i finished this and i’d like to hear what you guys think. i was somewhat underwhelmed. it’s a good book, but it didn’t seem to me significantly different from the other books published so far on 9/11 on this side of the ocean(s). the themes it centers on seem to have already been explored by others: the haunting of memory (extremely loud, the writing on the wall), the deterioration of memory (the zero), dysfunction in the nuclear family as metaphor for/locus of national dysfunction (the zero, a disorder peculiar to the country), traumatized children (all of the above), writing and production of language (extremely loud, writing on the wall), translation (writing on the wall), aging (extremely loud); what else?
delillo is, of course, a superb, even superior writer, and his style has a disjointed, mesmerizing, essential quality that makes the book worth reading regardless of repetition. it it totally possible that, years from now, when the other books will have receded into collective forgetfulness, this will be the american 9/11 book. now, it felt a bit redundant to me.
the part i liked best and thought most original and most vintage delillo was keith’s poker obsession at the end. the dissolution of the person into a mindless but purpose-giving routine; the attraction to fate and the desire to control it/toy with it; the intensity of the claustrophobic casino locales; the all-masculine absorption: very good. i also loved the Falling Man. i loved that he jumped with a fixed (non-bungee) cord, that his body was wracked by the jumps, that after jumping he stayed in a fixed position that mimicked the original falling man, that he died of a (banal) heart attack. i loved the morandi paintings on lianne’s mother’s wall, because i like morandi (though i was slightly annoyed by the facile assimilation of morandi’s vertical structures with the twin towers). and i loved these word sequences:
“the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible” (about memory) 30
“the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows” 30
“the puppetry of human desperation” (about the Falling Man) 33
“a whisper of self-disclosure” (what keith feels when his post-9/11 second chance makes him happy and elated) 66
“something people do, all of us, in one form or another, in the off moments of living the lives others think we are living” (about keith’s colleague rumsey’s compulsions) 121
“she could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach” (when the Falling Man jumps right where lianne is standing) 168
“he had to learn to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit” (the bum coming upon the Falling Man in upside-down resting position) 168
“she became whatever they sent back to her. she became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, with her fundamental meaning, her state of being” (lianne when she travels to cairo) 184
“maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her — one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white” (about martin) 195
“landfill of accumulated mail” (about accumulated mail) 213
“to feel the calm that marks a presence outside the nonstop riffs of the waking mind” (lianne in church) 233
“the whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now” (Rumsey badly hurt in the WTC) 243
what else?
Off to Cape Town tomorrow! I’ll post upon return in a couple weeks! Best to all! Exclamation!
i just updated my original non-post on Falling Man. your thoughts?
I’m about halfway through–I’ll post soon.
I completely agree with you Gio. The novel grew on me over time but it was hard to filter 9/11 through DeLillo’s dispassionate narrative style. This cool, detached, emotionally distanced novel seems almost antithetical to the other novels listed in your post Gio, and I find that intriguing. I guess I want the emotion, the darkly comic disruptions and other forms of messiness that Ken Kalfus or Jonathan Safran Foer offer up (DeLillo’s novel is infused with a sense of entropic decline but the actions depicted feel so detached from the world). Still, Falling Man strikes me as an elegy not so much for the horrific events of 9/11 or the world of pain suffered by the survivors (locally, nationally and globally) but for a way of life that, seemingly, appears to be vanishing (and, perhaps, that is a good thing). The emphasis on retreat–retreat from the family, god, politics, the clock, history, Western civilization; retreat from world within the simulacrum of a Las Vegas casino, and the retreat from the world via alzheimer’s disease (“From this point on,” a doctor tells Lianne, “it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns.” And this statement seems to reflect, allegorically, the mood or tone of the entire novel). Even the life and death of the artist, Falling Man, publicly performs anxiety inducing “retreats,” yet his work in no way seems to address the events with which the characters in the book are wrestling (everyone in this book seems to live in a closed world). Perhaps that’s Delillo’s point . . . that it is impossible to represent such stuff adequately but try we must. I don’t know. Stuff I liked: the kids fear of Bill Lawton, the desire for the rational and numerical as located in a game of poker, the gut-wrenching return to Keith’s final minutes in the Tower, Delillo’s economy of style. Stuff I didn’t like so much: why did Florence have to be a black woman???, what the hell was Mohamed Elamir awad al-Sayed Atta doing in this novel??? My favorite quote arrives via a librarian (a tart riposte to Martin’s anti-American invective): “If we occupy the center, it’s because you put us there. This is your true dilemma. Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?” Indeed, what happens when the world retreats from America? What is on the other side?
nice points, jeff (sorry it took me a bit to reply. i had to think. i think slowly). you hit the nail on the head with your emphasis on retreat. very true. i hadn’t seen it this way but now i do. that makes sense of the morandi paintings, too. very “retreating” art. talk about entropic. and the relation between keith and his old pal at the casino, at the end? rather haunting, no? these guys who were so close yet now don’t even bother talking to each other…
and the kid, who retreats into monosyllables…
i think it’s okay that florence is a black woman. delillo doesn’t make a big deal out of it, which is as it should be. but how about the anger against the woman who plays middle-eastern-sounding music downstairs? what’s that all about? just knee-jerk rage? that’s boring, no?
lianne is much less developed as a character than keith. what is she about? she’s bumping from one person to the next, trying to find an inner core for herself, which presumably she finds at the end, though it’s hard to see what that might be.
fuck if i know why atta is in there. the bit about the terrorist is totally unintegrated.
what is on the other side of america, indeed? maybe just everyone else, de-starbucked-ized.
Yes, Lianne is not a very interesting character (opaque I’d say, but not in a way that drew me in). I did like that entire sequence with Falling Man at the train tracks–very well-written–but Delillo pushes Lianne into the background (allowing the men and boys up front), and whatever she and Keith were dealing with before 9/11 also gets pushed to the side. I guess that’s why Florence bothered me; there is something about her blackness (and her 9/11 connection) that makes her more “authentic” than Lianne. It’s pure cliche (and maybe even drivel) but Florence has more soul and I thought that was a bit much.
i loved the scene at the train tracks, too. when delillo says, about the man with the tire who comes upon the falling man in resting position, that “he had to learn to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit,” i thought it was perfect. it’s so brilliantly said. it’s the line between sanity and madness. madness is when there is no crack in the world for some things to fit.
yeah, i get what you mean about florence. good point.
lianne has a lot of potential as a character, being someone who concerns herself with writing. she also appears a lot — maybe more than anyone else? — yet her edges remain blurry. it’s as if delillo could feel her more as an idea than as a person.
the language of this book is spectacular. is there anyone else who writes like this in the english world?
I just finished this book and I find myself impressed by a number of fragments—the description of the rituals of purity that Keith’s poker club indulges in (I remember my own ritualistic poker nights, though they tended to go in the other direction),the precise capturing of casino anonymity and absorption, Rumsey’s obsessive behaviors, the children’s secrets, the horrific events in the Tower itself and Keith’s dazed return to his family. I don’t find at all convincing or particularly compelling the interplay between Nina and Martin, or Hammid’s participation in the terrorist planning. I do not really know what to make of The Falling Man–my first feeling is that it’s rather too arty and cryptic for my taste. Delillo completely avoids confronting the media frenzy/overload that greeted the event (these people are so self-enclosed that they never encounter a newspaper,magazine or television program?)–instead he confronts it by means of a kind of conceptual art event, which smacks somewhat of highbrow posturing. Though I’m willing to suspend or modify this judgment based on further thinking. Lianne’s work with the Alzheimer’s patients has a moving aspect but, like the episodes with Florence, it’s rather heavy with Significance…I’m intrigued by Jeff’s idea that the novel is elegaic, but for what exactly? for comfortable self-absorbed New Yorkers? Or for the ideological screen that once made them impervious to any sense of history or threat? That made most of us feel impervious to these forces? I am not saying that DeLillo is in any way nostalgic for this screen…rather he is concerned with the consequences of its shattering, which appear to take shape for these people as the choice between living “serious, engaged” lives or remaining in the mode of the rootless cosmopolitan. The attack on NYC puts forward the issue of roots rather forcibly. But, as Keith particularly demonstrates, feeling the demands of the world in a flash of trauma, both personal and historical, does not necessarily entail a magic ability to center oneself in “family,” “work,” etc. Hence, the appeal of the autonomous, all-encompassing and anonymous world of professional poker for Keith–I like particularly the passage where we discover the reasons for his refusal of the private games, with all their disruptive extraneous elements. I have to give the novel more thought over the next few days, and think about your comments here. I’ll just finish by noting that the book brings to mind very much one of my favorite passages from the book by Adorno Minima Moralia (I’m taking “dwelling” here in its largest meaning):
I think DeLillo would appreciate the ironies at work in this exchange.
Michael I like your take on roots (rootlessness), dwellings, and the shattering of an ideological screen. The idea that everyone is wandering–falling–away from something permanent, or at least the illusion of permanence, is interesting to me. But I do wish this novel had worked a little harder to say something a bit more substantial. Then again, each of us has something substantial to say so maybe that’s what decent literature does (or am I simply projecting my desire for another White Noise or Libra onto Delillo’s less than satisfactory novel).
the insubstantial exchange on michael’s logging in problems, which i just deleted, didn’t give me a chance to comment on this passage of michael’s, that i found very astute:
so true. delillo shows very well how miraculous healings (the healing of a relationship, in this case, or the healing of a restless man from his restlessness, etc.), even when effected by pain rather than enlightenment, are ephemeral.
i thought of you while i read the book, michael, and i tried to guess what bits you’d like. i did pretty well.
Okay, late to the game, but hopefully I can still play. This may be long–I’ve got some time on my hands–but I’ll try to block it up into clear headings etc. And I promise it will be very much engaging with all of your intriguing comments, even as I also riff/ramble on other stuff of my own.
–DELILLO: well, the overdetermination of my approach to this novel deserves some attention. Here’s a guy I’ve read almost everything by, whose work repeatedly circles around the problems of how we represent in a world where representation divorces us from real engagement. Sports (End Zone, the astonishing baseball opening of Underworld), music (Great Jones Street), cinema (Running Dog), conspiracies (Running Dog, Players, Libra), art (White Noise, Mao II), crowds and mobs and terrorism (Mao II), math and physics(Ratner’s Star), language itself (The Names), the body (The Body Artist), and always always always writing — he ceaselessly tracks how forms of meaning try to retreat from or contain/capture the experiences of reality and the rush of history, and how each of these forms generally fail to allow us the retreat.
[I get struck by the Falling Man in this novel, who does at first seem like a cheap high-brow concept, as Michael notes, except that I found the impact of his performances startling and emotional . . . and so did he, it seems; his suicide struck me as an explicit reminder that our representations even at their most abstract cannot escape the messy burden of "things". The pleasure of "creating a structure out of willful trivia" (98) parallels the perils and burdens of trying to order and pattern the multiplicity of history.]
It always strikes me that DeLillo runs right up to the Modernist notion that we can never capture the reality of “things” (and how often does that word occur in this novel, a thumb in the eye of precision and particularity?). But I don’t see him engaged in that (for me dull) repetition of the ineffability of it all; instead, I see the postmodern move, where given this flood of sense-makings, the goal is to see how the represented is our source for very real physical and emotional and political engagements. (A concern made most literal in White Noise, where a pill to ease the fear of death makes language not representation but reality, “bullets flying” sending the pill-taker terrified to the floor.)
This event seems born for a writer like DeLillo, an irony which seeps up under every detail of his writing, in some ways wringing out the impact of the novel for me. (I may be the reader born to read this novel of this event for which this writer was made.) I see all the repetitions with other accounts, and like Gio I think that represents certain limitations in conceptualization, as if (and this is an insight I think DD continually returns to in his fictions) the forms of representation too often reduce too neatly to recognizable, palatable patterns. As if there’s no escaping the iconicity of certain images, the overwhelming force of such images and certain plots and patterns — the writer, every (American? ‘Western’? reader forced to repeat.
–IMAGE VS. PLOT — On the other hand, the novel plays like a collage of images. DD is skeptical of plots, patterns which seem so moralizing, so “magnetic” — “Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point” (174), and when terrorists and assassins find plots so well-crafted to their purposes, what is the novelist to do? Throughout there are images — the hanging still Falling Man, the photographs, the still life on the wall — which run counter to the overdetermined rush of plot, which freeze and force a different kind of engagement. Admittedly, pictures also open us to overdetermined illusions, Lianne noting how her appreciation of many images came out because “she was probably inventing a context” (142), an illusion of containment in the picture (“something hidden in the painting. . . . memory and motion”, 210) or a “a matter of false distinctions” (watching sports footage, 211) but there’s also a goal to keep liminal, between the static shot and the closed linear rush of plot — “You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition. . . . Your face is your life. But your face is also submerged in your life. That’s why you don’t see it. Only other people see it. And the camera of course” (115).
–WIT — it’s perhaps an icy pleasure, but I could also pull out any thousand phrases or sentences or small scenes that dazzled me, or even made me smile. “Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means” (67). Bill Lawton, speaking in monosyllables. That seems key: if this novel works, it works by fragmenting, at the level of plot, chapter, character, and sentence — even as we see the shadows of the “event” framing and organizing everything in the novel, we also have a narrative not wholly organized by/through/in terms of the event. (Although it also cannot avoid the “magnetic” force of that plot, eh?) That may be why it doesn’t — at this moment, as Gio suggests? — wholly work for me; the shadow of the towers falling is far too controlling. The novel has less vigorous effect on my understanding because I can’t seem to escape what I “already know”, can’t seem to find any reconceptualization despite the formal play of the novel. But this may very well be my failing, my overdetermined approach both to this event and to this writer’s work…
–That all said, I did find this moving. Even when you know that shadow, DeLillo’s final images were powerful for me, and the closing paragraphs returned me to the event in a way not “redemptive” (bleah) or consoling but powerful in a different way. Perhaps he does something to return us to the visceral but mysterious/ambiguous force of the event, after–despite–so much narrating and representation?
–Atta’s presence didn’t bother me, ‘though I found the terrorist plotting so reminiscent of his Oswald that it seemed interesting in how uninteresting and familiar the planning was. (Not exotic and horrifying, not “other” but all too familiar?)
But my favorite Atta is in a South African novel from this last year called _Green-Eyed Thieves_ by Imraan Coovadia. (And now I veer far from DeLillo, sorry.) The novel accounts the criminal shenanigans of a family of cons, forgers, crooks outside Johannesburg — it riffs on SA stereotypes of the Muslim/Indian population as conniving, money-hungry, cheap bandits — almost thumbing its nose, playfully inhabiting the stereotypes. Well, this gang of crooks hits the road and ends up forging documents for Atta and his crew; Atta pops up, eyes heavily lined by kohl, ambiguously flirting with the male narrator. Before being revealed as terrifying, he’s cartoonish …. this kind of parodic rewriting often strikes me as usefully subversive — Atta’s not a figure of exotic horror nor is he simply mocked (as in Martin Amis’ short story of Atta’s afterlife, forever doomed to relive the day before 9/11, suffering from constipation). Or, pointing back up to the above, the plot of Coovadia’s novel escapes the recognizable patterns of 9/11 fiction in ways that might be more challenging than any attempt to “make sense” of the events. Maybe?
Mike–You provide a lot to consider here. My initial response is to agree with most of your analysis but to express a certain dissatisfaction, stemming from the feeling that Delillo is illustrating these various ideas rather than realizing them for the most part—but I’ll clarify when I have more time to mull this over.
i have been getting ready to respond, somewhat, to mike’s comments, and in the meantime michael’s opened a new, wide-open thread, and then mike posted a mega-post about south africa that i have not yet read because i need to keep focused on <em>falling man</em> if i want to respond…
i dunno, mike. i read your comment and i like what you say, but i can’t escape the impression that there is nothing to left to say in america about 9/11. it was brave of delillo to try, and maybe, as you said, it was necessary too, but it is way too soon. the event is still very loud in our ears. it has its own narrative and ideological pull. its gravitational force is tremendous. any fiction about it is sucked right into the vortex, disappears.
no one can compete with the master narrative of 9/11. not now. there’s only room for side-narratives, other points of view, marginal readings.
delillo should have resisted the temptation to write this book. he should written another one, instead, one that, as michael hints, engages with the stories we are telling ourselves about 9/11. he should have brought in the media.
the media, the pr, is the other 9/11 american story. that’s the story that hasn’t been told yet, as far as i know. i would love to read that novel, written by delillo.
Actually, Gio, I’m with you. While I think there’s much worth reading in DeLillo’s novel, I don’t think it escapes the gravitational pull of that ‘master narrative’ right now. In some years’ hindsight it might appear more effective than it does now; now it seems less challenging than some of the other novels–I’m still kind of infatuated with Kalfus’ and Walter’s respective, more corrosive readings. (I was also trying to ramble my way into a point about DeLillo–it isn’t just that this event has a dominant narrative; it’s that this event’s dominant narrative so echoes so many of his dominant, repeating concerns, that everything seems overdetermined: what he represents and how he represents equally predetermined.) Still…there is something worth grappling with in this one. I like its resistance to psychology; I like its tendency, even as it moved me, to avoid the kind of catharsis more available in Schwartz or McInerney, or even Foer.
I just picked up Susan Faludi’s book about post-9/11 culture. In a nutshell, her argument is that rather than grappling with the particularities of this event and the world now, America’s retreated into a dream of traumatized, anxious worry about the “barbarians” at the gate–a return to the captivity narratives and revengers’ tales of the American West, which also gained popularity during the Cold War ‘fifties. (She keeps seeing references to “The Searchers”, for instance.) It’s an intriguing take–and it gets at what we’ve circled around in a number of these posts. The turn to trauma, the collapse into a dominant master narrative, the desire for some kind of agency (the ‘active’ protagonist versus those at the mercy of terrorists).
Still, I did enjoy DeLillo in relation to all these other texts, and I have a feeling that if I’d read far fewer other novels, this one would have had more impact. But your point nails the major problems here.