Falling: A Novel

Newman’s use of terrorism in her novel, while problematic, does attempt to connect macro-level failures with the micro-level ways in which individual humans experience institutional failures. Newman prompts her readers to consider what makes a terrorist, and Sam in particular has some sympathetic characteristics that complicate him somewhat beyond the flat archetype of a purely evil antagonist. At the end of the novel, Newman portrays the two terrorists as more misguided than innately cruel.

There is a tension throughout the novel between the use of humans as symbolic, passive objects and the reality of humans as autonomous beings whose lives are inherently valuable. This tension is a constant in politics, wherein politicians and those otherwise in power can become desensitized as they make decisions about huge numbers of people. Part of Sam’s frustration is in the emotional distancing of the American public from the trauma and loss that happened abroad, which he experienced on a personal level. Terrorism is the use of violence and fear to achieve political or ideological goals; this term describes the actions Sam takes against the Hoffman family in order to achieve his desired goal, that is, to force the American public to experience the pain he felt in the reduction of his own family to political pawns. Sam wants to make a statement against the President of the United States in response to the president deciding to withdraw troops from Syria with the understanding that this act would result in Turkey attacking Kurdistan, an ally of the United States. Sam’s actions, though, manifest the very callousness that he seeks to repudiate. Sam’s awareness of this paradox comes out in several ways. With more subtlety, it emerges in the brief moments where he chooses not to harm Bill’s family or offers them moments of dignity despite the circumstances he has placed them in. In a more explicit sense, it comes out in his death by suicide, which hints at the resolvability of his internal dilemma and the depth of his grief and guilt.

The novel is also interested in how wide-scale political actions can manifest in specific, individual human emotional reactions. The events that prompt the story of the novel are largely off-page, long-term historical-political conflicts; they are around a century in the making at least, and any informed discussion of them would entail a broader outline of the far-reaching consequences of the formation of the Western empire post-World War II. Newman focuses, in contrast, on individual humans in her character-driven novel. Sam feels deeply guilty that he left his family behind in Kurdistan, which meant he was in a bar flirting with American girls when the attack by Turkey took place. Sam’s survivor’s guilt complicates his profound grief. Publicly, he attempts to frame his actions as political in nature, portraying himself as no different from the detached politicians and American public who allowed the deaths of so many. Privately, his actions are an effort to displace his guilt and find a concrete target for his rage: a single American man who can embody the political entity of the United States, a concept too big and nebulous to pin down in the same way.

Newman’s portrayal of the two Kurdish terrorists, especially cast as the antagonists versus a noble white American everyman of the middle class, does help reinforce long-held prejudices about people from the Middle East. Though the term Islam never arises, and Sam and Ben insist they do not believe in jihadism, the novel nonetheless capitalizes on racist stereotypes and imagery common within post-9/11 Islamophobia and Jingoism. In the end, Newman describes Bill and his wife educating themselves about their politics and striving to make a difference. Considered in the full context of the novel, though, which centers white Americans’ perspectives and casts them as innocent victims and noble heroes, this minimally mentioned effort does not mark a substantial disruption of the status quo in the United States that vilifies and dehumanizes people from the Middle East.