Delillo's Falling Man

[rich]

in some bizarre way, 9/11 doesn't correlate to "9/11" in my mind--maybe at
this stage we still can't get our heads around it as the repercussions from
it are still developing. one could argue we're still trying to understand
the holocaust. my point is direct attempts to personalize, make clearer,
9/11 per se is doomed to fail. delillo was never one who could work that
well on the character level but more as he would say on the society, the
culture as a whole. his last two books were disappointments because of this
minimization if you will of his vision, his style--from the description of
Falling Man it would seem he is continuing in that vein but I'll delay
judgement until I've read it.
he's already written his 9/11 books--woe unto him the sage who feels the
need to expound upon that which he predicted. what makes him think he can
presage that which is now foreign to him, his paradox victory?

rich

On 3/26/07, John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> I'm reading Delillo's new novel, his 9/11 one, and it's remarkable how
> Pynchon's oblique treatment of the subject seems far more provocative to
> me precisely because of its opacity (and brevity, too). That said, going
> back and re-reading the destruction of the city bit in AtD, it appears
> not just a heavily encrypted meditation on the WTC attack but one which
> can very, very easily be read as *not* connoting 9/11 at all. Sure, it's
> perhaps inevitable that we'll think about it while reading that section,
> but the details which don't correlate surely number as many as those
> that do. Now, I wonder why?
>
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