Falling Man

Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world
This is Captain America calling
I bailed you out when you were down on your knees
So will you catch me now I’m falling — The Kinks, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling”

It’s not like I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about September 11. We live in a world so permeated by what happened that day — and moreover by the less fortunate aftershocks — that not thinking about it is all but impossible. (Though even Rudy “a Noun, a Verb, 9/11” Giuliani seems to be trying.) It’s just that I haven’t gone out of my way to relive those events, the way it felt that morning and in the immediate aftermath. I haven’t watched the documentaries or the interviews with survivors, or read any of the countless books written about the attacks. (The closest I’ve come is recently watching Spike Lee’s masterful 25th Hour, in which, as Roger Ebert notes, “the shadow of 9/11 hangs over [everything].”) I haven’t avoided it, but it occurs to me I also haven’t sought it out.

I wasn’t in New York at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until after noon that I learned that anything had happened. I wandered into a now defunct arcade in downtown State College, PA, and heard about the attacks on the radio. In retrospect, it seems incredible that I remained unaware for those first few hours, especially since the rest of the day was spent in frantic phone calls and watching the news. I remember being overwhelmed by it all, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and being just blindsided with grief*.

It’s maybe no wonder that I’ve avoided those movies and books.

Still, last week I read (and I’d say largely enjoyed) Don DeLillo’s 2007 book Falling Man, which right off the bat throws you back into that bright September morning:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under the cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

The “he” there is Keith Neudecker, and the rest of the story plays out over the next few years against the backdrop of his estranged marriage to Lianne. It’s in many respects a modest, day-to-day domestic drama, and I think it bothered some critics — notably Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times — that it wasn’t a more ambitious, more definitive 9/11 book. But is such a thing even possible? That day, and more importantly our fumbling and failed attempts to make sense of it, are never far from the center of DeLillo’s book. It’s not as panoramic or expansive as his novel Underworld, it’s true, but I think the sheer enormity and immediacy of the 9/11 attacks would make that kind of book difficult to write, much less read.

So this isn’t the definitive book on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t full of some terrific writing:

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

I think my pleasure in the book came precisely because it isn’t the definitive book on the subject, because instead of trying to make sense of it all, it simply lets us watch others trying to make sense of it all. And that, in the end, may be the best any of us can do.

* None of it personal, thankfully. None of the family or friends I had in New York were at the World Trade Center that morning.