A Flavour of the Book: “In those places where it happens… the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tint fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”
The Authortrek View: Don DeLillo’s account of 9/11 is very compelling, as his protagonists flap around in the huge narrative that has suddenly enveloped them. Keith Neudecker’s response to the attack is an entirely natural one, as he goes ‘home’ to his estranged wife, Lianne, and his son, Justin. The novel is written in the usual DeLillo style, with the odd staccato speech that he employs for all dialogue. This, in itself, is probably quite realistic, although it is a little hypocritical for Keith to criticize Justin’s monosyllabism, as he is not a great communicator himself. The survivors, such as Keith and Florence Givens, seem to be held up in shock, still trying to feel their way to an exit, a resolution, or to a closure that may never come. Interspersed by this are the thoughts and feelings of Hammad, one of the plane hijackers, and several accounts of David Janiak, the performance artist that seems intent on reminding New Yorkers of the tragedy whether they like it or not. Justin scans the sky for more evidence of attacks from ‘Bill Lawton’ (the kids have misheard ‘Bin Laden’), even though he does not believe that the Towers have fallen. Lianne, regarding Janiak’s stunts, thinks that “it could be the name of a trump card in a tarot pack, Falling Man, name in Gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky”, seemingly forgetting that there is a tarot card already like that: The Tower. These feelings of shock and numbness suit Don DeLillo’s famous prose style particularly well in this novel. However, where DeLillo really triumphs is in his depiction of the fall of the towers, especially regarding the jump from Hammad’s narrative to Keith’s at the end.
You can read a resume of the book on our Amazon store below. To find out more about the editor, please visit our Don DeLillo page.
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