don delillo’s falling man

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?

blankets!

unbelievable. i picked up this book again today and just finished it. i’m so happy, and not a bit disconsolate. it’s a really nice, even great book (i am not sure my praise counts for much, because i have no experience at all with graphic novels, but i enjoyed it very much). i think i started to be able to deal with it better when young craig becomes a teenager. looking back on childhood from the privileged (?!) place of adulthood, one cannot but feel it as a cussed state. maybe that’s just the way we feel about our own childhood, because, now that i think of it, i don’t perceive my friends’ and sisters’ children as unhappy qua children (some of them are not very happy, but that has identifiable causes that cannot be lumped into a generic “they are children”). but i do know that if i think of myself back then, i feel so utterly, unspeakably powerless, so borne by other people’s whims and wishes and intentions, so out of control of my own life at the most basic level (what and when to eat, when and where to sleep, when to use the bathroom, when to play, when to study, when to do anything really), that i want to weep for myself.

and this is the gist of the childhood’s depictions of craig thompson in this book and allison bechdel in fun home (which i’ll absolutely have to go back to now). i think that the whole of blankets can be read as a portrayal of the narrator’s sense of his smallness — in his own home, in his bed, in front of his parents and molesting baby-sitter, with his brother, at school, in his church, in his town, in the landscape, with his first love, with faith. it’s all too big, too important, too imposing, too strong and powerful, too much for skinny, sweet-tempered, gentle, almost feminine, inadequate craig, who is in fact frequently depicted in the comics as swallowed by things. sometimes these swallowing things are his physical surroundings; sometimes they are the ghosts of his imagination: the horror of damnation, the paisley, vortex-like ecstasy of love and desire.

blankets, of course, are all over the novel, from the beginning scenes, when craig shares his bed with his brother, to the ending scenes when he finds raina’s quilt and falls blissfully asleep inside it. the biggest blanket of all is the snow, whose softness, gentleness, purity, and joy play such a great and lovely part in this novel. it makes me really sad to be living in miami (and i do have lovely childhood memories of snow, so that was nice).

i did not expect to find graphic novels (or is it this one?) so deeply sensual — not necessarily in the sexual sense, though craig’s sexual awakening in raina’s bed is very powerful — but in the sense that one feels so fully captured by the images, wanting to look at them over and over, really enjoying the lines, the bodies, the limbs, the hands (craig’s hands are everywhere), the hair (ditto). i found myself really taken by craig’s body, both as a child and as an adolescent. i am impressed by the fact that the author of such a vulnerable book should choose to represent himself in the style of a japanese cartoon character with long shiny black hair, a beautiful and serene face, a fetching rail-thin body. i was totally taken by craig’s hair — the way it arranges itself around his face, the way he pushes it back around his ear, the way in which his hands are often caught in it. craig, in other words, depicts himself as incredibly attractive, and i find this very interesting in a book in which the protagonist/narrator/author seems to perceive himself as such a fragile, small, vulnerable thing.

at the end, i think i feel sorry for craig thompson. i don’t know if his intention in writing this book was to have his readers feel sorry for him, but that’s the way i feel. his picture in the back flap, so serious, so sad, reinforces my feelings. why is craig thompson so sad?

blankets: i fail again

i started reading blankets today and, jeff, you’re right, it’s excellent. damn, graphic novels. who knew such great stuff existed out there? just wanted to say, though, that i cannot keep on reading it, not because i hate coming-of-age stories, but because they really depress the shit outta me. i am too much of a psychological weakling, i suppose, to deal with stories of growing up miserable (and, i imagine, soaring above the misery at the end, at least enough to write a great and successful book about it!). i already had to bail out of reading fun home, so this is reading failure #2. sorry, guys, and sorry to you, jeff. hope y’all can still go ahead and read this great book, and discuss it with joy. feel free to open a new thread, jeff.

Graphic Text

OK, so go out and find Craig Thompson’s Blankets and read it; we’ll discuss. I choose it because it contains elements of Christian identity formation and I know that makes Reynolds uncomfortable, but I also think it is a beautifully lyrical work of literature (sorry Gio but its a coming-of-age narrative). I’ll post some stuff later to get the conversation started.