Credo / Mark Oliver

Falling Man

'It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night'. This is how Don Delillo's 9/11 novel opens (he always has great opening lines).

Before reading Falling Man, I heard a Newsweek podcast in which its book critic said it felt like the "first genuine work of art" about the attacks, though the New York Times critic Kak utani was not so keen. Some critics were uncomfortable with the sections from the perspective of an imagined terrorist (not unlike Martin Amis's Mohammed Atta short story).

I rated the book - any time spent reading Deillo is time well invested. It did not amaze me throughout but I made my way quietly through it, and felt inspired and wowed by the odd passage - like the one at the start in which the central character Keith, a survivor of the attacks, is being looked at by a doctor.

The doctor tells him about how in places where there are suicide bomb attacks, survivors sometimes bumps which turn out to be "small fragments of the suicide bomber's body" because the flesh hits them at such velocity it gets wedged into whatever it hits.

"They call this organic shrapnel," the doctor says.

A poster on a Guardian arts blog about it, attacks this as "semi-digested research" inserted into the book, but I liked it, because it told me about something I didn't know about and did not ring false as something a New York doctor might say.

I also liked the 'Falling Man' of the title, the performance artist who hangs from structures around the city, prompting fury at his perceived insensitivty (I read somewhere that Delillo uses this as a device to acknowledge how fraught it is to create a novel out of an event which caused such grief, so relatively recently).

I remember trying to write around the time of the Spetember 11 2001 attacks and just being totally frozen: that anything I was writing felt unimportant, that there were weeks when it felt like "the only subject" and one that I was not qualified to tackle. I recall being quite awed by how Spike Lee's movie - released in 2002 began with images of the Memorial in Light.

Who is more qualified to write a 9/11 novel than Don Delillo whose great work Underworld had cover art depicting, prophetically, a funereal image of the World Trade Centre?

In Falling Man, the other main character, Liane, obsessively reads all of the New York Times "portraits in grief", the stark profiles of the victims (I remember the Guuardian doing some profiles and being really moved by a guy working there, I think as a painter and decorator who had been a drug addict and had a tattoo of the Angel of Death on his arm but who was clean and optimistic when the planes hit as he worked in one of the towers).

I just read this on Esquire saying the novel is "the best test-case yet for the idea that when the planes hit and the buildings went down we entered the “age of nonfiction,” when journalism, even journalism as modest in means as one of those Portraits of Grief, is able to grasp what’s happened -- and, more to the point, what’s happening -- to us more than fiction can, even fiction by our most accomplished and ambitious writers".

I think there is something in that, though suspect the best books and films about 9/11 may not be created for several decades.

The best article I read about 9/11 was by a novelist, writing in a newspaper: the Ian McEwan article in the Guardian a few days after the attacks.

Franny and Zooey

"I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair?"

This is Lane, the boyfriend of Franny, in  JD Salinger's novella, Franny and Zooey. The scene, in which they are meeting for lunch on a weekend, is excruciating in how pretentious and generally dreadful they are.

It is an excellent book, which I have been meaningto read for years. The theme is about academic and maverick intellectual precocious brilliance and the strains it has on a group of  young siblings in Manhattan who used to be on a radio show for child geniuses  (cf The Royal Tenenbaums). The eldest and brightest, Seymour, committed suicide.

Franny is very troubled and has become obsessed with a religious book and something called the Jesus Prayer, which I think is something which you are supposed to internally chant continuously, the idea being that you should continuously show your devotion. "Something happens after a while," Franny  says, "and you are praying without ceasing."

The idea reminded me of a line from HG Wells, quoted in Colin Wilson's The Outsider, in which he basically says that the rational thing would be to work furiously at finding answers to life's questions - not to sleep but to strive urgently and continuously.

Franny and Zooey is kind of steeped in this sadness that seems to well up among some intelligent people when they know a few things, and perhaps know more than most about how bad things are, and they don't really see any point in anything. (SPOILER WARNING) The ending is moving - Zooey, Franny's brother, tells a story about  how Seymour used to tell him to shine his shoes before going on the show for the "Fat Lady".

He says that this picture of the Fat Lady set in his mind with her probably "sitting on a porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full blast from morning till night."

Then he says: "There isn't anyone anywehere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady ... Don't you know who the Fat Lady  really is? ... Ah buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Jesus Christ buddy."

And the idea consoles Franny. I guess she is comforted by the idea that some of the yearning sensibility  of  a kind of divine connection in the ceaseless prayer which she was seduced by - which is clearly madness - is already there in the real life and people all around her.

It was interesting to read it some 15 years after first picking up The Catcher in the Rye, which, when I was a teenager, my mother originally confiscated from my shelf (could there have been a more powerful way of making me want to read it?).  Some of the notions about phoniness also resonate in Franny and Zooey and many of the characters - but not the terrible Lane - are acutely sensitive in a way that Holden was. Both books also ask questions about how, as you get older, you chose to live your life.

The Bowery

There is a piece today about the Bowery, on the lower east side of Manhattan, and how it is becoming more and more gentrified, in contrast to its past as America's No1 skid row. It has long been a magnet for beatniks, artists and other assorted unwashed.

The Observer's Paul Harris notes the new expensive apartments and the building of a massive Whole Foods - a chain store like the UK's Fresh and Wild which seemed to be the subject of a lot of social commentary when I was there earlier this summer. I could imagine that it was somewhere that used to be a lot grittier, with all the flophouses and so on. But I still thought it had a great bohemian vibe to it - there was the Bowery Poet's cafe and a lot of characters. It was at least a five minute walk to a Starbucks. Okay, most of the people did seem to be young white graduates, but they did mostly wear t-shirts and look a bit scruffy.

Maybe I thought the rough era of the flophouses had not totally gone because I stayed for an eternity of six nights in the ridiculously cheap and scarily basic Whitehouse hostel, which for $28 provides you with a tiny space in a kind of chicken coop thing. On the night when I could hear this older guy repeatedly muttering the words "motherfucker" and calling out "please Irene!" in his sleep, I got as much of a flophouse vibe as I wanted.

Despite this, I loved the area, the street graffiti and the bars. 

                       

The New York Trilogy

  The New York Trilogy 
  Originally uploaded by clownsaw.

It is fantastic how Paul Auster's book subverts and, as the dustjacket says, "transforms" the genre detective story. The way the stories run into each other and ask questions they don't full answer is enchanting, and escapes being frustrating.

The relationship and merging between the writer / private dick is interesting, and a great device. It is about how you can get lost in a "case" or a story, or a city.

I loved the bits about the Tower of Babel, an amazingly powerful story I had heard before but never really thought properly about. Using it with a story about a man who kept someone in the dark to grow up to try and create a "pure" unfallen language was a tour de force.

The final story with the Nietzschean figure Fanashawe, who has turned his back on what he once loved because he needs to live differently to other men, captured me the most. The family duty v personal dubious voyage of discovery theme I am strongly interested in. I also like portraits of ubermensch, and the catastrophes their decisions make.

It also really captures something of the city and you get a sense of walking around it with the careful use of street names. Something of the gritty glamour of New York. The noir glamour. It expertly balances story development with descriptive observation. It defies cliche and echoes something of Delillo's paranoia and conspiracy theory obsession. It is of that great tradition of readable literature.