DeLillo, Don - Falling Man
10:14am Thursday 7th June 2007
SINCE his monumental Underworld, Don DeLillo has understandably been producing shorter works; if that was a magisterial secret history of America in the 20th century, this could be taken as the coda required since September 11, 2001.
It's told through one separated couple, tentatively reunited after he narrowly escapes the World Trade Centre's collapse - but this being DeLillo, he's made sure that his protagonists and their circle give him all the perspectives he needs on a time when "nothing seems exaggerated anymore".
She works with Alzheimer's patients, whose vertiginous terror of "the breathless moment when things fall away" seems to become endemic in a city where old certainties no longer apply.
The way in which these glimpses of strategies for making sense of the world coalesce and then flip into each other is kaleidoscopic; at times it's also cinematic, while still being aware of (and avoiding) cinema's little evasions and elisions.
If the book has a flaw, it's that sometimes the dialogue and internal monologues are almost too faithful to the patterns of reality; what one can follow in one's own head, or accompanied by non-verbal cues in conversation, becomes dizzying in textual isolation.
And the book's final section, set three years on amid anti-war protests, isn't quite the equal of the 2001 material - if only because there's not been enough distance for anyone to get the same grasp of an age still under way as DeLillo shows earlier with those first shocking days.
It's a stunning achievement nonetheless.