The subtitle for The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is, thankfully, “a true story.” I say thankfully because were the book not a true story I would’ve felt like I was wasting my time. The plot - a younger brother trying to reconcile his brother’s early, tragic death - is compelling … but the writing and storytelling were only strong enough to keep me reading. Were this not a true story it would not be worth reading. But as a true story, it is.
Below is how the front-flap describes the book. I’ll take issue with a few descriptive phrases after…
In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. [It] is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.
David Dornstein was 25 years old, a handsome, charismatic young man on the verge of becoming an extraordinary writer, when he [died in a plane crash in 1988]. …David’s brother, Ken, was nineteen, a college sophomore on winter break when the call came. All his life Ken had looked up to David, confided in him, followed where he led. David’s death left Ken with a void that both crushed and consumed him. … Ken Dorstein needed to learn the truth about his brother’s life and death. In this harrowing and affecting memoir, he records what he found out.
The memoir was certainly interesting … but it never felt “stunning, emotionally charged” or “harrowing and affecting”. While the book was “hopeful,” I would not say it was a “hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.” Ken never finds beauty and he only ‘makes sense of it’ by letting it go.
But of course ‘letting it go’ is Life, and Life can’t always resolve tradgedies into beauty. Much like Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis, the story is real; there isn’t a perfect story arc, there isn’t a central theme, there isn’t a happy ending. I am annoyed that the front-flap misconstrues the book but can’t find fault with the book itself for being real.
My one real frustration with The Boy Who Fell was that there were too few Big Emotional Moments. Despite reading 300-pages about a real-life tragedy and experiences of those closest to it, I never once really felt moved. It was sad at times, certainly, but none of the scenes ever packed the punch they could have; they were somehow muted, contracted … and told in such a tone that I just never felt the proper emotional impact. The “show don’t tell” motto ran through my head whenever the author mentions how his brother cried, or how he cried … I felt pity for them, but couldn’t seem to empathize with their sadness. The memoir/reporting style of the book could have had something to do with the emotional distance I felt to the main characters, but I think most of the blame for the gap lies with the author.
One glaring reason why the book perhaps wasn’t written as perfectly as it could have been is that the author is still clearly trying to make sense of the story himself. As the reader learns more about Ken (the author), it’s painfully apparent that writing this book about his brother’s death has taken an immense toll on his career, his family, and his life in general. By the 16th long year from the 1988 death to the book’s 2004 publishing, it is clear that Ken simply wants to get the book written and try to make sense later. Tuning the stories for the highest emotional impact didn’t seem like a high priority.
There is a deeply - and I believe knowingly - ironic quote within the book regarding one’s ability to reflect on their own life. David received the following comment from an English professor at Brown on an memoir-esque diary/collage type project:
[you are] ‘on to something,’ but that you have here the germ for one good story … one perhaps you’re not quite ready to write.
Although that comment was written towards David’s project, I can’t express how accurately that describes my feeling towards Ken’s own attempt at writing David’s life. Or, perhaps what I should say is that The Boy Who Fell is an good portrayal of David’s life but the book is also about Ken’s life, and that life story is one Ken is ‘not quite ready to write.’ I think Ken (the author) realizes the book is incomplete and imperfect, but I think he realizes (and the reader realizes along with him) that his own life has to move on from the book and, further, that the imperfections are irreconcilable anyway.
One final thing: The writing style is heavily influenced (or at least similar) as Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: self-aware author occasionally talking to the reader, occasionally using odd writing styles (lists, bullet points), occasionally going out of chronological order, etc. Although the style is undoubtedly useful, I sometimes found it merely lazy. The book felt more like a personal email or a private blog post. Maybe that’s simply how my generation writes memoirs.
and now for a Personal Perspective on a Personal Perspective
Reading The Boy Who Fell was personally interesting on several major fronts:
- I have an older brother. Ken’s recounting of how much David influenced him struck a chord with me.
- I’m 25, the age at which Ken’s older brother David died. Certainly prompts one to think about their own legacy.
- Like any 25-year-old, I also often wonder about my ‘career’ as Ken and David do post-college (though less dramatically).
I only wanted to note, not linger, on these. If you fall into or near any of the categories, you’ll probably find something interesting in the book.
and Finally Some Quotes
The following quotes stuck out to me for one reason or another. Without further, or really any explanation, here:
- I have some memories of my brother, but not as many as I’d like to think. And each time I check, I seem to have one fewer. If at first I found it hard to believe that David was dead, now I find it hard to believe that he ever lived. … I sometimes find it dispiriting to think that this is what life comes to, that this is how it ends. -7
- You will also find a fat red album marked A Book of Remembrance. The words will not be hard to imagine: “Missing you,” “forever yours,” “will not forget,” “until together again.” You will spend eight hours reading the words other relatives have written there, hoping they will give you some insight into how they are managing their loss. When it comes time to go, you will wonder if you should leave a message of your own, but the gesture will have come to seem meaningless after so many hours of clinical study. -37
- I will stand here even if you need to walk away. - 61 (from David’s ex-girlfriend Rina writing to Ken about dealing with the loss.]
- We were in that early, solipsistic stage of romance, focused tightly on each other, pushing even one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World to the margins of the frame as we sped toward Los Angeles. - 99
- I had no master plan and no burning desires. Nothing keeping me in California, and nothing drawing me somewhere else. … I needed a goal, a focus. Something. I bought a copy of Moby-Dickand decided to make a project of reading it. This filled around ten days. … Then it was on to Joseph Conrad. Not too far into the book I found a passage that felt prophetic, as if David had put it in my path to read at that very moment in life. Conrad’s narrator says, “No, I don’t like work … I had rather laze about and htink of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work. No man does. But I like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality, for yourself, not for others, what no man can ever know.” - 111
- Twenty-five should have been a hopeful thing for me, but I experienced it, instead, as an approaching danger, something speeding toward me faster than I wanted. The buzzers went off at twenty-five. It was pencils down and please pass your papers to the front. What had David accomplished at twenty-five? What would I? -120
- Warn me if I become overly pedantic, overly wise. This is a common occurrence in older brothers, fathers, philosophers, poets … but especially old brothers, who feel surges of closeness to their younger brothers, and want to give them all that they are able, who are effusive older brothers anyway. You must realize that what I write to you are love letters. - 147 [letter from David to Ken]
- I’ve got a lot of heart, Dad, and this heart might appear aimless and irresponsible but it’s not. It might be a partially destructive heart, but it’s a heart with gumption. It’s a heart with moxie. There is nothing to worry about. I’m not worried. - 151 [letter from David to his Dad]
- Do what you want, and do it as well as you can, as long as it doesn’t hurt people unnecessarily. And try not to be frightened of getting hurt yourself. -153 [letter from David to Ken]
- The standard symbols of a coherent life, the suit, the tie, and the monogrammed briefcase terrify me. I am nothing and want nothing but to die before I have to become something or do anything. -174
- I don’t know what to make of David’s increasingly pronounced religiosity. I got the impression that if he had been cast in plays as regularly as he wanted, or if his writing had come easier for him, or if he’d fallin in love, or if one of the many people he had appealed to in letters had written back to him with real enthusiasm for the kind of headlong collaboration he prayed for, then he would not have heard the call of the rabbinate so strongly. But none of these things happened. -185
- I don’t know how many hours of how many days he filled with these activities [chasing women] or how often he succeeded, but hardly a page of his notebooks goes by without mention of one woman or another. -189
- “Why the fuck don’t you think you need to get a job? Are you better than other people? Do you operate according to a different set of rules?” Billy’s tirades sometimes had a mock quality to them, like he was channelling the words that, in this case, a really strict parent might say to a really wayward teen. But this particular rant seemed to be coming from someplace real in him. “You don’t need a job? You must have gotten this from your brother. He never thought he needed to get a fucking job. It was preposterous when he said it, and it’s still preposterous. Do you know that?” -204
- I came to the stirring conclusion that, all things considered - all the proper qualifications laid out and caveats made, all the expert opinions weighted and the negative tax implications set aside - we should consider very seriously the notion that we would be much happier together than apart. And if being together meant getting married, then that was what we should almost definitely be prepared to take under very, very serious advisement. -210 [Ken’s recap of his wedding proposal]
- We all just want to be in love, Jena. That is all there is, I am more and more convinced. No new sentences, no better machines, no more mordant insights into Nature’s mind. No solutions, and no new problems. No new characters, no better references. Just love to befall us, to make everything bearable and maybe sweet. That’s all I want, anyway. -233 [letter from David to his friend Jena]
- I will become one of your stories and you will become one of mine. -242
- My heart is in my throat, my stomach in my heart, my head in my hands, and my hands raised up in supplication: “What am I doing?” -249
- His letter closed: “It’s pretty here in the Garden of Edan. I couldn’t resist writing to you. See you all very soon.” -252
- I was more like an unemployed person in his apartment pretending he wasn’t really unemployed by busying himself with papers. -254
- A job, I found, came with certain perks - a salary, for one thing, health insurance, an office. It was kind of a one-person economic revitalization plan, giving the unemployed not just a paycheck, but also a sense of pride and belonging, just like the politicians say. -255
- …the basic axiom of the confessional age: It’s more important to tell the world your story, to be recognized universally for your suffering, than to be understood by people in a position to really hear you. -267
- I’d like to say that there was a particular moment when things changed for me, but so far as I can tell, it was a series of moments, a few of which I have tried to set down in this book. And the change, insofar as I can be sure it really happened, will, I’m certain, never be complete. … I’d look for a way to make the man realize that whatever he lost isn’t worth spending the rest of his life trying to recover, for that wouldn’t be much of a life at all. -289
Reading through some of the above quotes from David, it really is clear how great David was with words.