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DeLillo, Literature, and 9/11Ruth Franklin and Meghan O'Rourke trace the intersections of art and world-changing tragedies.

Posted Thursday, May 24, 2007, at 5:41 PM ET

Slate literary editor Meghan O'Rourke and New Republic senior editor Ruth Franklin were on Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, May 24, to examine Don DeLillo's new book, Falling Man, and how writers and artists have reacted to world-changing events, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An unedited transcript of their chat follows.

Meghan O'Rourke: Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us for some discussion about fiction and art about 9/11 and its aftermath.

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Springfield, Ill.: Does Falling Man seem more like an elaboration of the terrorist/cultural themes of Mao II, or the exploration of the inner life of characters involved in actual events (Libra)? Parts of both, I sense from your writings ... but I find Libra to be one of of DeLillo's best ... Mao II, not so much.

Meghan O'Rourke: I'll be curious to know what Ruth thinks, but for me the book is something of a mix of "Mao II" and "Libra." It is a little less conspiratorial and paranoid than "Mao II," but it is also tries to update some of the thinking that DeLillo did in "Mao II" about the role of terrorism in our media-saturated culture, and about the state of contemporary life in America. The novel expresses some interest in the inner lives Keith and Lianne, to use your phrase, but I think, as Ruth put it in our discussion, DeLillo is mostly interested in them as figures who can express some of his ideas about the search for purity in a confused world. In important ways, too, "Falling Man" is really not like either novel, too. It is perhaps even more fragmented than either "Libra" or "Mao II."

Ruth Franklin: I agree with Meghan that "Falling Man" is a new direction for DeLillo entirely. Thematically, Meghan is right that DeLillo is updating "Mao II's" approach to terrorism; but the new novel is almost strenuously unpolitical. It also has very little of the humor that characterized novels like "White Noise" and even "Cosmopolis." The novel it's most similar to, I think, is "Underworld"—it also has a fragmented structure and moves forwards and backwards in time, and is similarly somber in tone.

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Night Fall: When I picked up Nelson DeMille's book I knew it was about TWA 800 but had no idea where it was leading. When the Corey sets up the meeting for Tuesday morning at Windows on the World I was practically screaming "NO!" at the book. And then the way DeMille describes that beautiful, clear, cool, crisp early fall morning ... it brought back a flood of feelings and emotions. I thought he did a great job of incorporating those events into his novel.

Ruth Franklin: Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the Nelson DeMille book. But I find it interesting that, as you say, the visceral details of the morning of Sept. 11 are so important in all these novels. I have yet to read one that took any liberty in imagining the weather on that day, although there are small details that some novelists (including DeLillo) have altered. In DeLillo's book, for instance, the characters watch a video of a plane striking the first tower, but I don't remember there being such a video, precisely because the attack was a surprise.

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washingtonpost.com: Ruth, you're writing about the Holocaust, a well-tread but potentially touchy topic. How do you approach the subject in a fresh way? How much effort goes into avoiding offending?

Ruth Franklin: Well, you're right that Holocaust literature is a very well-tread subject. I'm mainly interested in two areas. First, the way Holocaust survivors have negotiated the distinction between fiction and memoir in their writing; and second, the way readers approach the Holocaust as a fictional subject. I'm afraid I have managed to offend some people, perhaps mostly because I believe that fiction can be as useful and important as memoir when it comes to historical events like the Holocaust or 9/11. The fiction on 9/11 hasn't quite borne me out yet in that regard, but I'm hopeful that it still will!

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washingtonpost.com: A few films (World Trade Center, United 93) have tackled the events of Sept. 11 head-on, while others (Syriana, etc.) have come at the subject from the background. How much more difficult is the former? How much more impact can the former approach have?

Meghan O'Rourke: It's a really interesting question. It would seem to me that each approach has its own set of difficulties, but instinctively, I'd said that the head-on approach Paul Greengrass took with United 93 in particular presents a more rigid set of problems to navigate. It is surely hard to convince viewers (and oneself, as a director) that there is something meaningful—and artistic—about reproducing a story that we know very well from television, newspaper accounts, and books like The 9/11 Commission report. Of course, United 93 was also juxtaposing factual material about what happened in the air traffic control centers with imagined material about what happened in the plane itself (we know only a few things about what took place). And that requires a lot of control to do well. Same thing with World Trade Center. Syriana, on the other hand, is much freer to invent, rather than reproduce and document—but that places a new kind of burden on figuring out (and producing) the story itself.

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Horsham, Pa.: Ms. Franklin, what pieces of Holocaust fiction do you think are most valuable to the understanding of that event, and what gives them that quality? In your view, why have no pieces on 9/11 achieved this yet?

Ruth Franklin: Interesting question. Because time is short, I'll just give a couple of examples. Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz—a memoir that provides an almost absurd amount of information about the actual conditions in the camp, but simultaneously draws on literary tradition to contextualize the narrator's experience. To pick a more recent book, W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz is the fictional story of a man who discovers that he has been haunted through his entire life by wartime experiences he hadn't even fully remembered. It's an amazing depiction of the profound resonances that historical events can carry into contemporary life, often without our even recognizing them.

As for why no fiction on 9/11 has yet achieved this—I think it's too soon to tell whether they have or haven't. I suspect Jonathan Safran Foer's novel about 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, will be a book people turn to in future generations to try to understand that day, and DeLillo's as well.

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washingtonpost.com: One of the topics you've tackled in your back-and-forth has been the detachment exhibited in some of the post-9/11 literature. Given that some of the greatest writing to come out of World War II were first-person accounts (Night, Hiroshima) will this need to be overcome to produce a book that really gets to the heart of the attacks.

Ruth Franklin: Very interesting. I have yet to read a first-person literary account of 9/11 (certainly there were a lot of first-person journalistic accounts). I suspect that part of the reason is that it might seem redundant for an average person to write a memoir of 9/11 (rescue workers and others excepted). There isn't really a need for "testimonials" when we have the 9/11 Commission Report! The first writers to write about the Holocaust—Primo Levi already in 1945, Wiesel just a few years after—were driven by the need to recount what wasn't already general knowledge, but even they were self-conscious about possibly repeating facts that everyone already knew.

Meghan O'Rourke: I remember that I read a very powerful first-person essay written some months afterward by a young man who had been in the building; it was submitted to the magazine where I worked. I'm not sure it was ever published but it has stayed with me. But that, too, was nonfiction; it's interesting that novelists haven't tried to do this. There is one passage that tries to do some of this in the DeLillo—Florence, who is briefly Keith's lover, describes descending the stairs in the tower. It's quite interesting to see him try to inhabit that viewpoint, even in dialogue.

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washingtonpost.com: What would each of you say are your favorite works of writing, film, art, etc. that address these sorts of world-changing events? What are some of the older examples?

Ruth Franklin: The Iliad! In all seriousness, this is what bothers me when people wonder if fiction about 9/11 is necessary. People have always been making art about world-historical tragedies—wars, plagues, famines ... These works have always been crucial to helping people understand the problems of our own times: you can read Julius Caesar, for example, to get some bearing on the political corruption and scandals of this decade.

Meghan O'Rourke: Great question. There's a lot of film about war that I find very powerful—from The Seven Samurai to Letters From Iwo Jima. In art, there's Guernica; and a lot of Goya. (It's funny, I tend to go to 20th century examples.) For books, I'd have to say the Iliad, too. Then there's A Farewell to Arms. From Here to Eternity might be an interesting novel to reread now, since it's all about the lead-up to war.