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May
2009
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
This
book was chosen more or less by default: Jo, whose turn it had been
to suggest our next reading, failed to turn up, and, off the top
of his head, Doug tentatively suggested this because he'd just bought
it. Having read Panjak Mishra's Guardian
article on 9/11 literature I said I thought it was a book we
should perhaps read, and since we'd very much admired DeLillo's
prophetic White Noise, we
agreed on it.
We were very disappointed, and I found that the book bore out the
criticisms in Mishra's article. One of Mishra's main complaints
is that, as a study of the psychic effects on a bourgeois couple
after the husband Keith survives the twin towers, the book is a
retreat into the domestic, and thus away from the wider issues.
I'm not sure that such a focus, in theory, would necessarily carry
inbuilt failure in exploring the important issues, but we certainly
found that it failed here: we found the couple almost entirely unsympathetic
(with the exception that John thought the wife Lianne a fairly sympathetic
character), and the conversations between Lianne and her mother
Nina and Nina's lover almost shocking in their seemingly inappropriate
urbane novel-of-manners style - convoluted, arcane and indeed very
difficult to follow - and making it hard at times feel the urgency
or import of the twin-tower context even when they are discussing
the politics. We could see that there might be a political authorial
point here, that DeLillo is showing the inability of Americans to
absorb the reality of the situation, and indeed Keith's journey
through the novel seems to be one away from reality (into a life
of gambling), but the effect on us as readers was fatally ennervating.
(As Jo said to me in the cafe the week before the meeting, she didn't
care a hoot about the characters, and she wouldn't have gone on
reading if she hadn't been doing it for the group.) As a result
we found similarly ennervating the fragmented non-linear structure
and the glancing, cumulative prose which I felt should in theory
have been powerful as a depiction of the breakdown of bourgeois
American certainty.
For
a long time in our discussion we failed even to mention the fact
that each of the three sections of the book is concluded with a
piece which takes the viewpoint of Hammad, one of the 9/11 hijackers,
and the three together chart his progress from his initial conversion
to Islamism to the moment of impact. The fact that we omitted them
so long from our discussion is an interesting comment, I think,
on the ultimately bourgeois focus of the book, and once they were
mentioned, people didn't really know what to make of them. Mishra's
comment, in line with some other critics, is that the depiction
here is founded in unsubtle stereotype. Our group wasn't quite sure
what to think, but did find the depiction unconvincing (and someone
questioned the factual/historical accuracy of Hammad's geographical
origins). It's perhaps again an interesting comment on the failure
and pallor of the rest of the book that, even so, some said they
found these sections the most engaging and vivid.
If I understand him correctly, Mishra charges DeLillo with subscribing,
via this sterotyping and the 'Western'-centric focus of the rest
of the book, to a profile of Muslims as regarding 'Westerners' as
'other', while indeed colluding in a view of Muslims as 'other'.
I believe that DeLillo is striving hard to avoid this: there are
various tropes in the book which seek to break down such concepts
of otherness. Most obvious is the fact that Nina's German lover
has himself been a terrorist/freedom fighter (and argues the case
for Islamist dissatisfaction with the West). Then there is the moment
at the end of the book when the concept of 'organic shrapel' (in
which pellets of the skin of suicide bombers become embedded in
the flesh of survivors) is taken to a striking level when the body
and consciousness of Hammad morph in the moment of impact into those
of Keith in the tower. Such self-conscious tropes, however, are
at odds with the psychic centre of the novel, which is indeed 'Western',
forcing the 'eastern' into otherness, and in consequence, it seemed
to me, the sections concerning Hammad's story felt more like colonization
than the empathy which DeLillo may have intended. As Mishra notes,
most Muslims already live with a complex sense of their own Westernization,
rather than the polarization of which DeLillo feels compelled to
mastermind such a striking conversion in this final scene.
Meanwhile, on the less conscious level, it seems, an undercurrent
of polarization runs through the novel: Clare and I in particular
felt shocked by an episode in which Lianne hits the woman in the
downstairs flat purely for her insensitivity in playing eastern
music in the aftermath of 9/11. While there was some sense that
her behaviour was a kind of madness that had overcome Lianne (and
Keith suffers a similar 'madness' when he hits a man in a department
store for a perceived personal slight), there seemed too little
authorial indication that the true madness is that her sense of
injury and insult could only emerge from a sense of the music as
'other', and it was this that felt shocking.
And the street performance artwork mimicking the famous image of
the man falling from one of the towers seemed - apart from highly
unlikely: people thought that in reality the artist would have been
lynched by New Yorkers - yet another dislocation into artifice of
this urgent real-life issue.
Trevor was very late for this meeting, having double-booked, and
we had finished the discussion when he arrived. Since he so often
likes books others don't, we expected him to put up a defence for
it, but when we asked what he thought he lifted his hand and stuck
his thumb down, not exactly perpendicular but almost. And Hans had
the last word when he said that he had looked on the internet for
a real-life film of 9/11, and the very short one he had found he
left him a hundred times more profoundly affected than had this
novel.
Click
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