From ashes, DeLillo rises

Duane Davis, Special To The Rocky

Published May 11, 2007 at midnight

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In a certain sense, art and terrorism are both attempts to bring order and meaning to the welter of confusion and complacency that so often makes up our everyday world. Both are symbolic acts meant to convince us of something - art in words, images and sounds; terrorism in violence, destruction and death. That neither ever really succeeds is one reason both are endlessly repeated, endlessly renewed: a new novel, a new bomb. Every week. Every day.

Don DeLillo has been exploring the ramifications of this nexus since at least as far back as his 1977 novel, Players, in which a character observes that the World Trade Center Towers are "no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light."

By 1991, in Mao II, DeLillo had begun to worry that terrorism was, in fact, beginning to replace art as a way of expressing a vision of our world, that instead of words on a page, now "the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings."

Ten years later, Sept. 11, 2001, the towers fell.

Now DeLillo, a New Yorker born and bred, has fashioned a novel, Falling Man, in which, through the crush and roar of chaos and collapse can be heard, soft as whispers and ash, simple words of hope, courage and dignity. He does this with a litter of narrative shards from which he attempts to assemble a picture, fractured and cracked and seamed though it may be, of the lives that we live now, in the shadow of catastrophe.

He begins at the only place he can: with a man walking, stumbling, out of the North Tower in the moments after the South Tower has collapsed:

"It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. . . . The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke . . . "

The man, Keith Neudecker, a 39-year-old young professional with Royer Properties, at this instant, has been torn out of one world, one set of space and time coordinates, and blasted into another: "He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light . . . There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood."

One world was gone and another, terrifying and alien, has taken its place. "The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran . . . "

What follows in the rest of the book are glimpses - sometimes moving, often enigmatic, occasionally even comic, but always riveting - of how Keith, his wife, their young son, his wife's mother and her lover, attempt to pick the pieces of their lives out of the debris and to put them into a semblance of order and cohesion.

At first, for Keith, the world seems to have been stripped of everything, not just of color and light, but of meaning as well. Returning to his apartment near the towers, he finds, "Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under permanent siege . . . "

And worse: "The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes."

Putting the pieces of these lives back together may ultimately be impossible but one thing is certain, it can't be done alone. Keith forms a relationship, desperate and compromised, with a black woman, Florence, who also survived the North Tower. Together, they fumble through their recollections, and it is here, with their "crossing memories, brought down out of the tower and into this room" they are sitting in, that the reader begins to see something in people, ordinary people that we pass every day on the street and in stores and restaurants, that cannot be erased by terror and violence.

Florence recalls the stairs and "the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me . . . The crowd on the stairs, the sheer force of it, hobbling, crying, burnt, some of them, but mostly calm, a woman in a wheelchair and they carried her and people made room, bending into a single file on the stairs."

There is, of course, more: " . . . the firemen went racing past, going up the stairs, into it, and people got out of the way." Into it. Into ash and near night.

There is a great deal in this complex, intricate, sometimes baffling, sometimes deeply moving book that simply can't be touched upon in a mere review. DeLillo is, in my view, a great writer whose most characteristic weakness is a certain coldness of the heart: He is not a sentimentalist by any stretch of the imagination.

The characters in this book are deeply flawed; they were before the planes hit the towers - they still are after the rubble has been cleared away.

The purity of neither terror nor art will mend them - and DeLillo knows that. It may be that there is no better explanation for these events than one given early in the book by an elderly man who says God "has the big things that He does. He shakes the world."

What we do, DeLillo seems to say, is hold on, tight, to each other. Because the shaking never stops.

DELILLO ON DISTANCE

The acclaimed author rarely gives interviews. In a 1991 exception, he told The New York Times: "When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part... If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether neccessary."

Falling Man

• By Don DeLillo. Scribner, 256 pages, $26.

• Grade: A

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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