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?

neil bissoondath’s the unyielding clamor of the night

there are writers who build novels out of sideways glances. i mean those glances that allow you to see something you cannot see if you look straight on. it happens sometimes and it’s strange. i haven’t had in a while. maybe you know what i mean.

this book is built of sideways glances. until towards the end, you don’t quite know where it’s going. you are not really sure what each scene contributes to the whole and how bissoondath came up with it (i do this a lot: i imagine writers at their desks writing up scenes; sometimes what they are doing is clear to me, sometimes it’s completely opaque).

arun, a young man with a missing leg and a college degree decides to chuck the thriving family business in the capital of his unnamed south-east-asian island and travel to the poor, war-torn, beleaguered south to teach children. once there, he settles into a bare-bone shack built of cinder blocks and a galvanized tin roof and bravely starts the business of gathering pupils for his school. there have been previous teachers, of course, but they have all left. the suspicious villagers believe he will soon leave too. fortunately, he doesn’t need to go door to door. the school comes with a large, handsome bell the sound of which will attract the children. and the children do come. but the village is so poor that families cannot afford to let able kids go to school. so arun gets the disabled one — those who miss arms or legs or whatever little mental skill is required to work the fields. he does get a few good ones, but the disabled are the norm.

the physically disabled children of the village are disabled because they stepped on land mines. it takes a while for the novel to get around to telling us the reason for arun’s missing leg, but it’s much less dramatic. he was born with one leg that didn’t develop. his parents and the doctors decided it was better to cut it off and give little arun a prosthesis. he has no memory his leg. the amputation occurred when he was very young.

this may or may not be a metaphor for the island’s south. like arun’s leg, and like the south of so many parts of the world, this south never had a chance. parts of it are now in the hands of fierce rebels (the “boys”), while other parts are controlled by an apparently benign but clearly equally fierce military. there’s a government program that allows two percent of the southerners to get sponsored jobs in the north. needless to say, the two-percent rule is despised with equal vehemence by the northeners and the southerners. both hate the pariah population it creates.

the difference between northerners and southerners is characterized in no other terms than geography (there may be one reference to hair at some point). both people speak the same language, look the same, have the same customs. there’s no reference to accents or any other distinguishing feature that i remember. two percenters are solely determined by class. they are dirt poor. they’ll do any job to get out of the abject south.

as arun makes friends with the not-unfriendly local population, he’s also befriended by the army, which lodges in barracks some distance from the village. in particular, he makes friends with the general’s second on command, an intelligent, sophisticated, well-meaning officer called seth whom he met on the train on which he made his journey south. because he’s the school’s teacher and because he’s an educated northerner, the army treats him as one of them. he, however, doesn’t want to be “one of them.” as the villagers take him closer and closer into their fold and their confidence, arun needs to decide between what he is and what he wants to be.

the novel explores the dodgy, shady, dangerous territory that allows the privileged, the northerners of the world, to shuttle between worlds, a territory mostly barred to those others who live in poverty and are the object of pity, contempt, or charity. while two percenters can cross into the world of privilege only at fantastic personal cost, people like arun need little to gain the trust and warmth of the needy. the terribly underprivileged are in no position to refuse benevolence. and why would they want to? there is no hope in the place where they live.

bissoondath has no interest in portraying the villagers as noble or good. he has no interest in any vast generalization. his characters are deep and rich and subtle. by this same token, the army, with which arun maintains an overtly friendly if wary and sometimes unhappy relationship, may be a nasty institution, but its members are not necessarily nasty. seth, in particular, is a sympathetic character, mostly because he genuinely likes and cares for arun. everyone likes and cares for arun. he’s a young idealist with a plastic leg and no story behind. he’s prime material for projection and manipulation.

even though it proceedes slowly and by sidaways glances, the unyielding clamor of the night ends with a fantastic bang. finally, bissoondath turns his gaze (arun’s gaze) to those fleeting things he had allowed us to see only indirectly, and the sight is terrifying.

i am constantly worried by questions of privilege, partly because i make it my business to be socially active. what do we do when we help others? what do we do when we don’t help others? this book opens up this particular can of worms and does good work with it.

the reluctant fundamentalist

i’m half-way through this, and i would like to reprise some of the points mike and michael made in the extremely loud thread.

i wonder if one can talk about tragedies one has been a part of in any other ways than in personal terms. you discuss your reaction to the pain. the reaction can be simple or immensely complicated, depending on the depth of your intellect. that’s fine by me. the global can be a part of it, but the global, too, if you are writing a novel, is personal. novels need characters. you like kalfus, mike, because a disorder peculiar to the country confounds these boundaries. but it does so by making the characters into metaphors. are they alive? i don’t remember. they are certainly not likeable. we don’t identify with them.

we may have had this conversation before in the film blog. identification of some kind seems essential to me to the enjoyment of fiction and maybe of all texts. you resist this. i don’t believe you.

i just read black swan green and for a bit i couldn’t do anything with it, because there is very little an english schoolboy growing up in the 80s and i have in common. even the stuttering, which we both share, wasn’t enough to make me identify with the character. then jason taylor, the boy, brings in the falklands, thatcher, the first iraq war (he does, right? i suddenly feel insecure about the last). the moment he mentioned the falklands he got me. i can relate to a narrative that opens up to global tragedy. i noticed a dramatic click in me (dramatic because it was almost physical, like a double take of the inner eye). suddenly, i cared about jason taylor. i cared about him a lot. the book got funny and alive for me. i ended up loving it.

this is a very psychological way of approaching the act of reading, but i believe we all read this way, to some extent. you’ve got to care.

what i find dissatisfying in extremely loud is not that it is about a family’s personal reaction to tragedy, but that this reaction is not very deep. all the characters are wrapped up in pain. a book-long description of pain is not interesting. pain must be a conduit to deeper understanding. that’s what writing is about: using pain as a conduit to deeper understanding.

i don’t think that today’s literature is more self-involved, more concerned with the personal, than literature of the past, generally speaking. in the novel, the point of entry is always the individual. but american books about 9/11 are dealing with the painful fact that american culture is itself very self-involved. what to do when you write from within a culture (and use the distribution mechanism of a culture) that cares only about itself? either you write a self-involved book, or you step back and dissolve the self altogether, making it a metaphor for something else. it’s a very difficult position for american writers. i notice them struggling with this.

i just read the part in the reluctant fundamentalist in which changez says that he was pleased by the falling of the towers in 9/11. i wonder how many people, not only outside the world, but also in america, felt the same way. when i read that passage i shivered. saying something like this is like farting in church. it’s desecration. this is what i like to see in a 9/11 book. desecration. while the event is still sacred, there is nowhere to go for the critical and creative imagination.

teaching my 9/11 class was an amazing experience for me from many points of view, but i think we were all dancing around how much desecration we could allow ourselves. lots of disclaimers all the time. it was interesting but also painful.

i am writing from a place of confusion myself because i have just become an american citizen and this simple bureacratical fact seems to have plunged me in a sort of identity crisis. hamid lives in england. could he have written this book if he had lived here? (maybe he was, when he was writing the book. i don’t know).

i am passionate about books written by bi-cultural americans like me (desai, hamid, who else?). this is a vere difficult place in which to live. i’m scared just about all the time.

(y’all should read lynne sharon schwartz the writing on the wall. even john leonard thinks it’s the best of the 9/11 novels).

what memorable books have you read recently?

i still can’t believe the miracle that is cloud atlas, one of the best books i’ve ever read. wow. why did this book lose to the line of beauty for the booker prize? how can anyone not give this book laurel and fame?

also impressive, or at least very interesting: surveillance.

and, again, maxine hong kingston’s the fifth book of peace, which, at its third reading, and after two weeks of going through it with my students, shines more and more luminous in my pantheon.

ten days in the hills

jane smiley takes ten people, sticks them together in a couple of luxury houses in the hollywood hills a few days after the beginning of the iraq war, and watches them share meals, sunbathe, talk, and have sex. this premise could lead to a boring novel, especially considering that this is a long book, but instead i enjoyed it tremendously. i think jane smiley is one of the most reliably prodigious contemporary american writers. she concocts amazing literary meals in which every tiny morsel is as tasty and interesting as a bite of the freshest, best prepared yellowtail sushi: same complexity, same delicacy, same fullness. i love her stuff. i loved horse heaven, i loved good faith, and i love this one. maybe i love this one a little bit less than the other two, but who cares? it made me tingle with pleasure at every turn.

not much happens in this book, and i suppose that writing such a long book in which nothing happens and making it so snappy and fresh must be no mean feat. the background, as i said, is the beginning of the iraq war and that sense of despondency bordering on despair we all felt when the war started who had made ourselves hoarse shouting at anti-war demonstrations. smiley’s unlikely heroes decide (well, it’s not a decision, really, just something that happens) to huddle up and while away the beginning-of-the-war doldrums with good food, good company, and good sex. if you have read boccaccio’s decameron, on which this book is loosely modeled, you will find the same sense of pleasure and titillation in the very fact of people’s togetherness when disaster is raging outside. boccaccio’s people are younger than these folks, but these people make up for age with great vitality — sexual, for sure, but also the easy vitality that seems to cling to wealthy people in comfortable homes (or is it a california thing?). there are projects to be worked out, ideas to be hatched, food to prepare, childhood dramas to rehash, stories to tell, and, of course, lots of talk about the group itself to be had. when you put a group of people together they’ll immediately create their own gravitational field, their own little civilization with its little customs, its little history, its little tragedies and triumphs.

so this is what happens here. all of these people, by the way, are hollywood people — a movie director, one of the hottest female stars, a couple of old timers, an agent –, yet their conversations are interesting, deep, and very much alive. that’s what smiley does: she makes her characters live, so that by the end of the book you feel you know them just the same way as you would if you had spent ten days with them, hanging out in their fancy L.A. homes.

there’s a lot of talk about movies, of course, of which i am not smart enough to judge the quality, and a lot of talk about war and bush and the disaster of post-9/11 america. there’s a lot of talk about sex and there’s a lot of unspoken evolution in the feelings these folks have for one another: a daughter for her mother and the mother for the daughter and for her own mother; a man for his ex-wife and for his new partner; two casual lovers for one another; an older guy for everyone and no one, since loneliness walls him inside himself, two old women who are the undisputed matriarchs of the group for everyone and the whole world; a mother for her blooming 20-year-old son. smiley looks astutely at inter-generational dealings — that uneasy mixture of good-will, respect, and condescension that flows both ways between the older and the younger. she effortlessly deals with new age philosophies, political activism, art for art’s sake, commercialized art, race, childhood hurt, parent-children love, and the thin cocoon of wealth that simultaneously protects and exposes.

i think this book came probably out of smiley’s desire to give some creative outlet at her anger at the current government. i’m glad she wrote it. none of these people are particularly attractive, but they grow in each other’s presence; and it is certainly a mark of a great writer that she can create ordinary, possibly boring people, and make you intensely interested in them.

writers under siege

anyone had to chance to read cynthia ozick’s literary rant on the april 2007 issue of harper’s? apparently she thought a good way to boost her literary legacy would be to piss on her readers and the hapless academics who, like us, read books that, like hers, have little commercial appeal.

nice.

i’ll write more on this when i’ve dug my way out of this mountain of student writing.

kiran desai’s the inheritance of loss

if a novel is a narrative that contains character/plot development, maybe this is not a novel. the inheritance of loss does not contain development because development is not in what it says, in its content, but in the way in which it slowly and patiently brings the reader to an understanding of the intricate ways in which people move in and out of civilizations, cultures, social classes, and various other affiliations (identities?). this is a book about belonging and not belonging, needing to move away and returning. it’s very much a book about home — where is home, what is home, who are the people we feel at home with. if identity is made out of social bonds, this is a book about identity.

or at least this is how i read it. listen, i like books with plots and stories that move. i like change in my novels. what kept me from setting this novel aside and moving onto the next one was the depth of desai’s intellect, the subtlety and richness of her language, her profound understanding of what keeps us moored and what instead makes us subject to the force of powerful trade winds. she is without a doubt one of those writers one is tempted to call a genius.

the best part of inheritance of loss is the very last. the plot, such as it is, quickens, and the novel’s themes ripen and finally plop onto your table in full and glorious succulence. i’ll transcribe here in full some lovely, wise passages. the first one is about “the judge,” a now retired gujerati man who received an english education under a colonial scholarship and returned to india to be a judge, which he spent his life doing, proudly and angrily swallowing a miserably undignified existence at the margins of the english-dominated judicial profession:

The judge … was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present.

i liked this passage, which comes at a very nice moment, when an old friend and colleague of the judge tries to induce him to mull over their common past, and for the first and last time in the book the judge cracks the shell of silence and furious crustiness that envelops him and speaks his mind. desai is very keen, as i’ve noticed other indian writers are, on describing the most sordid and unsavory elements of a scene: ants, cockroaches, dirt, body filth, the accumulated traces of human passage, rats. in this scene, in which the two men sit together at a restaurant, all the human and animal filth only underline the outraged indignity that permeates every moment of the judge’s life. i like this passage because i am also a fan of the merciful lies that keep the human fabric (both the fabric of the individual human mind and of the human compact) from dissolving. i visualize it as threadbare, barely holding together, and in need of much gentleness. truth is too strong a force for such thin, fragile material.

the next passage is from lola, also english-educated and very much given to english distinction, thrown for a loop when all pretenses of difference and sophistication go down the drain during the insurrection of the indian nepalese minority. it kind of touches on the same idea.

What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.

It did matter, buying tin ham roll in a rice and dal country; it did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it did matter to fly to London and return with chocolate filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended it didn’t, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with them. The wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed… They, Lola and Nani, were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations.

This latter is of course a commentary on class and privilege.

Finally, a passage from Biju — the son of the judge’s servant, recently emigrated to the US, living in squalid conditions, working slave jobs and still making more money than he would have made in a lifetime in India:

Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all; in the space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air. And yet, another part of him had expanded; his self-consciousness, his self-pity — oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, and bigfat-sized helping of small… Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience the greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

And if he continued here? What would happen? Would he, like Harish-Harry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward?

This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time.

Biju, who eventually gives up the american dream (a phrase that, if i remember correctly, is mercifully avoided in the book) and returns home, seems to me to capture very nicely something that is at the heart of the emigrant experience and maybe doesn’t get discussed much, namely the loss of one’s family. it’s deep — the loss, i mean. after 16 years, i still can’t get over it. as difficult as families are, and infuriating, or upsetting, or even damaging, they are literally a primeval given. they are people whom life has brought together in a visceral way that preceedes likes, dislikes, decisions, compatibility, or even necessity. there’s a natural belonging in family that, even in the worst cases, transcends all this. even when one remembers all the good reasons that made one get as far away from one’s family as one could, one misses it.

rereading extremely loud & incredibly close

since i’m teaching this, i just reread it. my students are loving it, but i’m liking it as much as i did the first time, which is so-so. when i first read it i gobbled it up like it was junk fiction — i couldn’t stop reading. this time i thought i’d read more slowly and reflectively, and come up with something interesting to say, but it was the same as the first time: i found the book incredibly mesmerizing, charming, and moving, but i have little to say about it. maybe the most interesting feature of this book is its postmodern playfulness and intricacy — the chronological overlapping of the three narratives that constitute it, the slow unfolding of intersecting plots, the myriad coincidences that are not coincidences, the simultaneous meaningfulness and meaninglessness of everything, the protagonists’ deep isolation in the sprawling city, the human connections they are constantly making and dissolving with each other and other people, the ineffectiveness yet indispensable quality of language, the reworking of collective tragedy in terms of personal drama, the reworking of personal tragedies in terms of collective drama, et cetera et cetera.

yet i find all this, in this book, barely more than cute. this book is so compulsively readable because it’s so cute, but when it comes to analyzing it, to teaching it, i find i have nothing to say. this same nothingness seems to have affected my students, who went from being the most vocal class i’ve ever had to being virtually mute. they are bowled over by the novel in their journals, but have nothing to say about it in class.

what is there to say about ELIC? i don’t know. i have been trying to read it in terms of trauma theory but don’t want to go there because the book is too cute, too sentimental, and it’s not a testimony in any meaningful sense of the word (that i know of). does a book have to be a testimony in order to be analyzed in terms of trauma? i think so. i think it needs to be serious, you know. trauma is serious business, after all. it leaves people and communities devastated. it ruins the mind. it ravages the land. trauma is not playful territory and i am squeamish about treating a playful narrative as traumatic.

what was foer trying to do when he wrote ELIC? was he trying to come to terms with 9/11? one of the problems here is that 9/11 is a fairly banal tragedy in this book, as tragedies go. oskar’s father, thomas, who dies in the WTC during a breakfast meeting, could have died in a host of other ways and the book wouldn’t have been very different. the national and global significance of 9/11 is never even obliquely addressed. the terrorists are barely mentioned. the collapse of the towers is tragic for oskar only because his daddy was in one of them. this is not an oversight on foer’s part. he clearly juxtaposes the terrible tragedies of the firebombing of dresden and of the nuclear bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki to the 9/11 attacks, and gives the latter, it seems to me, short shrift by making it a very personal tragedy in the life of a very sweet little boy. whereas dresden and hiroshima are presented as collective events, 9/11 is described here only through oskar’s loss of his dad. this may have something to do with the fact that the audience of ELIC is aware of the political import of 9/11 in a way in which it may not be of the occurrence, let alone the significance, of dresden and hiroshima. foer does not need to remind us what 9/11 is about. still, one wonders.

the theme of ELIC, if this book can be boiled down to one theme, is the hopelessness and agony of love. we are all destined to lose each other, both when we physically have each other and when we don’t. at the end, [SPOILERS] everyone is alone, crying him or herself to sleep or sitting in an airport with nowhere to go. oskar’s lock-and-key search leads nowhere, his father’s coffin contains love letters neither he nor anyone else will ever read, love remains undeclared, and a lot of people who could have loved each other and supported each other are locked inside their personal hells, unable to tell each other anything except through letters the addressees never even get to see. this is not to say that this isn’t a tender book, because it most certainly is. these people love each other very much, and oskar is as luminous a literary creation as any. but they also make each other very sad, or, at least, they fail to alleviate each other’s pain and keep each other good, safe, lasting company. which may or may not have anything to do with 9/11.

family guy on bin laden

one of my students alerted me to this. maybe you’ve all seen it (what do i know what people with television see?), but it blew me away. anyone knows when this aired? anything else i’ve missed?

william langewiesche’s american ground

i wrote this for my class, because i wanted to write the paper alongside everyone else (don’t ask). i think it might be good here as a review of this excellent book — excellent in spite of the fact that my review of it highlights some of its faults.

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When William Langewiesche’s serialized American Ground came out in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer and fall of 2002, it felt like meat and potatoes after a long steady diet of junk food. The American government had appropriated the discourse of 9/11 in war-like terms not twelve hours after the towers’ collapse, and held it firmly in its grip afterwards. There weren’t many alternative narratives of the event. It was terrorists attacking our way of life, Al Qaeda’s menace, and national unity: other stories were kept from seeing the light of day or weren’t written at all. So Langewiesche’s matter-of-fact, modest eyewitness account of the taking apart of “the pile” (as the WTC ruins came soon to be called by insiders) felt intensely refreshing to me. I had read nothing about the technicalities, the material details of the disaster. I was happy Langewiesche had chosen to focus on that instead of the pat rhetoric that was in every journalist’s mouth. I was happy, in other words, to be offered a different story.

Four and a half years on, however, I found that American Ground is not as revolutionary and, ahem, groundbreaking as it initially felt to me. In spite of his clear intention not to kowtow to the official narrative of pride, hate, and vengeance, Langewiesche pays it some homage. I still find the book intelligent, courageous, and fun, but I would like now to deconstruct its seemingly level-headed approach to the unbuilding of the Trade Center “pile” and show that Langewiesche felt consciously or unconsciously bound to reproduce some of themes that dominated the discourse of 9/11 then, and that to a large extent still shape it now.

As he writes in the “Afterword” to the paperback edition, Langewiesche’s emphasis in American Ground is on the “deconstruction job” (209). The word deconstruction is, of course, a loaded one. Contemporary philosophy and literary criticism use it to signify the process through which we take apart language and show that sentences and texts mean something other than what at first appears. In using “deconstruction” to mean “physical unbuilding,” Langewiesche acknowledges that his text, too, can use some taking apart.