LA Weekly

I read DeLillo's short story in the latest New Yorker last night. I could have stopped at just I read last night and that would have been impressive enough since I usually just go home and cry, unless Bones or House is on, in which case I'll go home, watch Bones or House, eat a half box of Wheat Thins...and cry. Anyhoo...back to DeLillo. His story is called "Still Life" and it was inspired by the iconic image seen in just about every publication following the 9/11 attacks in New York of that guy who was walking away from the towers in a business suit with a briefcase, covered in ash. In fact, it takes up his story where that image leaves off, imagining him going home to his estranged wife and reconnecting with her and his son. I'm not sure what, if any, research DeLillo put into the effort - did he make contact with the fella? Is any of it grounded in truth, or is it a complete imagining? I imagine it was the latter. It felt a little invasive to me. After all, that guy in the photo was a real person and now there's a alternative narrative out there that's inextricably related to him because everybody has that image seared in their minds. Clever. But just? Worthwhile? I'm not sure. The story itself is pretty trite. One of the subplots revolves around the reforming couple's son, who spends time at his friends' (a brother and sister) house secreted away in a room in their high-rise apartment peering out a window with binoculars. Of course, you see the big reveal coming a mile away: they're keeping watch for the next attack. I guess my question is why now, six years later?

Reading, I kept asking: what's new here? What's helpful? What further understanding does this story bring? What's the point...? Except as a creative excercise in imagining the real life of a still life, i.e., the iconic image of that man. Even that feels a little too facile towards the story's end of reminding us that innocence had been lost on that day, that everything changed. Whose innocence? The childrens'? The country's? Really?

This tendency to look at 9/11 in this way, as it's own entity -- the thing that changed everything -- also tends to separate it from us and imbue the nature of the change it brought with some sort of inevitability. Yes, everything did change, and plenty of nothing did, too. Maybe not enough and too much did at the same time. The story is still being written and we have a part to play in how it is, but I'm a bit tired of the almost nostalgic looking-backs of this sort of literary grave-dancing. Here DeLillo gives us a 9/11 romance: girl meets boy, boy leaves girl, planes crash into towers, girl gets boy back. It would be utterly banal, except for his use of the backdrop of 9/11, which doesn't make it any more profound, just sort of exploitative, to me anyway. Not to mention a day late and a dollar short. Or is not enough days late? Maybe metaphysical context isn't possble yet, and all we can do is continue to sift through the ashes of that bad minute.

On the other hand, we look to masters like DeLillo to grapple with our societal and historic narratives and I shouldn't begrudge him for trying -- wait a minute, that's exactly what I'm doing, but you know what I mean. I'm not sure, though, that we look to Mike Binder and Adam Sandler. Binder is the director of the bereft Reign Over Me (the mildly charming Upside of Anger previously), a movie that, like DeLillo's story, has nothing new to add to the 9/11 narrative and not much more on its mind than a mawkish seduction aimed at setting us up for the kill: the cry moment when Sandler's Charlie finally talks about the family he lost in one of the planes. Talk about low-hanging fruit. I mean, of course I cried (see title of blog), but without out the movie having anything real to say (not sure of its tone, the film bordered at times on a comedy of manners -- almost like Woody Allen does 9/11), the tears were cheap and the movie left my wife and our friend with almost nothing to discuss afterward. It was like a piece of sugar-coated pain candy - easy to swallow but worth nothing inside.

Not that such subjects are verbotten (United 93!). And in a world that seems on the verge of lunacy, I often find myself wondering what the hell the hot, young generation of writers, the McSweenyites if you will, are doing. They seem so detached from the big questions and so focused on minutie and the arcane and the ironic (excepting Eggers himself) that I get frustrated with them. I mean when was the last time a publication like The Believer or McSweeney's itself wasn't an excercise in trivia? A breeze through the archives renders titles like: "The Personal Journal of Zan, The Male Half of the Wonder Twins", and something about someone's journal entry indicating a need to stop watching porn, and "My Rejected Design Theme For J.Crew's Summer Catalog.", etc. I'm sure a lot of this shit is funny, and one of the funniest things I ever read, an essay about how many 12-year-olds the writer could take in a fight, was in either McSweeneys' or The Believer... but c'mon, isn't there more to life?

Life, however, goes on and much of life is trivial and small. Until, of course, it isn't. And then we yearn for the time when it was so.

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