“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 and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads….
“The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office papers flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.”
It’s not quite “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” the first line of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (an opening line that I’d place up there with “Call me Ishmael”), but it certainly captures what it was like to watch the twin towers come down on 9/11. This is the subject of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: This was the world now.
DeLillo views this incomprehensible, unexplainable geopolitical event and its human aftermath through the prism of a dysfunctional marriage, the male half of which, Keith, trudges down several flights of stairs after the first airplane hits the south tower where he works as a contracts attorney, through lower Manhattan, and to the apartment door of Lianne, the wife from whom he has been estranged for weeks. Without speaking a word they begin their marriage anew.
Most of the book centers on their halting efforts to become a family with their son, Justin, again. At least one critic has faulted DeLillo for creating such a shallow, unattractive protagonist in Keith. I took a different view: Keith was shallow before 9/11, and it’s probably entirely human of us to think that living through such an event should make Keith come through it with a determination to devote himself to humanity. But it seems just as likely to me that a guy who lives to play poker with his buddies before a tragedy would only want to play poker with his buddies after the tragedy. In my experience many, perhaps most, people are not self-reflective, and tragic events like this don’t automatically lead to self-reflection. Even so, Keith has multiple chances throughout the plot of the novel to break out of himself, as it were, but he never quite does. DeLillo offers a devastating clue as to why he doesn’t at the end of the novel.
DeLillo also makes an honest yet not fully developed attempt to understand the motivations of the hijackers. (One of the minor characters in the novel even makes a halfhearted attempt to justify terrorism on the part of the weak in an asymmetric relationship with the powerful, but this idea isn’t played out completely.) I found his attempts to understand the hijackers as three-dimensional human beings brave, and the sections where he writes about them surprisingly moving. (For this, he will surely be attacked by Bill O’Reilly any day now.)
By far the most moving accounts in the book for me were the ways that Justin tries with his friends to make sense of the attacks. If you read the excerpt in the New Yorker a couple of months ago you got the gist of this, but it nailed me again when I read it for the second time. Fifty years from now adults like Justin are still going to be struggling with how they reacted to the attacks on the twin towers, and I have to think that they’ll still be reading Falling Man to help them figure it out.
Don DeLillo is one of my favorite authors, and I’m glad that he chose to tackle this subject. I somehow come away from this book thinking that it’s not the best one he could have written about it, but DeLillo’s not-quite-best is a heckuva lot better than most. The title character, for instance, comments on American life in a way that only DeLillo could have invented.
June 18, 2007 1:01 pm | 
It’s Music Week here at BGB. Why? Why not? I’ve been spending some quality time with my Believer Music Issue, which includes a great CD. I’ve been checking out some recent shows and have been kicking around the idea of buying tickets to some shows as far away as September. It’s summer. Music is on the brain, so why fight it?
Subscribe
