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Don DeLillo
specializes in writing about a certain class of spiritually
empty Americans who try to find satisfaction in the superfluous
and ephemeral, and what happens when American culture clashes
with the desire for something deeper and more meaningful.
In that way, it's fitting that DeLillo's new novel Falling
Man, is about 9/11.
DeLillo
is among those famous American writers that many readers know
but haven't read. Yet many writers—David Foster Wallace,
Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Franzen to name but a few—cite
him as a major influence. Maybe he's little-read because he's
unclassifiable—post-modern with a writing style firmly
rooted in traditional literary fiction. Characters speak in
highly stylized, non-naturalistic ways, and there are no experimental
aspects to his structure. DeLillo has delivered much of the
same with Falling Man.
Readers
first meet protagonist Keith Neudecker walking away from the
wreckage of the World Trade Center—"It was not a street
anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near
night. He was walking north through rubble and mud…." Covered
in ash and blood, and carrying someone else's briefcase, he
heads for his estranged wife's uptown apartment. Keith, his
wife Lianne, and their son Justin seem to drift through the
subsequent months and years, all living together but only
connecting briefly, like flying debris. Keith begins an affair
with the woman whose briefcase he's discovered, a fellow World
Trade Center survivor, but even that is short-lived.
Everyone
in the book looks death in the face, but this doesn't spur
any of the characters to any sort of instant spiritual epiphanies.
As the world around them falls apart, emotional rigor mortis
sets in. Keith's affair seems to end because he wants to keep
emotions at arm's length. Lianne rails against a neighbor
who plays loud music. They do their best to try to hold onto
their neat and tidy lives.
The characters
are typical DeLillo characters—well-educated, well-off,
aloof and distant. Keith and Lianne don't belong to any particular
time or place, or, more accurately, they belong to a lost
place and time—the suburban 70's. They never quite become
fully-realized characters. During dialog sections, it can
be difficult to tell who is talking. This is one of the oddities
of DeLillo's writing—it's almost as if the book itself
is the only character, having philosophical arguments in its
head.
The tragedy
affects the family in strange ways—Justin and his friends
scan the skies obsessively searching for "Bill Lawton" (a
mishearing of bin Laden), which his mother only hears about
from one of the other parents; Lianne becomes obsessed with
a performance artist, the Falling Man, whose art consists
of dressing in a suit and jumping off of buildings and bridges,
tethered by a bungee cord; Keith, encouraged by survivor's
luck, stops working and tries to make a living playing poker.
All of this is interspersed with a few flashback chapters
from the point of view of one of the 9/11 hijackers, Hammad,
but the narrative lines merge at the end of the novel. Unlike
his American counterparts in Falling Man, Hammad is
living his life to the fullest—he has a girlfriend and
he enjoys his time in Florida while he waits for the day when
he and his fellow jihadists strike.
Falling
Man is an engrossing reading experience, but the protagonists'
lives offer no solace to the reader. Their big breakthroughs
never come. Keith and Lianne live together but never bond.
Ultimately, perhaps Keith's and Lianne's lives are as senseless
as the attacks.
(June,
2007)
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