Falling Man (2007)
4 Stars out of 5
Don DeLillo
256 pages
Don DeLillo started writing somewhat late in life after having
started his life in an Italian/Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx. Considering
his penchant for writing on the American way of life and who is it that tells
that story, it is tempting to search for some of his inspiration from these early
years. DeLillo would disagree: he points to jazz, cinema greats such as Scorcese,
Kubrick and others, and of course to certain authors like Joyce and O’Connor. He
seems to feel that historically the job of communicating to and about American
society was best held by novelists; perhaps best of all by modernist writers such Faulkner
and Hemingway or such post-modernist writers as Pynchon (a writer that DeLillo
has been both praised by and compared to by others). But after the assassination
of JFK in 1963, DeLillo feels an era was begun that consisted of a “…series of
catastrophes…” and that this created in Americans a sense of “fatality,
widespread suspicion, of mistrust…” DeLillo has perhaps compared these changes in
stark contrast to his happy and contented suburban childhood to form an opinion
of the writer as “the Bad Guy”, as someone who “must oppose systems… power,
corporations, the State, the whole system of consumption, and of debilitating
entertainments”.
DeLillo has taken up his challenge of being the “Bad Guy”
and written 17 novels. He has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in
Fiction (“Mao II” in 1992 and “Underworld” in 1998). His early novels from the
1970’s were generally light and somewhat comic in several cases, but starting
with his 8th novel “White Noise” (1985) he started down a darker
path, and he gained a critical stature that had not previously been his. He
stayed on this path with “Libra” (1988), a fictionalized account of Lee Harvey
Oswald, with “Mao II” (1991) and its account of how novelists function in a
media- and terrorist-dominated society, and with his best regarded novel, his
11th “Underworld” (1997) and its depiction of America during the
Cold War. After “Underworld” his novels begin to shrink in length and critical
approval. He has written another six novels since “Underworld”. In 2001 he
published “Cosmopolis” just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US by
Islamic terrorists. And while this book has been compared to Joyce for its
updating of “Ulysses” from Ireland to modern America, it was also criticized
for among others things being insensitive to the effects of 9/11. In 2007, his
next novel took on this daunting subject and in typical DeLillo fashion he
wound within the story of the falling of the twin towers an intimate story of a
marriage unraveling, the curious story of a performance artist (rather than
the mass media) re-telling a part of the 9/11 catastrophe, and he does it all
while employing a tone that emphasizes the desensitization to violence and to
life in general that is going on within modern America.
“Falling Man” begins with an ash covered man with an “unfocused
gaze” carrying a briefcase stumbling to a halt in the street; too tired, too
injured to go further he collapse onto the curb. Improbably, a New Yorker stops
his truck and asks if he can give the hurt man a lift somewhere. Thus begins
DeLillo’s attempt to tell a story that describes the 9/11 attack on America,
and to do it by giving “…memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling
space”. The man covered in ash is Keith Neudecker, a 39 year old lawyer that worked
in the World Trade Center. His Good Samaritan takes him to the home of Keith’s
estranged wife Lianne and their son Justin. Keith begins his physical and
emotional recovery with a reluctant Lianne. As Keith begins his recovery we
meet Lianne’s harsh-spoken mother, Nina and her European (and perhaps former German
terrorist) Martin. Keith regains his strength and seeks out the owner of the
briefcase he absent-mindedly picked up in the evacuation of the buildings. She
is Florence, a “light-skinned Black woman”. Keith begins a relationship with
Florence, not for sex but rather for the sharing of memories, the altered
reality they separately experienced in the stairwells fleeing the WTC. Lianne
spends much of her time leading an Alzheimer’s group in a therapy based on
journaling. Those in her care struggle to remember the events of their lives or
even of their day in order to complete their journals. In the latter parts of
the novel, Keith largely leaves Lianne in order to participate in a World Poker
Tournament, while Lianne has several occasions to observe a street artist
re-enacting via a safety harness an AP photograph by Richard Drew of a man
falling from one of the towers on 9/11.
This book is replete with multiple layers and artful language.
The title and characterization of Keith suggest Keith’s personality
disintegration. That Keith goes from a lawyer and amateur poker player to a
professional player by the book’s end is of course just the edge of the book’s
message. Is Keith’s reconstruction a function of 9/11 or of how its story is
told is closer to one of the core truths of this book. DeLillo’s search for a
novelist’s attempt to interpret the meaning is found in this book instead to
come from the street artist Lianne observes. There is no tenderness; there is
no meaning, only spectacle to these acts. Like the mass media that reproduced
the photograph of the actual falling man for a short period after 9/11, there
is only the cold depiction of a man falling to his death. What meaning there is
from that event will not come from the photograph or from the performance
artist. There is only a numbing of the collective mind to the violence and loss
of innocence that took place on that day. The terrorist and the mass media work
together to create on a large scale Keith’s “unfocused gaze”.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the three children in “Falling
Man”, one of which is Keith’s son Justin. He and two peers spend their
afternoons staring through binoculars for “Bill Lawton”. It is with difficulty
that the reader and Keith decipher that the children impressed with the fear
and confusion of 9/11 are looking for bin Laden. The kids explain they learned
Bill Lawtons’ name from the TV. The poignancy of their fear is one thing, but
the continual distortion of events by the mass media is yet another. This distance
and disconnection between the people, the events of their lives and those that
tell the details of those events speak of the times we live in. Fragmented
language and distorted vision are the new tools of communication. The acts of
terrorists are certainly bad enough in themselves, but this cloud of misinformation
and obfuscation is quite another. We live as a people with an unfocused gaze. Courtesy
of the mass media’s re-telling of events, we like Lianne’s Alzheimer patients struggle
to remember the actual events of our lives, or at least their true meanings and
emotional impact.
DeLillo’s desire to tell stories such as 9/11 free of “the
mercies of analogy or simile” reaches its climax in those stairwells of the
WTC. Opening the book as he did with an anonymous Keith falling to his knees in
the ash-covered streets of Manhattan, out of context and meaning; DeLillo gives
the meaning and the emotion felt by the immediate victims as some rushed down
and others up the stairwell. Here the reader finds and feels the pain and
confusion of the people. There is no analogy or simile, only simple experiences
that have value for us all. DeLillo amply demonstrates with these closing pages
that the novelist can still tell the true story of an America as “…a time and
space of falling ash and near night”. DeLillo has been criticized as having
left the broad panoramas of his earlier masterpieces (Underworld, Mao II, Libra),
but by focusing on the close-ups of domestic life and its tediousness coupled
with glimpses of the how the outside world crosses with the individual, he
accomplishes something new and valuable about world views. Is the average
American re-constructing himself from a group mentality, one created by the
mass media – watching the politics of the new millennium, does one really have
to wonder? DeLillo has taken up his challenge to the writers of the world and
sounded both his clarion call to wake up, and has at the same time created an
empathic picture, a small one of those that experienced 9/11 first hand. This is
a book well worth reading for its exploration of the events of 9/11 as well as one
from which to learn about the underworld of modern life.
