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 Click for words events Only Disconnect Don DeLillo tumbles backwards at 9/11
On the Eastern seaboard the crisp autumn morning of September 11, 2001, visibility extended to the horizon in a state of "severe clear," in what novelist Don DeLillo once described as "American sunlight." Only the skies were clear; the now that followed then is twisted with debris and demolition and disinformation and DeLillo’s newest weave of his prescient fixations, of listings and decipherments, of terrorism (all of his books), the nature of crowds (notably "Mao II"), the loneliness of the man at sea within the city ("Libra," at his best). After the terrible fall, the cries, sobs, the failure of systems, what is left?
"Falling Man" is an imperfect book, necessary, but necessarily elusive. A couple chapters near the end seem to dawdle. This deceptively flat late passage has to be accommodated as he seems to lose his pace in slower movements, lesser themes, events damped in decrescendo. And with fearsome suddenness and rapacity, all heck breaks loose, returning to the opening chapters as a man who worked at the World Trade Center wanders from dust to light.
Falling plays throughout DeLillo’s work. It is the loss of control. For instance, "This was worse than a retched nightmare," the last lines of a short story by an autistic boy that closes "The Names" (1982) go, "It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world." The "falling man" of the title is a made-up, mis-dealt performance artist, a man who suspends himself above crowds in the weeks after 9/11, assuming the position of an upside-down joker on a tarot card. It’s pretty much a throwaway, a ludic joke about DeLillo’s own cleverness.
The 70-year-old novelist often plays with mis-hearing. What is heard versus what is said. The title of the opening section of "Falling Man" contains a contrivance, a mis-homonym that cuts like a joke. In the "days after the planes," children, the outsize interior life of which recurs: "Damn kids with their goddamn twisted powers of imagination," whisper in abiding fear of a man named Ben Lawton. (Say it a few times.)
The gifted and autistic are privileged in DeLillo’s work, boys, mostly, and a girl child in "White Noise" who murmurs brand names in her sleep, reserving her greatest hush of awe for "Panasonic." An elderly mother who has begun to lapse into senescence, iterates a DeLillo triad. "Pictograms, hieroglyphics, cuneiform," a phrasing he dubs as having "archaic grain."
Still, the prose in his fifteenth novel tends to plainness, with fewer of the obsidian constructions of earlier books. Yet the writing is taut and spring-loaded, first there is the lull of commonplace and then a crack, a word that focuses your attention like the tip of a whip. These careful phrases compelled me to re-read the opening ten pages for three days, each placed with delicious quirk. "Ungainly…Buckling rumble…The high smoke…A soft awe of voices…Scaled in ash, in pulverized matter." Plain words, even monosyllabic, marshaled with urgency toward the passing moment that also contains the ineffable. The effect could be precious and grandiosity is always nearby. Yet. But.
In the days after, a character works with men and women with early onset Alzheimer’s. They are to write stories. They want only to write stories about "the planes." The book considers various forms of "slow waning," contrasting the sudden and apocalyptic with other mortal fears, connecting 9/11, Alzheimer’s, the mind of a child misconnecting, disremembering. To remember. To never forget. To forget.
An ex-husband arrives on the stoop of the once-wife. Disquisitions furl and snap, as always with DeLillo’s free-associative characters, middle-class American clowns who share a can’t-think-must-speak numbness with much of Beckett’s aviary. The man sums up, "We're ready to sink into our little lives" how many days "since the planes"? There is an overintimacy of close moments, detail as immersion, but also abeyance, "the dust of stray sensation." Sensation and errant perception, as always in DeLillo, are everywhere. ("There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls," someone thinks of an apartment.) The characters yearn for connection. The particulars of intimacy conceal-reveal: of relations, of duration, of prose and fuck: "Come out wearing something," he said, "So I can watch you take it off." And: "She described her position in bed, curled up, hand between her legs, or body spread wide above the sheets, phone on the pillow, and he heard her murmuring in the double distance, hand to breast, hand to pussy, seeing her so clearly he thought his head might explode." And the plaintive but goosebump-evoking: "She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation."
DeLillo’s prose is a stylized affair, far from realism. Consider the familiar gnomic reductions to a roux of rue: "Everything now is measured by after"; "You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk"; "Most lives make no sense." He achieves effects other novelists can’t. "The energies of sheer weather"! In context, that phrase amazes, capturing the banal as brilliant, radiant, even, in less than a breath.
Temporal play, grammars of duration and deviations of memory and anticipation run through DeLillo’s body of work. He is a great writer for many reasons, and this line is one fine instance: "Every sin of your life is forgiven in the second to come." This book is not to be doubted.
[NOTE: The last line is quoted several places inside "Falling Man"—it is the opening line of the Koran.]
"Falling Man"
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, $26, 246 pages
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