THE LIGHT OF FALLING STARS
By J. Robert Lennon
Riverhead Books, 308 pages, $23.95
When I think of airplane crashes as the subject for a story, I think first of all those disaster movies of the ’70s–“Airport,” “Airport ’75,” “Airport ’79–The Concorde”–any movie, for that matter, in which actor George Kennedy appears inside the cockpit of an aircraft. Next in line is Jimmy Stewart as the stalwart captain in “Flight of the Phoenix,” followed by two more recent entries into this subgenre, “Fearless” and “Alive.” In short, I think of movies, not books. In fact, the only literary works I’ve read in which an airplane disaster is used as a starting point are Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief,” a haunting short story based on the real-life act of terrorism against an Air India Boeing 747; and Salman Rushdle’s “The Satanic Verses,” in which a hijacked jumbo jet is blown out of the sky. One must now add “The Light of Falling Stars,” a first novel by J. Robert Lennon, to the very top of that list.
Lennon has written an immensely readable, multilayered and dramatic book, using the crash of an AirAmerica passenger jet as the axis upon which the plot of this powerful novel pivots. “The Light of Falling Stars” tells the story of five people whose lives are affected by this plane crash in the deep woods on the outskirts of Marshall, Mont.: Paul, whose house is damaged by the plane’s fallen engine; Anita, Paul’s wife, who talks to a dying boy moments after the crash; Lars, whose girlfriend, Megan, spent the summer in Seattle before taking the fatal AirAmerica flight back to Marshall; Trixie, whose estranged ex-husband, Hamish, booked a flight from Seattle to visit her after a 35-year absence; and Bernardo, who left Italy to begin a clean slate in America and, though no one knows it, is the only survivor of the crash.
Lennon uses the crash as a springboard to catapult his plot into motion. Immediately, a wrench is thrown fiercely into these people’s lives, and they must decide how they are going to handle it. The crash works beautifully as a conceit for the novel (the images are haunting, the tension palpable, the conflict immediate), but the crash is mere subterfuge for the real subject of this novel: the exploration of relationships between men and women. Lennon writes as convincingly about infidelity as he does
about the guilt a dying parent can inflict upon her child. His psychological insights are piercingly accurate, as when Paul misinterprets Anita’s birthday present to him, a green silk nightdress, as Anita’s way of suggesting that they make love and have a child. Shortly after the crash, in the midst of burning rubble and chaos, Paul tries apologizing to Anita for his callousness, but it is too late; in light of what she has just seen, Paul’s apologies merely underscore his self-indulgence and make her even angrier at him.
Any novel with more than one narrator runs the risk of creating one voice, or one narrative line, that is more interesting than another, and “The Light of Falling Stars” is no exception. Of this novel’s five narrators, the most engaging are Paul, Anita and Lars. Bernardo’s story of life in Italy seems more fabricated, more researched than the others, and therefore not quite as convincing. The novel’s only real miscue, however, is with Trixie. Though interesting, Trixie’s story never intersects with any of the other narrative lines. While the reader watches Bernardo step into Paul’s and Anita’s life, or Paul step into Lars’ life, one can’t help but expect Trixie to do the same. As it is, her story remains free-floating, disconnected from the lives of the others except for the fact that she, too, has lost someone in the airplane crash. Her sections could be cut altogether, and the novel would not miss a beat–a glaring flaw, it seems to me, in the scaffolding of the novel’s plot.
That aside, Lennon is an artist of the first rank. He writes sentences the way they should be written–that is, artful without calling attention to themselves. He uses similes that enhance the visual image in a scene and capture for the reader the psyche of the narrator through which a particular image is being filtered. Shortly after the crash, for example, an airplane engine sits between two trees, “crumpled and smoking like a cigar stub, its butt end blackened.” In the surreal moment before the crash, oxygen masks “dangled comically before them like gag spiders.” For the grief-stricken Lars, his best times with Megan “had been like touching a nine-volt battery to the tongue: a little uncomfortable, very exciting.” Language this interesting and vivid fuels the novel with a momentum all its own, creating for the reader what the late John Gardner called, “The vivid and continuous fictional dream.”
By taking the sensationalism of headline news and shaping it into something significant, J. Robert Lennon has done something quite admirable here. In “The Light of Falling Stars,” he has written an honest and moving piece of literature, a book, I suspect, that will endure.
