This Book is not to be doubted

Don DeLillo's recent novel, 'Falling Man', features a character, Keith, who is lucky enough to escape from the World Trade Center on September 11.

Before the attacks, he was a player in a home poker game, a place to experience the joy of routine and ritual:

"No food. Food was out. No gin or vodka. No beer that was not dark. They issued a mandate against all beer that was not dark and against all beer that was not Beck’s dark. They did this because Keith told them a story he’d heard about a cemetery in Germany, in Cologne, where four good friends, card-players in a game that had lasted four or five decades, were buried in the configuration in which they’d been seated, invariably, at the card table, with two of the gravestones facing the other two, each player in his time-honoured place."

In the years that follow the attacks, he is unable to go back to work and becomes a professional poker player. He feels the alienation:

"There was no language, it seemed, to tell them how he spent his days and nights."

He now desperately needs the ritual but cannot control it:

"He was fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never more himself than in these rooms, with a dealer crying out a vacancy at table seventeen. There were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards."

By the end of the novel, he has become a slave to the cards:

"Days fade, nights drag on, check-and-raise, wake-and-sleep. He wondered if he was becoming a self-operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch sensitive but totally, rigidly, controllable."

Keith arrived at that point because of the events of September 11.

I'll say no more.