Mark Charan Newton

Taken from my old blog, because I was reminded about it recently.

A performance artist hangs in statuesque pose. Knee bent. Upside down. The pose of the famously pictured man on 9/11. And this artist is effectively frozen in time. Which is the metaphor at the heart of Don Delillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. That of a moment in time so frozen, so embedded in characters minds, that they are unable to move on. They, too, are frozen in a moment.

The subject of 9/11 is a risky business. Not because of the content, but the weight of the content. It is difficult to avoid the more tabloid angles. But DeLillo takes a sidestep of this. That is, after his much quoted opening:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.

The full weight of the events of 9/11 are there, of course, but secondary—as much as they can be—to the effects on the every day routines of our existence. Those routines that will never quite be the same. Keith is a survivor, a lawyer in his late thirties, having walked from one of the towers before the collapse. His relationship with his wife is reignited in some primitive level, a focus on the needs we don’t really understand. But Keith soon has an affair with a black woman who suffered in the destruction of that day, forms a kind of therapy with her in their intimacy, a way of coping with the events. They never connect in any other context than the discussion of that day.

So where are the Big Issues that DeLillo has usually tackled in his books? The grand conspiracies?

I think I understand DeLillo’s intentions from the passage during a writing class:

From this point on, you understand, it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns. Their situation will grow increasingly delicate. These encounters need space around them. You don’t want them to feel there’s an urgency to write everything… The writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.

He’s not after the obvious. Why do that when he’s done it before in his career, long before other people approached the subjects? He wants to focus on the effects. You get the idea he’s looking for that moment that we become human, in this almost inhumane (un-human?) situation we find ourselves in post-9/11.

And so the characters don’t really develop, they undevelop, peel back to some level before, searching for whatever it is to fix their lives since the destruction of the towers. Keith becomes heavily involved in poker games, for example, detached from the mechanisms of reality. His wife has flirtations with art and church. All the time his son looks towards the sky for more planes. This isn’t quite normal DeLillo territory. Gone are the almost claustrophobic paranoias that featured in his earlier works. There is a search for openness, perhaps honesty in things. But people seem unable to move on. They see the representation of the Twin Towers everywhere.

There is some questioning to be found, of the motives behind the suicide bombers, but this feels detached form the other sections. I wonder if it is there as a framework, or perhaps even to remind ourselves that the bomber had a human side too, once?

A more wonderful analysis can be found on the New York Times. But I applaud DeLillo for not doing the obvious thing, for not looking for headlines, and maybe this will surprise some.

Oh yeah, his prose is on sparkling form too. When DeLillo steps into third-person, he really riffs like a god.

I’ve received the first chunk of the edit of Nights of Villjamur from Peter Lavery. It came with a slip saying “Hope it’s not too much of a shock”. I looked at the manuscript. I laughed.

Time to lose the ego.

It’s funny, because I’ve seen interviews where Neal Asher talks about Peter’s scary pencil. I sent a brief message to another Macmillan author, Alan Campbell, whose first response was “I hope Peter hasn’t been too ruthless with his pencil”. So when it came through, what else could I do but chuckle?

This is a bit of an ode to editorial work. When someone reads a book, they might catch a typo or two, and say, ‘Who the hell edited this?’ That’s just the copy-editing (a tough job also, but that’s the next stage). What Peter has done is quite amazing, on a sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph level, making dull areas shine with his sleight of hand. You can think you have a perfect sentence, and he’ll change one word for another and it’s hugely improved. I’ve laughed countless times already at how he’s made something work better, some dialogue sharper. Editors as good as Peter can make the book work much, much with a few suggestions. And he’s worked on other SF and Fantasy greats, including China Miéville and Hal Duncan, so with such a pedigree, who am I to argue?

Books are never completed by just one person. A team is involved, and they rarely get the credit that they deserve. I’m only a short way into working through the edits and comments, and I can already see I’ll be owing much thanks to him.

Something a little melancholy for the weekend. Mad hair.

Okay, so this is totally a geek thing, but how cool is it? (Linked to from Bookninja.)

For those of you who don’t know, ISBNs are the International Standard Book Numbers you get near the barcode. Every title has a unique ISBN. And to see them as graffiti is simply awesome enough to make me want to live in Toronto. I shall expect minions to be doing this with my tome when it hits the shelf, in order to perpetuate the myth that I am in fact a totally funky hipster. Or whatever.

I’m about to hit Nottingham with some Great Gatsby action. Or—sweet irony!—a little of DeLillo’s Underworld. Fuck it, I’ll just quote whole paragraphs across railway bridges. That should culture up the yoof.

Canadian indie funksters who were always much better than Arcade Fire.

A good convention, Alt Fiction, based in the Assembly Rooms in Derby. Cheers to Alex for such dedication to organise it.

Far too many folks there for me to catch up with in the four hours we hung around. But I like this con. It’s all about the fiction. All about the writing, the craft of it, the ins and outs of the industry. No crap panels. It’s wonderful for people who want to get into writing, or those who are just fans of certain authors. It opens up this mysterious industry, something I’m very keen on supporting. Met up with a few Solaris authors present and future, and various bloggers, reviewers etc. Watched my agent John Jarrold lecture on the frightening realities of getting published.

I only wish it ran for two days, but then it might lose the magic of being an intense, one-day affair. Anyway, apologies to anyone who I didn’t get a chance to say hello to. There’ll be a stack of other cons that I’ll be at this year, I’m sure…

It’s always interesting, when I see writer blogs, to say publicly who your influences are, I find. Plus it’s a shortcut to the ‘Oh, dude, so, like, whose books are cool?’ answer.

Main ones:
Don DeLillo
M John Harrison
China Miéville
Conrad Williams
Ernest Hemingway

Lesser, but still significant:
Steven Erikson
Jonathan Lethem
Christopher Priest
David Peace
Henning Mankell
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard

A mixed bag of genres, but I like reading around. The main ones are authors who I’ve read, become amazed, and whose books have just unlocked something within me, even if I’m not sure what.

One of my favourite writers, Don DeLillo, makes the front cover of The Onion.

Awesome. I love that magazine. DeLillo is by far the best prose stylist I’ve ever come across. Underworld is perhaps the greatest novel. Sometimes, when some of his paragraphs are flying with cool structure and word selection, there is nothing better. Nothing. He’s an old dog, too, which makes me think that it’s the sum of a vast career, the peak. Something to look forward to about getting older.

I’m away for a few days, heading to the coast, plotting books, seeing old friends, drinking wine in the sunshine, or watching storms roll in, treading slowly through nostalgia. In the meantime, here’s by far the best band of the last couple of years, Beirut.

My questions are to the girl on the sofa: are you married, my dear, and if not, are you willing to be taken out for cocktails?

Lyrics:

They’ve Incorporated Their Culture And Their Values
Into The City And They’ve Enriched The City
Both Like, From Uh, You Know Work Ethic
And You Know The Restaurants
And The Music
And It’s Really A Diverse City.

I Think The Real Important Things In Life Are You Know,
People And Your Family.
I Think You Don’t Realize That,
A Lot Of People Don’t Realize That Until They’re Older.
I Think There’s Going To Be
A Backlash Against Technology