Don DeLillo is one of the major novelists working in the USA, so his novel about September 11 deserves attention.  Yet it is a difficult work, despite being short.  The unabridged audiobook fits on 6 CDs, the print version in about 250 pages.  The sentences and paragraphs are superb but the flow of paragraphs is confusing and one wonders while reading it what DeLillo is trying to accomplish.  Most of the characters live in Manhattan; Keith, 39, was in the World Trade Center when the first plane hit, and the novel starts with him wandering around, heading back to his wife Lianne, from whom he had been separated.  DeLillo describes scenes of their lives, and some other people connected to them — their children, parents, friends — from now and the past.  The characters try to sort out their lives, they try to make sense of what happened and working out how to carry on.  Keith spends time with Lianne, has an affair with a woman who was in the same tower as him, and he plays professional poker.  Lianne runs a group in which people talk about 9/11, in the hope that talking will be therapeutic, but it does not seem to achieve much.  Her mother is fiercely intellectual, analyzing history and art, and she has extended conversations on the causes and significance of 9/11.  We read scenes of their lives, and often there are touching or striking points made or illustrated, but there seems to be very little continuity.  One of the characters is one of the terrorists who hijacked a plane, and his life unfolds along lines that make sense according to what we know.  Another character is a performance artist who reenacts the Falling Man in public places, causing controversy and anger.  As the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that there will be no resolution, and hardly any fitting together of all the pieces.  If DeLillo has a message here, it is about fragmentation and the pointlessness of modern life, the dissolution in the postmodern condition.  But it isn't clear he is trying to make any point and the novel is resistant to any simple interpretation.  One could alternatively understand the novel as a working through of the experience of 9/11 for Keith and those connected to him; an examination of the experience of trauma almost in the sense of Buddhist mindfulness, allowing thoughts to arise and disappear without judgment.  The meaning of the novel may be found more in the flow of words, rhythms and sounds, rather than some message to be derived from the narrative.  The reading by John Slattery helps to emphasize this aspect of the novel, staying consistently low key and yet hypnotic.  The opening and closing passages of the novel, set on September 11, are especially remarkable in describing terrible events in measured, careful language.  If one is going to find value in the book, this is where it has most to offer.  

© 2007 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

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Categories: AudioBooks, Fiction