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Literary Review
FICTION
Grappling with fear and loss
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN
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A subdued yet compelling read.
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Falling Man; Don DeLillo, Picador U.K., £16.99.
They were called “the jumpers”. Those who leapt from the World Trade Center soon after the first plane crashed into it on September 11, 2001. They jumped to escape the smoke and fire, the collapsing ceilings and buckling floors, and kept
jumping until the towers fell.
One of the most controversial photographs of these “jumpers” was taken by Richard Drew, and showed a man plunging to his death, falling vertically, in perfect symmetry with the lines of the towers behind him.
Don DeLillo’s newest novel, Falling Man, takes its name from this photograph, which was withdrawn from publication the day after the attack as people found it too disturbing.
Dramatic association
The falling man of De Lillo’s title is a performance artist who, dressed in a business suit, straps himself to a harness, and throws himself off elevated structures in high-visibility areas — a highway, a building, beside a railway track — and hangs in the pose of the man from the photograph. But, despite the rather dramatic associations of the title, the book is a subdued yet compelling look at one family’s reaction to the events of 9/11.
DeLillo, usually known for his wide, almost panoramic all-American landscapes, limits himself here to the lives of a family in Manhattan. He skims almost disconcertingly easily between 9/11 and the days, the weeks and the years after, as his characters find their way out of the soot and ash of the fallen towers, and pick up their lives again.
Keith is a 39-year-old lawyer who walks out of the buckling north tower to the home of his estranged wife Lianne — to revive the relationship, to see his son, to find home… he’s not entirely sure but understands it was “where he’d been going all along”. He arrives carrying a briefcase that someone passed him in the stairwell of the tower and, in the following days, tracks down the owner.
Somewhat predictably, he has a brief affair with the owner of the briefcase, but it is more a relationship about remembering and forgetting the shared chaos of making their way down the stairs of the tower — descending at different times but seeing the same people on the way, a maintenance man carrying a crowbar, a woman in a wheelchair, a woman with burnt hair smoking, a blind man with a guide dog…
DeLillo’s description of the confusion in the towers and on the streets below — sheets of office paper floating around, a white shirt drifting down into the river, paper cups bouncing by, laptops lying discarded in the street — is both bizarre and brilliant.
It’s hard to get a grip on characters in this rather disconnected novel. Except for Lianne’s mother Nina, an aging art historian, all the characters seem deliberately flat, faded, almost numbed by events and circumstances much larger than them, much larger than anything they could ever have imagined.
To Lianne and Keith’s young son, Justin, the attack is a strangely real game. He joins two friends at the window of their high-rise home and scans the skies with borrowed binoculars. Communicating with each other only in code, the three are convinced the towers have not fallen, that there will be more planes, and that ‘Bill Lawton,’ whose name they’ve been (mis)hearing on the news as responsible for the attacks, will return.
Others include a group of Alzheimer’s patients who Lianne leads in a writing class, helping them come to terms with forgetting and remembering, and a somewhat shady art dealer Martin, Nina’s lover for decades and the voice for the European opinion that “America is going to become irrelevant… It is losing the center”.
Odd jumps
DeLillo, however, could have stayed within the fictitious family of middle class New Yorkers that he is, quite understandably, more familiar with. Mohamed Atta makes a few brief, and extremely unconvincing, appearances as he battles with himself and finally grows into a single-minded jihadi.
Surprising and delighting with its odd jumps in narrative, Falling Man is a book of enigmatic silences, oblique observations and fragmented conversations, somewhat incoherent at times, as ordinary people grapple with fear, loss, memories, questions of their pasts and their futures, and their perception of and place in the world.
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