that when an event is transformed into an image, it has been made safe. Cameras have been able to identify the situation and contain it. An event becomes "news." And so remembering September 11 th is a useless enterprise, because the impoverishing process of image-making is too thoroughly implicated in memory; memory that can only happen in images cannot happen on one's own terms. In Falling Man, the characters who can't give up memory are like tourists in an art museum, casting their self-congratulatory gazes on a 2 inch digital-camera display rather than on the riot of color that hangs on the gallery wall in front of them. This analogy is particularly specific to Falling Man, where the transformation of art into image is rendered in reverse. A still-life by the twentieth century Italian Giorgio Morandi hangs in Nina's apartment, a gift from her art dealer boyfriend Martin. When Martin visits, he stands in front of the paintings and says, "I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight. . . . Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life." Lianne joins him in looking: "Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. . . . She saw the towers." Morandi is a real painter, and the painting described is a real painting, but the image isn't in the text, and this lack sends a reader with an internet connection rushing to Google to sift through Morandi's still life paintings. And there it is, and there they are, the two dark objects in the background, partially obscured, easily identified as the towers because one has been told they are the towers. But the moment that gave Martin pause, the bewildering realization that he wasn't seeing household objects, is gone. Delillo has prepared the reader to see the towers, which means that when they are finally seen they dissolve into a kind of cheap blandness. The image is there on the screen, but it's empty. Delillo finally gets down to the mechanics of this emptiness in the novel's final pages, when he also gets back to September 11 th itself, to a jet-liner slamming into the side of the South tower. Here, in the novel's finale, is one of the highlights of Delillo's long career. Right up until the final scene, Delillo keeps a tight grip on his prose-which frequently careens from page to page, heart blazing, in his other novels-almost to the point of impoverishment. But when the plane hits the building, Delillo unloads. The sentence starts in the plane, with Hammad, one of the hijackers: A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. First rolling to and fro, then spinning, then skittering with anticipatory electricity, Delillo's prose performs a thrilling feat of gymnastics, mirroring the devastating impact of the blast wave that throws Keith to the ground. He begins to find his way to an exit, then stops to try to save a man named Rumsey, who is bleeding badly: Things began to fall, one thing and then another, things singly at first, coming down out of the gap in the ceiling, and he tried lifting Rumsey out of the chair. Then something outside, going past the window. Something went past the window, then he saw it. First it went and was gone and then he saw it and had to stand a moment staring out at nothing, holding Rumsey under the arms. He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it. That "instant of something sideways," which Keith cannot stop seeing, is what we cannot stop seeing, the man in a white shirt, plummeting upside down. But it goes, is gone, before he sees it. He sees an absence, a ghost. The image that he cannot stop seeing is empty, is the white shirt Keith sees fluttering toward the earth, without the body inside it that should be there, in the beginning of the novel. What lies just behind the image is of course a person who jumped out of a tower and died, but that person has abandoned his image as surely as he abandoned his life. So what's left is that Keith doesn't see what is actually there ; he sees what there is to see , he sees his own seeing. The circular nature of the image compels Keith to keep looking-remember that he "could not stop seeing it"-because each new seeing is confirmed and then repeated by its object. When Lianne goes to bathroom to escape a conversation about what motivates the terrorists, she sums up the emptiness of the circle of seeing: "She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in a mirror." And how to even think about "moving on" if one cannot stop seeing, particularly when the seeing is so unproductive? How to manage the space between "first it went and was gone and then he saw it?" Delillo isn't sure, which can be unsatisfying. Keith, for all his forgetting, for all his recognition that a thing is gone if he has seen it, retires to Las Vegas and poker chips. Keith played a weekly poker game with three friends until two of them died in the towers, and he has not quite decided what to do instead. But my feeling is that this retreat is temporary, that Keith-and, by association, Delillo-will find their way back from the desert once they've thought things through; as Delillo has recognized, September 11 th is still too close, and we have not yet discovered a way of slotting it into a satisfying history. But Delillo, to my mind, is the first artist to make produce something that is neither a document of denial nor a cry of grief, but something really productive. If this means that he has only identified a problem, that is not an achievement to be taken lightly. And even if he doesn't come out of the wilderness with an Underworld for the 9/11 age, even if he comes back with empty hands, or even if he stays there with his card games, his trip will have been worth the expense.
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