style

I was strangely isolated compared to my compatriots.  I had no television and chose to read as little news as possible about the event itself.  I avoided approaching the site for months.  I didn’t want to be constantly thinking about it. I did think about it—how could one not?—but my self-imposed internal exile left me free to think about it entirely on my own terms, to come to it through my own intellect and my own emotion rather than through the collective response.  This wasn’t a conscious decision, more like an instinctual withdrawing to heal after injury.  It probably saved my sanity, which had not been reliable even before that day.  I am speaking, of course, of the day the Towers fell.

As a consequence, I was unfamiliar with the picture of a man in a suit and jacket falling headfirst from the Towers after which Don Delillo named his novel, Falling Man.  I only saw the picture after Delillo’s novel was dismissively reviewed by the man, Tom Junod, who wrote the original article about this figure.  I did not read the obituaries about those who died in the attack.  I did not read the story of the terrorists who hijacked and piloted the planes.  I did not read the 9/11 Commission Report.  I didn’t think any of that relevant to how I needed to understand what happened.  I had no duty to the dead but to myself, my country, my world, in short, to the living.  Perhaps it would have been different if I had lost someone close to me or if I had been closer to the epicenter of the attack when it happened.  I did not.  I was not.  I dealt with it in my own way as best I could, as we all did.

Three figures, whose names grace the three major sections, haunt Delillo’s novel, all of them ghosts of a sort, terrorists of a sort, but they are not the central characters.  The three central figures are Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, and a member of the terror crew named Hammad, each of whom provide the point-of-view for sections of the novel.  I call them figures because it may not be appropriate to call them characters for they do not seem real in their actions or speech, do not behave as people.  Rather they seem like cyphers, unfathomable to themselves, to each other, to readers, perhaps even to their creator.

Most critics who denigrated Falling Man when it first appeared in 2007 did so for the way that it failed to honor the psychology of character.  Junod thought it disrespectful of the dead and the living to use characters, the victims of this event, in the way that Delillo does here.  I don’t remember if James Wood reviewed Falling Man, but I know why he would have disliked it, dismissed it as less than a novel, as immoral.  He would have been antagonized by the utter abandonment of psychology, of any attempt to understand or portray a human mind from the inside.

That description of Delillo’s writing isn’t entirely fair, however.  I noted a number of places where the narrative voice drifted into the perspective of his characters.  But their voices never shine through; they are subsumed by Delillo’s style with its distinctive cadence and insistent indirectness.  Delillo’s style is daring and beautiful, but it sounds nothing like human speech or human thought.  It, nevertheless, feels real, captures something true about our condition and nature as human beings, as creatures living in this particular historical moment, when fear of death has been overwhelmed by the fear of annihilation, of species extinction.  For this has always been Delillo’s true subject: life in the shadow of Hiroshima and mutual assured destruction; that’s why his greatest works explore the history of the Cold War.  These books explore the free-floating dread and nihilism that characterized the lives of so many in those years.

In Falling Man, Delillo is trying to bring the same insights and techniques he used to illuminate the apocalyptic mind of Cold War America to bear on this age of terrorism.  Delillo recognizes the break with the previous epoch while simultaneously believing that the dread and fear of today’s world is an extension, a metastasizing of the apocalyptic mind.  I believe he is right about both the break and the continuity, and Falling Man is his first, if inadequate, attempt to understand this apparent contradiction.  For me, what makes this book worth reading is precisely that for which others dismiss it: Delillo’s style, which is as engaging a portrait of the human psyche–Delillo’s own psyche–as one gets from full-bodied character development.

Delillo writes here in a flattened, affectless voice, perhaps to avoid sensationalizing or exploiting a raw historical event, but that is only the surface.  Beneath it roils powerful emotions that his characters do not understand and cannot control or contain.  In a more effusive style, his character’s feelings would become maudlin and trite melodrama.  Delillo tries to portray both the sense of withdrawal and despair that many people felt along with the grasping after meaning, the newfound capacity or desire for faith, for belief that also characterized those first years after the attacks.  The portrayal feels true but reading the novel is ultimately unsatisfying because the end of the story lies beyond the end of the novel.  We are still living that story, still trying to come to an end.  Perhaps our recent economic woes has made terrorism feel unimportant again, tangential to our lives.  But none of us, including Delillo, yet have the perspective to know what this new epoch will be like or how humanity will respond, what human life will become for those of us living in it.  So, while Falling Man may not be perfect or adequate to the task of defining our era, it is a powerful novel that evokes much that is true about the moments we first came to recognize that the times had changed.