Falling Man

Do you ever find when you’re having a conversation with someone and they’re talking about something relatively trivial or boring that you tend to wander off in your mind and starting thinking about something or someone completely off-topic? My habit in these situations is to compose lists - normally some sort of to do list.

The problem is I have a tendecncy to do this when I read as well. For the last year or so I’ve been reading purely non-fiction – it all started with Tom Humphreys Laptop Dancing and the Nannygoat Mambo (even if you have no interest in sport you should read it – I’m utterly bitter over the quality of the man’s writing!) and it spiralled from there on leading to a long trail of sports biographies (and one of the Dave Gorman books!)

I think that what I like primarily about these books is that there’s not a lot of waffle (says I the waffler supreme) The story pretty much tells itself, the stories are primarily told anecdotally which I’m a big fan of – anyone remember Eddie Linehan the seanchai who used to be on RTE 2? That’s the sort of storytelling I’m fond of most – a tale that grabs you by your relevant body part (tick genitals as appropriate) and keeps you in the story till the last fullstop.

The thing about sports biographies is that provided you’ve chosen the book carefully and you haven’t ended up with, god forbid, Lewis Hamilton’s book (HE’S a CHILD!! How can he have a whole book??) then the person involved will have a compelling story to tell - recent examples of books I’ve read would include Moss Keane, Paul McGrath, Muhammed Ali, Paul Kimmage and Roy Keane (sure he’d have to be in there wouldn’t he?!)

My point is this – jesus talk about an overdrawn tangent – biographies in general don’t waste too much time with overly flowery descriptive paragraphs (unless they’re looking to fill space) and this is one of the main reasons why I drifted away from reading fiction. I understand the need to develop atmosphere but, blame it on my limited attention span, I often feel that fiction writers get a bit carried away with themselves and consequently I frequently find myself reading paragraphs where I get that distracted feeling and skip to the end of the paragraph without actually absorbing whats been written. Not so for the most recent book however.

So just before christmas I called into Hodges & Figgis to pick up the Gum Thief for Una’s Book-N-Supp and, as I have a tendency to do, I went on a bit of book buying binge. Now normally I prefer to get one book out of the way before moving onto the new one but for whatever reason I picked up one of the new purchases the other night even though I was still in the middle of another one. By the following night I’d eaten the book up, the book being Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.

I’ve been a fan of DeLillo since reading Underworld and this was one book that was on my list of things to read – I knew the basic background – that the story was rooted in 9/11 but knew very little else apart from the fact that it came highly recommended from several heads.

And what a book. Without going on too much more (!) suffice to say that DeLillo begins with an incident of global significance but instead of looking at the implications for the world or for America just gives us one family and an entirely convincing and realistic tale describing the fallout from this event. Aside from the parts dealing with the hijackers there is no real apparent drama – if anything its a tale of the mundane ways in which people piece their lives back together again – but you still don’t know where the story’s going to go. The arc of the story was completely unpredictable and obviously that’s what separates fiction from non-fiction.

With the biographies I already know where the relevant parties are in their lives so the story’s all about the manner of its telling. With fiction its all about the conclusion. With this book though there were no real cliffhangers, no narrative contrivances attempting to hold your attention, it was a very ordinary story but I still couldn’t put it down.

If you haven’t read it, I’d strongly suggest you do – the chapter towards the end on the tower coming down is worth the price alone.

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