The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  Later, we find Gladney trying to have a conversation with one of his colleagues, Alfonse Stompanato, chairman of the department of American environments. DeLillo wrote those lines in the year Mohamed Atta turned fifteen – though at that time Atta may have called himself Mohamed El Sayed and his telegenic flight into the World Trade Center was half a life away.

  ‘Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?’

  I told him about the recent evening of lava, mud and raging water that the children and I had found so entertaining.

  ‘We wanted more, more.’

  ‘It’s natural, it’s normal,’ he said, with a reassuring nod. ‘It happens to everybody.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information … The cameras are right there. They’re standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters?’

  ‘For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.’

  ‘Feel bad,’ he said.

  That was a key flavour in DeLillo’s earlier work, that we were all waiting for something terrible to happen, something that might blow us apart but which might also bring us together. It might be shopping or marketing. It might be a toxic gas in the subway. But likely it would be something that partook of the energies of each of these things: American capitalism and the toxic waste residing at the other end of it. In 1997, when the novelist wrote the following wonderful passage in Underworld, Mohamed Atta was living in Germany and had just been recruited by Al Qaeda. As mentioned before, Underworld’s Brian Glassic works at Waste Containment, and he is standing next to a mountain of trash at the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island:

  He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza – only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one … He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about … He dealt in human behavior, people’s habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.

  Don DeLillo is a writer who has become less funny as he gets older, perhaps more serious as he moves towards the presentation of his darker purpose. Not that he was ever light, mind you. In any event, it is part of his genius to have truly engaged with the discomfiting strangeness of our times, and by the time he published The Body Artist, in 2001, DeLillo’s writing had entered a style of passionate numbness. The prose was cautious and drained and none of it seemed funny any more. Meanwhile, Mohamed Atta, the man of many aliases, had developed a hatred of American habits that bordered on the messianic. As DeLillo pressed the keys (and returned the carriage) to create the following passage, Atta was on American soil and in daily contact with his fellow conspirators whilst training on flight simulators at a rented house in Florida:

  His future is not under construction. It is already there, susceptible to entry.

  She had it on tape.

  She did not want to believe this was the case. It was her future too. It is her future too.

  She played the tape a dozen times.

  It means your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.

  All these passages, written over the course of a career, could be understood to evoke something very like a terrorist’s trajectory towards an encounter with the Twin Towers, but they also describe very well the journey made by a singular American novelist towards what might be considered the day of days for his preoccupations as an artist and his brio as a stylist. If the Twin Towers could be said to have stood in wait for the Mohamed Attas of the world, then the Mohamed Attas of the world were standing in wait for Don DeLillo. To have something to be your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature – consider Kafka and the Nazis, Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age – but the meeting of 9/11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival, and a connection so powerful in imaginative terms that it instantly blows DeLillo’s lamps out.

  ‘In a repressive society,’ the novelist said in an interview published around the time of Mao II, ‘a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act … people who are powerless make an open theatre of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.’

  And so it feels like something of a consummation when a person called Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir el-sayed Atta appears on page 80 of DeLillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. The novelist seems to recognise Atta’s impulses as if they were old friends: ‘This was Amir,’ he writes, ‘his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.’ But Atta has little narrative reality in DeLillo’s book. He is the ghost in the machine, flying so fast he is barely separable from the surrounding ether, and the reader indeed will find himself knowing Atta only as a distinguished absence, present everywhere but visible nowhere, like Flaubert’s idea of the perfect novelist.

  The other main character in Falling Man is a youngish lawyer called Keith Neudecker, whom we meet at the book’s opening as he walks north in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001, his face covered in ash and blood and his hair full of glass splinters. He carries somebody else’s briefcase and for reasons he might never fathom he heads directly from the rubble of Ground Zero to the apartment of his estranged wife Lianne and their son Justin. Keith and Lianne had been together for eight years before ‘the eventual extended grimness called their marriage’ ended in a well-educated state of suspended resignation. Lianne’s mother, Nina Bartos, is an aged, recently retired professor – ‘the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such,’ says Keith, in a burst of the old DeLillo humour – and she has a lover called Martin. The women scrutinise each other as mothers and daughters often do, harbouring special, harsh feelings about the other’s motivations and choices. To Nina, Lianne only married Keith to feel dangerously alive, but Lianne knows her mother would forgive Keith all his faults if he happened to be a raging artist.

  The child Justin has two friends whom they call the Siblings and they live ten blocks away. The children talk in code and they are always standing at the window of the Siblings’ apartment, looking at the sky through binoculars and whispering about a man called ‘Bill Lawton’. Like children in a science fiction movie, the Siblings and Justin seem connected in some unspoken way to a much bigger picture, but we don’t really get to hear a great deal from the children. (DeLillo is not good on children; they always exist as runes foretelling the bad weather of adulthood, and Falling Man is, to say the least, a book in pursuit of adult vexations on an international scale.) Keith survives the planes owing to a piece of luck, so he spends much of the novel embroiled in poker, the game that is a dramatisation of luck. Before the planes, he used to play it on Wednesdays with six men at his apartment: ‘the one anticipation,’ DeLillo writes, ‘that was not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections.’ The poker evenings ended when the towers came down, but he thinks about the game a
lot. He is interested in the meaning of luck and we find in time that he is also a cheat, whatever that means. In the course of the novel he goes to see another survivor, Florence Givens, the owner of the briefcase he took from the North Tower; he visits her more than once, and he goes to look at his old, frozen apartment, the one he took up when he split up with his wife. Apart from this, there is only recovery, if that is what you’d call it. Keith does a little homework duty with his son and walks the boy to school, ‘going slow, easing inward … drifting into spells of reflection’.

  Lianne is doing some work for a university press, editing a book about ancient alphabets. Her hobby survives the attacks: it involves conducting ‘storyline sessions’ in East Harlem, which take place in the company of half a dozen or so people with Alzheimer’s. Apart from some calmness it perhaps brings to her – and aside from some kind of Manhattan mid-life ennui – it is not clear why Lianne spends so much time with these forgetful narrative-makers in East Harlem. They write about the planes. We also know that Jack, her father, had the beginning of senile dementia; not able to face it, he killed himself with a sporting rifle. Lianne is therefore a victim of violence, with a mother now messing around with an art dealer. Though DeLillo keeps it pretty spare, we feel we understand Lianne as one of his types. At some level she is surrounded by death – even her husband, when finally he comes home, walks in from the most famous American death-trap in history – and she is ripe for some kind of urban epiphany to set her heart in motion. The closest she comes is to see a performance artist known as Falling Man – he dangles upside down from a structure in Pershing Square, reminding people of the jumpers who chose air over fire on 9/11. ‘It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic.’

  Don DeLillo has always been very good at male dissociation, especially the kind that can thrive in certain domestic environments, and he can be as good as Saul Bellow when it comes to showing the way married couples might go about dismantling one another’s powers and confidence. On this occasion, he treats Keith like a male archetype. ‘This was the period, not long before the separation,’ he writes, ‘when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation. He seemed to walk in the door waiting for her questions … she understood by this time that it wasn’t the drinking, or not that alone, and probably not some sport with a woman. He’d hide it better, she told herself. It was who he was, his native face, without the leveling element, the claims of social code. Those nights, sometimes, he seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all, and it would end everything between them, all discourse, every form of stated arrangement, whatever drifts of love still lingered.’ These descriptions are the best things in the book: they have the force of felt life, and through them we begin purely to understand what estrangement really means with this Manhattan couple. They each have known a little hate. But how can they relate to each other now that hatred means something else, now that it means flying planes into buildings? How are their own feelings changed now that hatred means terrorists and victims shouting in their final moments to different gods?

  Yet such enquiries, however acute, however felt, cannot make up for DeLillo’s failure in Falling Man to imagine 9/11. The hallmark of those novelists who have tried to write about the attacks is a sort of austere plangency – or a quivering bathos – that has been in evidence almost from the moment the planes hit. Those authors who published journalism immediately after the event failed to see how their metaphors fell dead from their mouths before the astonishing pictures on television. It did not help us to be told by imaginative writers that the second plane was like someone posting an envelope. No, it wasn’t. It was like a passenger jet crashing into an office block. It gave us nothing to be told that the South Tower came down like an elevator at speed. No, it didn’t. It collapsed like a building that could no longer hold itself up. Metaphor failed that day to do anything but make one feel that those struggling to deploy it had not been watching enough television. After the ‘non-fiction novel’, after New Journalism, after several decades in which some of America’s most vivid writing was seen to be in thrall to the techniques of novelists, September 11 offered a few hours when American novelists could only sit at home while journalism taught them fierce lessons in multivocality, point of view, the structure of plot, interior monologue, the pressure of history, the force of silence, and the uncanny. Actuality showed its own naked art that day.

  DeLillo the novelist prepared us for 9/11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have desiccated the ripeness of his style, and he truly flounders in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that 9/11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall. What is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true? Of course, a first-rate literary intelligence can eventually meet a world where reality acknowledges the properties of his style by turning them into parody, and in these circumstances, which are DeLillo’s with this particular novel, the original novelist may be said to be a person quietened by his own genius. This is another American story – the story of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles – and it gives us a clue to the weakness of Falling Man.

  But the novel itself is packed with clues, the first and most obvious being the author’s inability to conjure his usual exciting prose. In his best novels, DeLillo is pretty much incapable of writing unexcitingly – but 9/11 busts his sentences before he can make them linger. Good prose in a novel depends on its ability to exhale a secret knowledge, to have the exact weight of magic in relation to the material, the true moral rhythm. DeLillo had all of that before 11 September – so much magic, indeed, that it was initially difficult to absorb the events of that day without thinking of his writing. On 11 September, however, novelists of his sort ceded all secret knowledge to the four winds: to CNN, to the website of the New York Times, to CCTV, and to the widespread availability of video cameras in Manhattan, each of which captured the event in real time.

  Reading Falling Man, one often feels that DeLillo’s formerly superlative intuition has become a form of ignorance: he dangles uncertainly between what he knows of that day from pictures and what of it he predicted in his novels. But the latest book is merely blank with shock, as if his sense of awe and disbelief may only express itself in a fetish with the obvious:

  She was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head.

  She read everything they wrote about the attacks.

  She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe.

  Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs. Even when she was barely aware of an incident it came to mind later, with meaning attached, in sleepless episodes that lasted minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure …

  But things were ordinary as well. They were ordinary in all the ways they were always ordinary.

  This most assuredly is not the DeLillo of Libra or Underworld. In the first of those novels, the author enacted wonders the Warren Commission could never have imagined. He had readers in the corner of that room at the Book Depository, practically squeezing the trigger with Oswald. But Falling Man is a distillation of awe and grief over real-life drama next to which the 9/11 Commission Report reads serenely and beautifully. Open that report at any page and you will find a breathtaking second-by-second account of that mo
rning, and of the hijackers’ backgrounds, that will make DeLillo’s novel seem merely incapacitated.

  DeLillo might know the nature of his trouble. He might see it. At one point, we hear of a book written by someone called the Unaflyer that predicted all the events: ‘A book that’s so enormously immersed, going back on it, leading up to it … it seems to predict what happened … It’s badly written.’ People still speak of the anxiety of influence, but what of a novelist’s anxiety about his past work’s influence on himself? Falling Man, it seems to me, is about a brilliant writer’s free-falling anxiety of that sort, and most of it comes to be expressed in this novel through ruminations on art and terror. This is old DeLillo stuff: we’ve already met Klara Sax from Underworld, the lady who once studied the Twin Towers as they were being built, later to find fame as an artist who paints B52 bombers, the kind that once carried nuclear weapons. She displays these objets d’art in the desert with their innards ripped out and their shells coated in beautiful colour. (‘This is an art object,’ she says, ‘not a peace project. This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself.’) Later in that novel, we discover that Klara and her contemporaries had been fascinated by the nearness of art to violence, hooked on a near-invisible graffiti kid called Moonman 157 who paints subway trains. DeLillo has always favoured using the art world as a place where cultural anxieties are made compact and fashionable, but his repeat of this ploy in Falling Man pushes the book towards silliness.

  Keith’s mother-in-law has a boyfriend called Martin. He is an art dealer – apartment in Berlin, liking for the unreadable – whom we learn was once a member of a 1960s anti-fascist collective called Kommune One. Martin, it seems, was a kind of terrorist, living with people whose faces would one day end up on posters. ‘We’re all sick of America and Americans,’ he says at one point. ‘The subject nauseates us.’ But Martin is a nullity: who could care about him and his little European pieties on the state of the world and the mysteries of art? Is he a terrorist? Who cares, he’s a goon. Meanwhile, people are holding hands and jumping from the 102nd floor of the North Tower, the novelist’s imagination nowhere in attendance. When Martin speaks we sometimes imagine he could be speaking for DeLillo. ‘Nothing seems exaggerated any more,’ he says. ‘Nothing amazes me.’ In this book, the events aren’t enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few novelists in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building – or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets – but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, and show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of 11 September 2001 could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject both to the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.