Not too long after Don DeLillo wrote Mao II , a bomb was detonated in a parking garage of the World Trade Center. The novel, published in 2001, was about terrorism and the way terrorists eclipse art and the novelist with their trajectory of narrative. The book is not quite as memorable as White Noise or Libra , but it does show most explicitly DeLillo's role as a seer. As Toby Litt reminds us in the Guardian , DeLillo wrote: "Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word 'loomed' in all its prolonged and impending force."
If White Noise was about the apocalypse via the media and our entrapment by domestic technology, and Libra was the JFK conspiracy book that made sense, Mao II, which was published in 1991, was already his 9/11 book.
Reading Falling Man , his latest novel in which he finally means to take on the America after 9/11, I felt an emptiness and an outrage that crept in with the turning of the first page and persisted for days afterwards. Aside from those reactions, this book made me feel nothing.
The critics' responses varied only in terms of whether their appreciation of DeLillo's virtuosity overshadowed an overall sense of vacancy or not. All have found the self-involved characters to fall short of a true embodiment of our consciousness, whether DeLillo had chosen the large scale or small. (Because Underworld , his masterpiece, was all-encomassing of the American popular consiousness, the author can be forgiven if he chooses to downgrade a bit.)
I sort of enjoyed Cosmopolis, for it's nihilism and for DeLillo's audacity to publish a book that deals with a millionaire businessman who, as Bookforum just pointed out, would have perversely embraced the events of September 11 th . I didn't think it was a very good book, but I understood why it was published. When an artist is noted for their role as seer, and as premonitory, the expectations can be superhuman and the pressure must sometimes yield to evasion.
But DeLillo himself wrote that it is the writer's duty to construct a "counter-narrative" to what the terrorists gave us on that day, in his essay for Harper's, "In the Ruins of the Future," December 2001. He wrote of America's course to live permanently in the future, with such things as the global market and the internet and the general speed of life divorcing us from memory and the need for god. And then of 9/11, and of the power of this day to end our catapult through the future, to be reckoned by history. It was the enormity of the event that occupied our lives and formed our narrative. But the personal stories, the moments of human beauty, whether dreadful or heroic, he said, shape the "counter-narrative." And he makes peace with the awareness of insufficient time, suggesting that this new fissure is vast enough to permit contemplation. "There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space."
This is the promise of Falling Man . And the disappointment comes from the sense that he is merely repeating himself--stylistically, with empty gestures that fail to analyze--and narratively. Litt compares fiction's project of describing real and massive shared events to the theatrical device of the chorus, which is expected to give meaning to events that are seen and heard. When the writer merely repeats, we are left with the feeling of too much time spent before a television.
There are definitely areas in the book that work, and I was particularly impressed by a chapter that conveys the experience of researching an event on the internet. A character is reading the obituary of the fictional performing artist known as Falling Man, and new details are introduced in successive summaries, which mirror the experience of reading multiple newsfeeds. Moments like this were almost enough to make me wonder if in fact the book stands as a mirror of our failed media system and society, which wallows adrift in a sea of self-absorbtion, that the reluctance to feel or to address is meant to reflect our mistake. But the book is simply too lazy.
