Falling Man: Don DeLillo

[poliphilo]

Don DeLillo's people are sleep-walkers. Numb, hopeless, disassociated. True, they have the excuse that they're victims of 9/11, but if they hadn't been numbed by the planes flying into their lives they'd have been numbed by something else because life hurts all of us into passivity.  Falling Man is a fiction of the early 21st century but feels like one from 60 years earlier. The chilliness of the authorial gaze reminds me of Camus or Antonioni.  When I was a kid I used to like this sort of thing;  now I don't.