Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Alice McDermott – Charming Billy

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Finished up my 4th Reading the Author Challenge book last night – Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. McDermott came away with the National Book Award in 1998 for this quiet novel and it is considered one of her finest.  

My notes from the first time I read Charming Billy, sometime back in 2004, mention that I found the perspective jarring because while it was first person it was also omniscient. Having had more experience with her work now, I have come to appreciate McDermott’s ability to meld the two perspectives and think that it brings a richness, or maybe a better word for it is layering, to her stories. The narrator sweeps in and out of several story threads at once, reserving different levels of authority for each one. In many ways, the combination of threads work to reveal a larger narrative about who the narrator actually is – but this is done so slyly, so covertly, that it is only at the end you realize what all the storytelling has really been about. 

The novel begins with Billy Lynch’s death (the horrible and messy death of an alcoholic) and the necessary assembling of friends and family to grieve and remember him. They recreate the stories of Billy’s life, focusing on a part of his history that made him famous, the story of his falling in love with an Irish girl visiting in New York, of his asking her to marry him, then sending her the money so she could come back to him and finally, of his getting the news that she has died. This tragedy becomes the epicenter of the earthquake that Billy’s life will turn out to be – nights of drunken grieving, a childless marriage to a woman that everyone suspects knew she was second best, strained friendships and endless health problems.  

But the trick of the story is that the girl, Eva, never died. I am not giving anything away with this information – the narrator and her father Dennis (Billy’s cousin, but more like a best friend) have known the truth of Eva’s disappearance all along. In fact, the lie of her death was created by Dennis himself, a moment of panic when he realized he couldn’t tell love-struck Billy that Eva had taken his money and married another man in Ireland. 

What comes out of this scenario is a frank examination of the idea of fated experience, a look at how our memories are constructed around significant events that, if we have the courage to consider it, might not be that significant in the end. Dennis’ lie is wrapped up in his own desire for fairytale, Billy’s alcoholism is given a convenient excuse, our longing for ideal love is provided safe shelter. She writes: 

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.  

And just a few lines later: 

Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more. 

Charming Billy is about so much more than Billy’s story. It is about the complexity and complicity of family life and marriage, a subject that McDermott brings to all of her work with a great deal of finesse. It is also about all the ways you can lose a loved one and how that loss may dissolve any previously firm foundations on which to base belief or hope. And in a subtle way, it is very much about understanding the balance of acceptance and resignation versus cherishing necessary ideals.  

I have two more McDermotts to go to finish up the challenge but I will take a small break and not start the next one until later in November. The next two are completely new to me and I’d like to let these last four fade a bit more before I start again.  

Jane Urquhart – The Underpainter

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For the past year I have belonged to a book group here in Switzerland. This is by far the best book group I have ever had the luck to join. We’re an international group of women who meet once a month in one of the region’s wine caveaus – a beautiful smoky cellar filled with wine casks and gnarled old vines in a village that dates to Roman times. We do a tasting and talk literature for a few hours – it is an evening I look forward to all month and I am never disappointed. Last month we discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and this month David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is on the schedule – I cannot wait.

Sometime last year we read Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass which was my introduction to this Canadian writer. On the whole we were a divided group. Some of us loved the book and others a bit less. I was in the second camp. Something about the novel put me off. It is a beautifully written story and deals with emotional distance and artistic expression in an intriguing way – which might have been the problem. Like my more recent experience with Don Delillo’s Falling Man, when a character keeps his or her distance from me, I tend to respond a lot less as well. While reading it, I kept telling myself that I should love it but something held me back. However, Urquhart’s stunning and skillful writing told me that I had found an author I might like to try again.

When I saw another Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter, on one of the awards lists for the Book Awards Reading Challenge I added her to my list and I am so glad that I did. What was even more interesting about this read was that although the story is extremely different, the themes in The Underpainter are very similar to those in A Map of Glass – emotional distance and the artistic mediation of that same distance.

The story is narrated by an elderly painter named Austin and covers a large span of his life, from his childhood into his forties. I mentioned yesterday that this book reminds me of Les Ames Grises and this is mostly because the tone of the narrator is so similar – such sorrow and regret, and such a need to account for his life. Austin circles in and out of his own story and the story of one of his friends – George. The two stories are, of course, linked far more deeply than is initially expected. And the way Urquhart moves us through these men’s lives is so adept, each new experience echoing another.

Writing a novel about a completely unlikable character who needs the reader’s sympathy for the story to work is difficult and Austin was one of the most difficult characters to get on with I have ever read. He made me angry before I managed to feel sorry for him and it took me a long time to forgive him but this serves the story’s purpose in a clever way. So all I can do now is admire how Urquhart pulled it off.

The Underpainter is essentially a love story. But that completely reduces all that is actually contained in its pages – yes, it is about Austin and Sara, his artistic muse, it is also about George and Vivian and later Augusta (one of the book’s most interesting characters), but it is also about the trauma of WWI, about choosing whether to observe life or experience it, and it is most definitely about artistic passion and how different individuals manifest and serve that passion.

Alice McDermott – At Weddings and Wakes

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Alice McDermott’s At Wedding and Wakes is subtle, very subtle. And quiet. With a healthy dose of nostalgia and a certain reverence for the bewildering emotions of childhood. The story belongs to almost every member of the Irish-Catholic Dailey Family – a grandmother, four sisters (Agnes, Veronica, May and Lucy), May’s fiancé, Lucy’s husband and their three children. Most of the story comes filtered through the collective eyes of these three children, although McDermott jumps point of view all the time, a way to give life to each and every character, no matter how small.

Veronica, for example, begins as a missing element, the sister living in the shadows when the children visit their grandmother. At first it seems that McDermott is content to let her stay that way – separate, faceless, silent. Until suddenly in the middle of the book her own story stands up and says, Pay Attention. It is a beautiful moment and resonates through the rest of the book every time Veronica silently steps across the page.

There isn’t anything resembling a plot in this novel, no real forward action, no single story to latch onto – but this isn’t a drawback. This book is for careful, quiet reading. Paying attention to the prose is reward enough. In many ways At Weddings and Wakes reads like a series of vignettes. Although series isn’t the right word because the different stories don’t move in a straight line, instead they loosely circle the death of May – an event that is never realized in the book but whose repercussions are hinted at and projected through glimpses of May’s final days.

One of the more interesting things that McDermott does in this novel is take liberties with the timeline in ways that should be unsettling but which never actually disturb the surface of the story. She has a way of jumping quickly forward from a particular moment and creating a memory out of something actually happening. It’s like she explodes that very moment in time, filling it with longer-term emotions and transforming it into something more complex and complicated than it could ever be on its own. That she does this so seamlessly is a fantastic testament to her skill as our narrator.

So what is At Weddings and Wakes about? On one level it’s about the mysteries of family dynamic – how we work against each other, hurt each other and yet still manage to cultivate love and duty in that difficult environment. On another, it’s about falling in love – a boy with a vocation, an older couple with the idea of happiness, a young girl with the tragic story of her aunt’s late marriage and early death. And on even another, it’s about collective story telling – the narratives and threads of existence that we pull and weave together to create who we are and how we want to remember our life.

At Weddings and Wakes was published in 1992. It is Alice McDermott’s third novel.

Next in line for my Reading the Author Challenge is McDermott’s Charming Billy which won the National Book Award in 1998.

Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex

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Is gender genetically or socially determined? This is the question that lies behind Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. Enter Calliope – the lucky girl who gets to be a muse for her adult male self. Calliope is raised as a girl but discovers at the age of fourteen that genetically, and almost physically, she is actually male.  

Middlesex is often presented as a single story – Calliope’s. In fact, the novel doesn’t really belong to Calliope at all, it is more about how the entire Stefanides family and their various experiences resulted in Calliope. And so the novel actually begins in their ancestral village of Smyrna, a village the Stefanides were forced to leave during the Great Fire of 1922, and moves forward through two further generations as the family adjusts to immigrant life in Detroit.  

Eugenides uses incest and its genetic consequences as an explanation for Calliope’s disorder and so he sets it up early. In Smyrna, we meet Desdemona and her brother Lefty – who soon becomes her husband Lefty. The problem of inbreeding is continued, in a lesser degree, in the subsequent generation when Desdemona and Lefty’s son Milton marries his second cousin. The adult Cal is our narrator through all of this and his tone is an intriguing one – part admirative, part sympathetic, part accusative. He has a vested interest in getting the details of his family history recorded correctly because they are what made him who and what he is.  

The trick to enjoying this novel is perhaps understanding its humor. Cal’s hermaphroditic situation is tragic but it is so tragic it is also comic. And the entire family history rides along the crest of that paradox. Once Lefty and Desdemona finally arrive in Detroit, their immigrant experience turns into a kind of farcical sitcom: Lefty gets work as a rumrunner, they move in with their married (but devoutly lesbian) cousin, they open a juke joint that eventually becomes an old-fashioned diner, Desdemona gets work in a wacky mosque. But beneath that are all the banal tragedies of life: racism, poverty, and perhaps the most poignant tragedy of all, despite their unusual romantic beginnings Lefty and Desdemona struggle with the sad reality of a fading love affair. The torch is passed to the next generation – enter Milton and Tessie and their children. 

Finally, we meet Calliope. Calliope’s childhood more closely examines the novel’s preoccupying question about gender determinism. She is a beautiful child who grows tall and slender, perfectly girlie and bad at sports to boot. Socially, she is unequivocally a girl. But puberty acts as the catalyst for all of Calliope’s gender identity issues – she falls in love with another girl at her school which leads toward her first confusing sexual experiences, the eventual discovery of her genetic mutation and the journey of self-realization that ensues. 

Middlesex is a multi-storied saga. The novel begins with such incredible steam, charging forward unapologetically through Lefty and Desdemona’s affair and what happens to this unusual couple in America. But it somehow loses pressure as we get closer to Calliope. Perhaps because it is the adult Cal telling the story – without meaning to he answers almost all our questions about his life and what it has done to him before we get a chance to ask them. There is no doubt, however, that Middlesex is an interesting and captivating read. The book is extremely well-written and contains a breathtaking amount of history. If for nothing else, the sheer creativity in Eugenides’ careful prose makes this a book worth trying.      

Alice McDermott – That Night

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There is a lot of important and provocative fiction out there; in the last two years alone there have been numerous BIG books. What I mean by that are the books that openly tackle huge questions about morality or the future, about issues relating to theology, philosophy, good and evil. While I do love fiction that takes on those kinds of challenges, I also have an immense respect for the writer that takes a quieter story – a tale of love and madness, of ordinary heartbreak and modest triumph – and writes it honestly and beautifully.  

The actual story behind Alice McDermott’s novel That Night is nothing extraordinary – teenage love, life lessons learned early…but the careful way McDermott works this simple narrative manages to create a startlingly rich world peopled by a sympathetic cast of characters with a lot to say about life. The entire novel centers on a single event in the life of the narrator – a summer evening of her youth when a street fight broke out between some teenage kids and the neighborhood fathers.  

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad – the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes – startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all. 

The voice McDermott sets up here is just wonderful. The narrator looks back on the event with a keen nostalgia and a careful eye on everyone involved. And she continues to move in and around the event, telling how it came about and how it was resolved, with this same unique narrative access. In this way, she creates a microcosm of desires and disappointments for her entire neighborhood from the shared history of this event – an ingenious trick that adds a subtle weight to the entire story and infuses even the smallest action with deeper meaning.  

But now as she watched her cousin’s husband turning casually and only a little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

And so it happens that wedged inside the simple story of a teenage romance gone awry is a cautious exploration of love and how it works, how it comes into being and in what shape, how important it can seem, and how sometimes it must be given up in the process of growing up.  

That Night is McDermott’s second novel, published in 1987 and it went on to become a finalist for The Pulitzer, the Pen/Faulkner and the National Book Award.

short fiction – Mark Helprin

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This week’s short fiction focus comes from the January 5, 1976 New Yorker: Mark Helprin’s Notes From the Samantha. What an extraordinary piece of short fiction! What started out as a comical little story about a fictional ship that survives a cyclone only to rescue a monkey turns into a rather sinister reflection on humanity and weakness.  

Writing a series of letters to his commander, ship captain Samson Low recounts the bizarre occurrence of a tornado at sea that nearly sinks the ship. As the men are recovering from their fear and shock, they discover a monkey floating on some logs and other debris just off the bow. On impulse Captain Low hauls him aboard. The next few letters detail how the monkey works on the crew’s psyche – at first they mock them, then they fear him only to suddenly bestow a certain nobility upon him. But soon enough they start to hate and dread his continued presence on board. Factions form about whether to throw the creature in the sea. The men fight amongst themselves while the monkey sits aloof on the upper mast. They create a raft for him, intending to put him to sea in a place where he will float to land. But this plan fails. As the story unfolds, the tension builds until it sets the scene for the Captain’s final, inevitable act.  

I love stories that begin on one emotional plane and glide effortlessly to another. Stories that really hone in on some aspect of the human condition, for this story it was fear. Helprin does a wonderful job of capturing the excitement and attraction in fear, something that fuels the story through to the end: 

We were afraid, though every man on deck wanted to see it, to feel it, perhaps to ride its thick swirling waters a hundred times higher than our mast – higher than the peaks inland. I confess that I have wished to be completely taken up by such a thing, to be lifted into the clouds, arms and legs pinned in the steam. The attraction is much like that of phosphorescent seas, when glowing light and smooth swell are dangerously magnetic even for hardened masters of good ships. I have wanted to surrender to plum-colored seas, to know what one might find there, naked and alone. But I have not, and will not.  

This story introduces me to Helprin’s work and I just discovered he has five novels and four short-story collections. I will definitely be looking for more.

Alice McDermott – A Bigamist's Daughter

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Reading an author’s first novel is always an interesting experience. Especially because in most cases I’ve already read a later work so my basis for evaluation seems a little unfair. That’s not to say that all first novels come out lacking in comparison to an author’s later works (in fact, sometimes it’s the reverse) but sometimes it is clear that the writer is still working through the questions of style or thematic project when the first novel is published. And really this makes sense because writing careers develop over a long time, have ups and downs, big triumphs along with mediocre successes, just like any other profession. Still, I enjoy reading first novels because I can get the sense I’m experiencing a real time development of the writer’s skills and confidence. 

Such it was with Alice McDermott’s A Bigamist’s Daughter. Now, I went into this reading with certain preconceptions about the kind of writer that McDermott is and so it was relatively fun to see how those presumptions held up. I’ve always considered McDermott the most non-flashy of American novelists – someone who writes subtly and tactfully about sex, who tackles domestic (I’m using this word in a positive way) and intimate themes about family and relationships with great insight. Well, to my surprise, The Bigamist’s Daughter is big on fairly explicit sex and it deals with what I would consider the rather provocative subject of vanity publishing. I say provocative because I think it was really ballsy of her to write so scornfully of vanity publishing in her first book. A daring or ingratiating literary feat. 

All that aside, McDermott’s fine touch is unmistakable in this early work. Here is the basic story: 25 year-old Elizabeth is an editor at a NYC vanity press. One afternoon a client comes in with a book about a bigamist. She goes through her usual schpiel, telling him how great it is, pretending she’s actually read it. The fact of the matter is, as long as he’s willing to pay, he’ll get his book. But Elizabeth and the writer end up in a sexual relationship and here is where the story takes a few surprising turns. As it turns out, Elizabeth‘s father kept another family and she’s living out the legacy of his duplicity – in her own romantic life and with her relationship with her mother.  

I nearly got the sense that there were two writers vying for territory in this book – one who wanted to write a chick-lit-esque satire on the life and amorous escapades of a young NYC editor and one who was really interested in exploring the painful territory of a parent’s influence on their children, the aftertaste of a strict religious upbringing as well as the pitfalls and victories of feminism. The first author was primarily concerned with creating a new kind of heroine, smart, tough and vulnerable all in one. The second author wanted to investigate the boundaries of fiction and how we self-narrate our successes and failures. Because of her skill, I think McDermott pulls off this combination but there were moments when I felt like I could see the seams.  

At least for me, the most satisfying part of reading McDermott will always be her writing. The startling little moments of intuition or exposure: 

She held herself before me rather delicately, as if her center were made of fragile glass. It made me feel childish, or fat, clumsy – a woman without a lover facing a woman with one. I glimpsed, for a moment, what Ward must have found so fascinating and tragic about her: that odd and delicate core, full of secrets. 

It occurs to her that every great realization given up, spoken, placed in another’s clumsy hands is, at heart, silly; every message from the grave a stale sermon or a slick song; every fiction, with all its attempts at sense and order, climax and resolution, words that mean something and change everything, laughable. Terribly laughable. Merely an excuse for fear, for laziness, for bad luck.  

Lovely, isn’t it? And her writing is filled with these keenly perceived moments.  

My next book will be That Night, published in 1987, five years after A Bigamist’s Daughter. I’ve already read That Night and loved it, so I’m really looking forward to this re-read.  

Richard Powers – The Echo Maker

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I love fiction that engages both parts of my brain – the part that expects nothing more than the words on the page to create distinctive if not beautiful prose and the part that wants to be challenged, that wants to have to re-think something I thought I understood or at least had some idea of. I think that fiction, if it works, should accomplish these two tasks. In that sense, I want more than just well-written entertaining distraction. I want the questions. Along with the messy and improbable answers. I want flawed individuals and eccentric personalities, historical perspective and modern recklessness. I want understanding and fear, courage and abandon. I want humanity distilled and discovered. I want to find myself in the story and at the same time lose myself completely in something wholly beyond me. 

Which is exactly what The Echo Maker does. The underlying story is deceptively simple: a man flips his car on a lonely stretch of highway one night and wakes up several weeks later, both physically and mentally broken. His sister copes with the burden of caring for him. A famous doctor comes to work with both of them. But this simple story hinges on the mentally broken aspect of Mark’s post-accident person. His body is the same, most of his memories intact but his very notion of self has undergone a radical transition.  

The question underneath all of this – how do we know who we are – is profoundly difficult to get a grasp on. The very fact that our own self-awareness is superceded by the brain’s need to ensure the cohesiveness of that very awareness makes the awareness itself dubious.  

To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment, nothing inside Mark felt changed. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation. 

[…]The job of consciousness is to make sure that all of the distributed modules of the brain seem integrated. That we always seem familiar to ourselves.  

The novel’s two other points of view parallel this idea as well: Karin, the sister, fighting against who she wants to be and the person she presents to others and Dr. Weber, a specialist called in to work on Mark’s exceptional case, struggling to determine his professional and human self-worth, his multi-layered appreciation of brain functioning and what it means to his specific truth. Powers uses these three individuals to explore, quite beautifully I might add, this intricate question of self-understanding and constructed reality. 

In many ways the story reads like good detective fiction. There are several mysteries to solve regarding the night of the accident and other events in the past of each of the characters. Powers introduces a number of twists and turns to the otherwise straightforward and time-contained plot, twists and turns that eventually lead to a satisfying and surprising end. But where Powers really shines is in the humane dissection and presentation of his characters; these are fragile humans from the get-go who are made more fragile by one fantastic event. In Powers’ hands, they fall apart, lose themselves and lose each other but in that dissolution they somehow stumble upon something essential. Some tiny piece of understanding worth fighting for. And they fix on that breathtaking perception and find a way to hold on.  

Finally, I can’t finish this without mentioning the cranes. Powers begins the book and centers much of its story on the spectacle of migrating Sandhill Cranes. Such a perfect image running parallel to his exploration of memory and consciousness – creatures with an inherent map, their lives and self-perpetuation wrapped up in something as simple, as complex as memory.  

The nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they’ve learned to find by memory. They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.  

[…]As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started.

short fiction – Grace Paley

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Grace Paley, a tremendously talented writer of short fiction, passed away last week and I thought it would be appropriate to look at her for this week’s short fiction focus. I was initially introduced to Paley in one of my very first graduate school courses and I remember being astounded to discover that the things a writer leaves out of a story might be just as important as the carefully included words and descriptions. Paley often seems to work her stories around this great looming heap of unspoken emotion and thought. For the most part, her stories center on a very specific moment of the day but yet they manage somehow to lay open the very essence of a character’s entire life. She writes about women and the men they are in relationship with, the children they have brought into the world and the complicated alliance they hold with their inner selves. 

In the introduction to The Collected Stories (published in 1994), Paley addresses one of my own concerns about the perceived distinction between men and women’s literature:  

As a former boy myself (in the sense that many little girls reading Tom Sawyer know they’ve found their true boy selves) I had been sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman I had no choice. Every day life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me, my portion, the beginning of big luck, though I didn’t know it. 

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women’s movement. I didn’t know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation. Others like Ruth Hershberger, who wrote Adam’s Rib in 1948, and Tillie Olsen, who was writing her stories through the forties and fifties, had more consciousness than I and suffered more. This great wave would crest half a generation later, leaving men sputtering and anxious, but somewhat improved for the crashing bath.

Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it – the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness. 

It would be difficult for me to select a single Paley story as a favorite. I read many of them over and over and I especially enjoy the set of stories that center around a particular character named Faith. In general, I simply love looking at how she manages to begin a sentence or a paragraph one way and then suddenly hustle the reader off an emotional ridge we didn’t even know we were standing on. She does this again and again, in all of her stories.  

Here’s just one example, from Living (1974): 

After we talked, I felt worse. I left the kids alone and ran down to the corner for a quick sip among living creatures. But Julie’s and all the other bars were full of men and women gulping a hot whiskey before hustling off to make love. People require strengthening before the acts of life. 

Paley uses the bedroom, the kitchen or the front garden as places where life really happens. Her characters are precariously situated and unloved, angry and unsure and she animates them with all the love and care they deserve, making them hers and through her skill and affection, ours as well.    

Don Delillo – Falling Man

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Delillo’s most recent and ominously titled novel tackles the aftermath of September 11th by giving us the story of two New Yorkers – Keith and Lianne. We meet Keith on the horrifying day itself as he slogs, dazed and stunned and holding someone else’s briefcase, away from the rubble and toward Lianne, his almost ex-wife, whom we are told he has been separated from for over a year. Lianne, who we learn later had watched the towers fall believing Keith was inside, believing he was dead, lets him in and slowly these two bewildered individuals find themselves a family again.  

Bewildered, stunned, shocked, numb…these are the predominant flavors of Delillo’s exquisitely-written feast. Both Lianne and Keith seem to move through a foggy haze. There are moments that they lose control, like when Lianne finds herself attacking a neighbor woman for playing music too loud in their building, but that stronger emotion is swallowed up by the whale of her own shock. And again for Keith, who gets in a fight in a department store, he seems to experience this loss of control as a curious and misplaced moment in his day, a fluke. Although this myriad of astonishment and numbness seems to ring true, psychologically speaking, following this kind of traumatic event, it did create a wall between me as the reader and the novel’s characters. Neither Lianne nor Keith, despite the carefulness of Delillo’s description and the thoughtfully attended subject matter, managed to create a ripple on my reservoir of sympathy. Their stunned bearing kept them watching their own lives from a distance and therefore, held me behind the same restraining wall.  

On the day the novel opens, the twin towers are no longer a part of the New York City skyline but their ghost looms over the entire novel with a lurking shadow and Delillo parallels this metaphorical reality in several places: Lianne’s father’s years-before suicide, the children hunting the skies for planes and believing that the already fallen towers will fall again, and even the sporadic attention paid to Keith’s missing friends. It’s extremely well-done, this idea that something missing can take up more space in its absence and just one example of the many questions that Delillo poses in Falling Man.  

Despite the more personal nature of this novel, Delillo is still exceptionally good at turning a microscopic lens on America in a general sense, at its nuances, its eccentricities and emotions and Falling Man is no exception. His characters may remain enmeshed inside their own personal story but they externalize more global fears and opinions: 

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 a thing 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 are saying, Here it is, bring it down. 

There is quite a lot packed inside this novel, a lot of questions and a lot of ideas in only 246 pages. In one sense it presents just one single road inside September 11th, only one example of an individual’s reaction to the trauma and damage of that day. But at the same time, Keith and Lianne’s couple offers the dual perspectives of survivor and spectator and Delillo works these distinctions very well.

Among other literary explorations of America’s response to September 11th as a defining moment, Falling Man stands out as careful and specific, as honest but still kind, and most of all, as an attentive work of art.