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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.

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Washington: Hi guys. I read DeLillo's short story in the New Yorker called "Still Life" back in April. I thought it was really great. Was "Still Life" an excerpt from The Falling Man? It seemed quite self-contained. Also, if the only of his novels that I've read is White Noise, where should I turn next?

Meghan O'Rourke: Hi there. DeLillo is one of those writers it can be hard to recommend; readers tend to vary in what they most like, I've found. For example, some DeLillo fans love White Noise and some like it the least. But I certainly think Libra, his book about Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK, would be a great place to go after White Noise. It's not as long as Underworld, but it's excellent. I love the first half of Mao II; it does get more and more fragmented as you go, but if you like the gnomic DeLillo, the one given to vague koans and mysterious pronouncements, you might find this book to be quite brilliant. New York Magazine has a useful summary of all the DeLillo novels up on its Web site: it divides them into several categories, including the necessary ones and the ones that maybe only diehard fans will want to read.

Ruth Franklin: "Still Life" was definitely an excerpt, or at least an adaptation, of "Falling Man." Interesting that you found it self-contained. It didn't include any of the parts of the novel that depict the terrorists, or another important subplot that Meghan and I also didn't get to on Slate: the affair Keith has with another 9/11 survivor.

It asks a lot of the reader, but I definitely have to recommend Underworld. I prefer it to Libra for the fascinating way it's structured and also just the sheer quality of the language. Falling Man is more terse than DeLillo usually is, and doesn't give much of a sense of the poetry of his language. Also, the set-pieces in this book—the reconstruction of the famous baseball game, or a huge art installation in the desert—really showcase his imagination.

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New York: Do we really need an expansive 9/11 novel that tackles Guantanamo and Iraq as well? Do we want a post-9/11 Middlemarch? As you say in your discussion, not enough time has passed for us to fully digest what has happened and what it means. It seems to me the most affecting 9/11 narratives are not the ones that put that day right in the author's crosshairs, but the narratives that quietly acknowledge how the minutiae of everyday life has changed. On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey and her boyfriend are entering the subway, when the police ask to search their bags. When the cops get too chatty about the contents of her purse, she rolls her eyes and says, "forget the subway, let's just walk." The scene is slight and funny, but made my skin crawl more than anything else I've seen and read since 9/11 precisely because of how non-chalant it was about acknowledging the threat of terrorism and the conflation of the personal and political in the past six years.

Meghan O'Rourke: I think there's room for many different kinds of approaches—and what I was trying to get at in talking about the "post 9/11 novel" was that a novel that dealt with the day's after-effects (Guantanamo, etc) need not be one that put the day itself in its "cross-hairs." I absolutely agree that some of the most striking post-9/11 TV, movies, and books I've read contain small but piercing moments like the one you describe from 30 Rock. Those moments of nonchalance are quite telling, absolutely. Part of what I want to see, in such an expansive novel, would have to do with how people are dealing with these after-effects, some shadowy, some not. As for the question of digesting, Willa Cather wrote "One of Ours" only four years after the First World War, I think; admittedly it's not a great Cather novel, but it's one I'm glad exists.

Ruth Franklin: I feel compelled here to bring up Suite Francaise, a book that I have problems with but does succeed amazingly well at depicting the changing landscape of France during World War II in something close to real time.

One problem with moments like the one you describe from 30 Rock is that the rules we live under change so quickly. Ten years from now, will anyone still remember that we couldn't take fluids on airplanes, or that our bags were constantly searched? Will it still matter? By then, the conflation of the personal and the political could well look extremely different.

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Bar Harbor, Maine: Meghan—how are the questions raised by 9/11 self-evident? Are the (largely academic) debates about late modernity, spectacle, the dissolution of identity—to touch on just a few nodes of contemporary academic discourse—really "self-evident" to a moderately well-informed but casual reader of DeLillo? Did 9/11 do its work in displacing Western dominance, or has it only reinscribed this dominance in the West's singular fetish for it? The shoring up of national identity in the wake of 9/11 leads me to believe that the more nuanced questions are precisely not self-evident, that a radical reappraisal of our times has not been accomplished, at least in the popular realm of the novel, and that DeLillo's work—which I am not entirely familiar with, beyond White Noise and Mao II—addresses these questions on grounds where they have not, but need to be, addressed.

Meghan O'Rourke: Thanks for your question. I'm afraid the sentence you're referring to in the first entry must have been a little unclear. What I said was that the "challenges" presented in writing a 9/11 are self-evident—by which I meant the formal challenges of writing a 9/11 novel (as opposed to, say, a World War II novel). Even that assertion may be spurious! But God knows, I didn't mean that the "questions raised" by that day are self-evident, for all the excellent reasons you raise. These are the big questions that I talk about wishing a novelist would get into in my second entry.

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Great Books, Va.: I loved, loved, a couple of novels that are about 9/11, explicitly and somewhat obliquely. Those novels are Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was wonderfully cathartic, and Ian McEwen's Saturday, which is a lean, mean look at vengeance vs. diplomacy, and how we should react when a violent act is committed against us. As wonderful as the same author's Atonement is—and it's a favorite of people love Novels with a capital "N"—give me Saturday any day.

Ruth Franklin: I'm with you on Saturday! Although I wouldn't call it a 9/11 novel exactly, but more a novel about the ways the world has changed since 9/11. I could be wrong about this, but I'm not sure it ever explicitly mentions 9/11, even though that's the obvious backdrop for everything that takes place. (As we all know, the Iraq war was not intrinsically connected to 9/11 ...)

As an American, one thing I found most interesting about Saturday was the way it gives a British perspective on the Iraq war. Things look a little different over there.

Meghan O'Rourke: I do think that one of the funny things about the "9/11 novel" nomenclature is that it seems to exclude a lot of novels that are, as you say, in some sense about 9/11, but less directly. Saturday is, for me, one of those novels that tries to deal with the post-9/11 climate, large and small. He even captures the way every plane in the sky can seem a kind of menace.

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Washington: In some ways, I'm wondering if we need a pre-9/11 novel that focuses on its pre-9/11-ness. I've often thought how I will explain to my (not-yet-born) children what life was like before the anxiety and security and control born on that day. I mean, there are details and levels of consciousness that no novel before 9/11 would have considered documenting, and yet now we are focusing on what life is like post-9/11, when there is this undocumented relic that is getting further and further away.

Ruth Franklin: This is a great point. I've often thought of The Corrections as just such a novel—it came out just around the time of 9/11. I read it in the few days afterwards, and found it extremely consoling as a vision of a lost America. Of course, Jonathan Franzen didn't plan it that way! I think The Emperor's Children, which takes place in the months before and after 9/11, might be the pre-9/11 novel you're looking for. This book does a tremendous job of capturing the bright superficiality of New York in those days, and making it feel like a lost Eden of innocence.

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Washington: One of the obvious pieces that differentiates "9/11" fiction from "Holocaust" fiction is time—Levi and Wiesel's books, as well as post-WWII movies, talk about the gradual realization of and adjustment to the reality of the concentration camps, including a portrayal of the difficult job of protecting a tiny flame of hope. 9/11 is a burst, that allowed for neither a gradual adjustment nor any personal heroics of hope. Because novels rely so heavily on time, perhaps it never will be possible to write 9/11 literature that is not fragmentary. I love DeLillo, particularly The Names—a sense of language as both divider and binder flows throughout his novels—it is the central force. It seems, in this novel, that he has found a force greater than language in controlling our lives. Thank you.

Meghan O'Rourke: Your point about time is a crucial one, it seems to me. I suspect it will be possible to write a good 9/11 novel that isn't fragmentary, but the idea that it's impossible is a really interesting one. Of course, we've seen some novels that aren't fragmentary, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; whether you admire them is a different matter, but I do think that, as Ruth says, future readers will return to them to see how we made sense of the event in the immediate aftermath.