Homeland Insecurities
by Jason Helms
Six years after the towers fell and many of us are still moving through various stages of grief. Depression has become a way of life for some, of death for others. Anger smirked us through two wars and hungry eyes a third. Bargaining gave us a new government department, complete with color-coded fear-mongering and the addition of parachutes to high rise first aid kits. Denial remains the most wide-spread emotion, with acceptance the most elusive.
Perhaps in this moment art can finally fulfill its purported value of healing and enlarge our national minds and hearts into a holistic conversation with our deepest fears. However, that work has yet to appear.
Don Delillo’s newest novel, Falling Man, attempts to fill that very void. Opening with a survivor’s recounting of the mad dash away from the towers, the book moves slowly into the horrors of banality. Delillo, famous for his razor-edged, alienating narration, slowly peels back the layers of a family torn apart — torn together — by our national tragedy. As he makes tiny incisions, then larger, reaching finally for a Stryker saw with which to open our chest, readers become slowly complicit in their own autopsy. There, beneath all the gore we find a small, blackened heart. Were we at the yoke the entire time?
Midway through the novel, a placid discussion of ruins offers a cynical European an opening for accusation:
“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build things like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You were saying, Here it is, bring it down.” (Delillo, 116)
Hubris and self-deceit. The rise and fall of America written in concrete. These are accusations we are not yet prepared to face.
The novel centers upon Keith, the survivor we find on the first page, and his wife, Lianne, an editor who runs a writing workshop for Alzheimer’s patients. Gradually, other characters insinuate themselves: their child, known only as “the kid;” her mother, a chain-smoking New York elitist with a mysterious European lover; one of the terrorists as he prepares for 9-11; and the central image of the Falling Man, a performance artist who reenacts the tarot-like stance of a man plummeting from one of the towers.
Delillo’s prose is choppy and distant, but he uses this to his advantage, allowing the ambiguous pronouns to bleed into each other as terrorist becomes victim and wife becomes lover. If the novel has a theme, it is community; 9-11 united us all by sundering each of us. Keith and Lianne strive to comprehend what has happened and what life will look like now. There is unfocused anger—brought to bear on a helpless middle eastern neighbor, and there are attempts at understanding the terrorists — given through the glimpses inside the terrorist’s mind.
The book is uneven and the dialogue, as often with Delillo, seems forced and unnatural, but the payoff is better than fifty minutes with a therapist. The opening sections burn their way through the readers’ eyes, bringing about tears and a dropping of scales. Next comes the quotidian reality of life as it is, devoid of meaning unless its actors provide it. Much of the middle is in fact quite boring, punctuated with moments of brilliance – like the European’s accusation of American complicity and decadence. Delillo somehow manages to subtly punch his reader in the gut, but then the closing sections heal the wounds the novel reopened earlier.
Falling Man
Author: Don Delillo
Publisher: Scribner
Date: May 15, 2007
Available at: All major book sellers
Price: Hardback: $26.00 (available)
