Keeping It Real
Andrew O’Hagan’s review of DeLillo’s Falling Man makes a writer’s syntax the measure of success: “Good prose in a novel depends on its ability to exhale a secret knowledge, to have the exact weight of magic in relation to the material, the true moral rhythm.” Yes, rhythm, and as far as 9/11 is concerned, O’Hagan would have this be the rhythm of the real. With metronomic regularity, his review inserts precise glimpses of the factual, names of the dead, whether they be the victims of the attack or the biographical details of Mohammed Atta’s life, a life that is set in contrapuntal relation to the life of the novelist.
O’Hagan is never less than interesting in his writing but here I find his insistence on the real a bit banal. Not one of the details he offers from the “real” world is the least bit surprising; DeLillo’s exploration of the figuure performing, with damnable, hubristic nonchalance, is more imaginative and challenging by any measure. O’Hagan’s piece is easily the best review that has appeared so far, not in the sense of being the most positive (that prize goes to Michael Wood’s generous but, in comparison, uninspired essay in Bookforum) but easily the one scripted to respond in its very form and spirit to the dominant impulses of DeLillo’s writing.
Perhaps my opposition to O’Hagan’s reading is simply the prejudice of memory. I expect him to propose readings against the grain of the real. Consider this debate between O’Hagan and Ian Jack, as recounted by the latter, in the pages of Granta. In that debate, O’Hagan had argued for imaginative departures while Jack, characteristically direct and forthright, had wanted nothing more than plain, unvarnished documentary: “… I would indeed prefer a photograph to a Picasso. For example, if as a modern Crusoe I wanted to tell a modern Friday what the effects of air bombing were like I would choose a photograph from Dresden or Vietnam over Guernica, every time.”
A similar debate, between the metaphorical and the realistic, but also between narrative and fragment, can be witnessed around Michael Ondaatje. In the crimson shorts with purple ruffles in the left corner, we have Pico Iyer, and, in the corner on the right, in red shorts and wearing a black cape is Louis Menand. I enjoyed reading both pieces, Pico Iyer so fluent in the way in which he makes connections, wearing Californian sandals called Metaphor, while Louis Menand is sharp and grimly business-like, a literary detective sitting in a New York diner named The Daily Shift. Neither of them is interested in exploring their own contexts, the conditions that make available to each the currency with which they pay their way through our minds, but each is consistent to his purpose. I wouldn’t choose between them. Why? Partly because I’m a teacher with a professional investment in fence-sitting, and partly, I guess, because we shouldn’t have to choose between language and reality.
