Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Every time she saw a videotape of the plans she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting spirit that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men's intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God's name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.

Who else but DeLillo could write a novel about 9/11? In a way, he wrote one already with White Noise, the ultimate novel about disaster and mass destruction in modern America, a novel about how, even faced with the bare physical fact of our own destruction we are too wrapped up in the images and signs to really see. As television has failed to enable Jack to accept his own mortality--incarnated as a tower of black smoke--so television, and our primitive computers, failed to enable us to understand the crushing force of history. Even those who experienced it firsthand, like Keith in Falling Man, must live with the long life of the image, the video, the photograph, always keenly aware of the ways in which it does not quite match the horror that was not quite legible, even in the moment. 

Keith is a businessman who worked on a high floor of the first tower; after he escapes it he hitches a ride to the apartment where his estranged wife and son are living. His arrival is necessitated by circumstance--his downtown apartment is dangerous--but it also harkens to, perhaps, a rekindling of their relationship. That would be the easy story, and it's kind of DeLillo's, too, though he's too canny a writer to make it that simple. Keith comes back, but he's transformed, part of him has been left behind. He's carrying a briefcase that's not his own; when he returns it to the woman who does own it, they strike up a brief affair predicated on those stories about the falling tower which neither of them can share with anyone else. 

In the weeks and months after "that fateful day," people in the city begin to see a street performer called the "Falling Man", who hangs from a harness in the position of the famous photograph of a man plummeting to his death from the height of the tower's top floor. What's the man's intention with this? In a way, it reminded me of the Guilty Remnant from The Leftovers, whose gruesome antics are meant to remind people of the horrors they'd rather forget. But the man never speaks for himself. He's only an image; the image. Images are signs and portents, but they never speak for themselves, only within the eye of the beholder. This is, I think, something that sets DeLillo apart from some of his peers. Whereas a guy like Pynchon suggests that signs have no meaning, have become space for pure play, in DeLillo everything seems meaningful, though meaning itself is elusive. Keith's wife Lianne notes that "Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs." The Falling Man is another piece of, in the words of White Noise, "psychic data," of "waves and radiation," and the baffling inexpression of his image is only an emblem of the larger inexpression that is the attack.

What I thought was best about Falling Man, and most DeLillo, is the way that Keith and Lianne's son Justin interprets the events. He and a couple of neighbor kids invent a kind of mythos around the event: they search the sky with binoculars for planes, which they believe will return--there's a kind of cargo cult element to it--and finish the job, not understanding that the towers have already fallen. Their cult fixates on a figure called "Bill Lawton," who only belatedly Lianne and Keith discover is their mishearing of Bin Laden. Who can say whether their understanding, their ordering and sense, is any truer than ours?:

They talked to him. They tried to make gentle sense. She couldn't locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. It was the fairy tale children tell, not the one they listen to, devised by adults, and she changed the subject to Utah. Ski trails and blue skies.

The riskiest choice, perhaps, are three brief interludes written from the perspective of the attackers. These sections could have gone very wrong--through cultural chauvinism, poor research, whatever. Just look at how Updike biffed that book Terrorist that everyone hated. But DeLillo makes it work by keeping the language simple, and focusing on the ways that the attackers are themselves not so different from the people whom they target, having found in an apocalyptic form of Islam a kind of code or key to understanding the world. The final section in which--spoiler alert, I guess, if you've never heard of 9/11--the viewpoint attacker crashes into the tower and the point-of-view leaps into Keith is one of the most audacious things DeLillo's ever done. 

I have a vague sense that this book was not well-received when it came out. Even in 2007, I wonder if we were ready for a book like it. I think time will show that it's among DeLillo's best, because it speaks powerfully to our century's most pivotal moment. It's probably the most written-about day of our lifetimes, if not longer, and yet I think we are still struggling to understand what it meant, or what it means to say "what it meant." No one but DeLillo, I think, could speak so clearly about the anxieties, the mysteries, the interpretations, the images, that have agglomerated around it.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

From our perspective that semester, the events of September--we did not yet call them 9/11--seemed both near and far. Marching poli-sci majors chanted on the quads and the pedestrian malls, "The chickens have come home to roost! The chickens have come home to roost!" When I could contemplate them at all--the chickens, the roosting--it was as if in a craning crowd, through glass, the way I knew (from Art History) people stared at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: La Gioconda! its very name like a snake, its sly, tight smile encased at a distance but studied for portentous flickers. It was, like September itself, a cat's mouth full of canaries. My roommate, Murph--a nose-pierced, hinky-toothed blonde from Dubuque, who used black soap and black dental floss and whose quick opinions were impressively harsh (she pronounced Dubuque "Du-ba-cue") and who once terrified her English teachers by saying the character she admired most in all of literature was Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood--had met her boyfriend on September tenth, and when she woke up at his place, she'd phoned me, in horror and happiness, the television blaring. "I know, I know," she said, her voice shrugging into the phone. "It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had to be done."

After three books, I see what Lorrie Moore is up to. She wants to make us laugh, and then devastate us. We're not supposed to see it. I'm onto you, Lorrie. In this case, the set-up centers on Tassie Keltijn, the daughter of a small organic farmer who enters a college that looks and sounds suspiciously like the University of Wisconsin. Tassie takes a job as a nanny from a woman named Sarah, but she starts before the baby arrives: Tassie and her husband Edward are trying to adopt. She's whisked off on a flight to Green Bay to pick up a biracial child who becomes Tassie's charge. Tassie becomes enamored with the girl, who begins as Mary, extended to Mary-Emma, then just "Emmie," and she finds herself fascinated by the steely, middle-aged Sarah, who seems alternately impossibly self-assured and strangely desperate.

A Gate at the Stairs has all the hallmarks of a coming-of-age novel: Tassie, on her own for the first time, looking to Sarah and her unconventional family, contemplating Sarah as a model--or a warning. Tassie is wry and jocular, in a way that sometimes sounds a little too much like Lorrie Moore, and not enough like a 20-year-old, even a particular observant or knowledgeable one. Moore has a real gift for the humorous detail, one that thrives on a brisk pace: not every joke lands, but before you have time to think about it, she's onto the next one. And Tassie is growing up in a rapidly changing world: 9/11 has rapidly transformed the country, and though the Twin Towers and the war may seem distant from this Wisconsin college town, it intrudes upon Tassie's life in surprising ways, not least of which is her younger brother's decision to join the army when he graduates from high school. 

From there Moore ushers the reader into a series of utter shocks--spoiler alert: first, Tassie's new Brazilian boyfriend Reynaldo turns out not to be Brazilian at all, or Reynaldo, but a young Muslim en route to vague missions in the U.S. Sarah admits to Tassie that she has a horrible secret: she and Edward once had different names, which they changed after running over their own son in a horrible and negligent car accident. (The parallel between Reynaldo and Sarah--the hidden identity, the assumed name--stands out, and contribute to the feeling that Tassie's life has destabilized, become uncertain.) When the adoption agency discovers their deceit, Mary-Emma is taken away from them, and never seen again. Finally, Tassie's brother is one of the first servicemen killed in Afghanistan. In one bold scene, Tassie climbs into her brother's coffin, feeling his mangled body, stuffed with replacement parts because he was blown apart, and is accidentally whisked away inside the coffin to the graveside. It's a scene that probably shouldn't work, but the fact that it does is testament to Moore's writerly skill.

I've had a similar experience with all the Moore novels I've read, which include this, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams: I start impressed by the writing, if a little impatient with how loose and silly it can be, and by the end I'm absolutely devastated. Moore writes like that, I suppose, because sometimes life is like that, with humor and grief mixed in unequal measure.

"No day shall erase you from the memory of time..."

...is the memorial inscription planned for the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, taken from Vergil's Aeneid. Bad call, says author Caroline Alexander--these words describe the death of Nisus and Euryalus, two close friends who die together after having massacred a number of Rutulians:

The central sentiment that the young men were fortunate to die together could, perhaps, at one time have been defended as a suitable commemoration of military dead who fell with their companions. To apply the same sentiment to civilians killed indiscriminately in an act of terrorism, however, is grotesque.

David Post of the Volokh Conspiracy calls it "the Snarkest NY Times Op-Ed for 2011":

Sorry, but Caroline Alexander does not get to decide for the rest of us what those words on the inscription “mean.” Neither, actually, does Virgil (though he’s got a helluva better claim on it than she does). The words mean what we decide they mean. This notion that they’re somehow frozen forever in time, attached to Virgil’s tale, is ridiculous and the worst form of elitism. “No day shall erase you from the memory of time” strikes me as a perfectly appropriate sentiment for this memorial. That Virgil used these words for a different purpose is interesting and entirely irrelevant to whether they are appropriate.

Oh, please! (As Post writes.) Count me on Alexander's side here. The sentiment, taken alone, provides an appropriate memorial, but the sentiment was not written for the occasion. Rather, it was taken out of a work that has its own clear set of implications, some of which are rather grotesque for the most important civil memorial of our lifetime. Those who chose the quotation have consciously chosen the the association with Vergil; otherwise, why not write original words? Furthermore, it is unclear to me why Post's interpretation should be considered more valid than Alexander's, especially when Alexander has the added support of context. It isn't clear to me why quoting Vergil out of context is any better than quoting a living person--say, David Post--out of context. Those who died in the Twin Towers deserve a thoughtful memorial, and this isn't it.