Displacement: Falling Man by Don DeLillo

This is the second time I've read this book this year, once for each Tower. Read it first for this 50 States blog, but decided to hold off on a review until it was up for my regular "face-to-face" book club this month. Sad to say, I have not found it any more engaging this time.

Anyone who witnessed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings has to be looking for a catharsis. I know I am. That's why I selected this book to represent New York.
I guess no review of Falling Man is complete without divulging what I was doing on 9/11. I was undergoing radiation for my first go-round with cancer. I was bald. Wearing one of my husband's old soft golfing hats to work every day and hiding in a back office building so none of my fellow workers would see me in a weakened state. Several of us, all women, congregated into a conference room to watch the WTC on TV. I called my husband, my sons, to let them know what was happening. I had worked in the Tower, taken my oldest son to Windows on the World for his first visit to NYC. It was my building. It made me think my illness was dwarfed by all this suffering. Later in the days and weeks that followed, the deaths crept north: a brother-in-law of a woman in the Capitol had died; executives from several State agencies were there for work and also perished.

I still need interpretation and closure and I had hoped DeLillo would have given another perspective. Alas, he does not. If you research his books on the Internet, you discover that one of his major themes is the effect of terrorism on daily living. This does not come across forcefully, however, to me in Falling Man. His major characters are contrived, even as they cluster conveniently alphabetically: Jack/Justin, Keith, Lianne, Martin and Nina. They are Woody Allen stock New Yorkers without the wit or distance, only the angst.

Their lives are self-centered, interpreted by parents foibles and compulsive habits that pass on from one generation to the next. Are these people really the quintessently New York? And should the culture and the characters in the City represent the State? Keith and Lianne move through the novel as though 9/11 could have been a bad subway accident or a City debilitating snowstorm. The event does not demark their lives. She still obsesses about getting Alzheimer's from her father and he loses himself in endless poker tournaments, both compulsions that predate 9/11. Keith's returning to Lianne's apartment after the fall of the Towers is undecipherable. Things that happen to him are lacking in passion. Although Lianne seems to have more feelings, they are misdirected and ineffectual, except to be omphalosceptic.

I must give credit to DeLillo for the style of the book. It is completely disjointed and choppy, intentionally so, to convey the displacement of 9/11. But there is no respect to the victims, no national interpretation, no sense that this was a seminal event in the lives of his characters. As well as having no segue between paragraphs as a device to emphasis the disjointedness of thought and plot, DeLillo alternates the New Yorkers' stories with those of the terrorists. He has one of the say "Others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them." This is DeLillo's theme: it not only applies to the zealotry of the Muslims, but also to the four main characters.

Maybe I should have selected Drums Along the Mohawk.