“one side has the capitol, the labor, the technology, the armies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die”
Combine the immensity of the events of 9/11 with arguably America’s greatest living novelist and surely you can’t go wrong? Well, yes and no.
Don DeLillo’s description of “the day the planes came” and the aftermath is certainly magnificent with impressive descriptive lines like “The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now”.
Yet at the same time there’s quite a bit of tired and clunky writing here in the way in which events are embedded with heightened symbolism. It’s hard, for example, to think that saying plainly “they had sex” would be so much worse than the pretentiousness of “they took erotic pleasure from each other”
DeLillo is perhaps not telling us anything that we don’t already know but it is good to have the feelings of disorientation and fear articulated so eloquently.
Nothing can ever be the same again after this fall of the world trade center and its impact on a human scale is summed up the memorable photograph of one around 200 or more people who jumped from the burning towers. For DeLillo, as in Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’, this becomes a defining image of the tragedy: “this picture burned a hole in her [Lianne’s] mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific”.
What the novel captures so well is the sense of how being on the brink of danger gives both an urgency and anxiety to our daily lives. DeLillo also brilliantly captures the gulf between the perceptions of the terrorists and westerners: “what they [Americans] hold so precious we see as empty space”
You can never imagine a DeLillo book becoming a great movie because even when the external events are on such a massive scale, all the momentum derives from the internal lives and philosophical musings of the characters.
The story here follows the life of a survivor from the North Tower but beyond this there is no plot to speak of. For two thirds of the novel the quality and poetry is of a high enough level for this not to matter but the final part, three years on from the attack, lacks the same intensity.
Curiously the story ends as it began in the dust, noise and confusion of the fateful day in September, so that the novel becomes a kind of vicious circle suggesting that 9/11 is still too incredibly close to gain any meaningful perspective on it.
