Colorado Review - Falcons on the Floor - review by Joe Hall

Falcons on the Floor, by Justin Sirois

Publishing Genius Press, 2012

reviewed by Joe Hall

On American fiction, Anis Shivani, with characteristic spleen,

recently pronounced, "There is only small writing, with small

concerns, and small ambitions [T]he serious writer is trained

to look down on politically aware fiction: that's just journalism.

There are no AWP awards there." For Shivani, domestic realism

and its overly precious drama of the individual psyche has

replaced engagement with politics, ideology, and their expression

in the kinds of events that make headlines, shake lives, and

redraw borders.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, a bar. To a veteran of the most recent

war in Iraq, I described the plot of Justin Sirois's Falcons on the

Floor. Lifelong friends Salim, wired and westward looking, and

Khalil, an impulsive and flamboyant chaser of his own local

celebrity, flee their hometown of Fallujah to avoid being drafted

by the Fedayeen into the front lines of a fight against American

forces. Salim and Khalil follow the Euphrates west to Ramadi,

where they are convinced they will be safer. It is a portrait of

wartime Iraq that grew from Sirois's correspondence with Iraqi

refugee Haneen Alshujairy.

The veteran's reaction was unequivocal: "The New York Review

of Books will eat that shit up." His tone communicated

"shit" as excrement. Falcons occupies an impossible space between

critics' desires for a great topical novel and the public's

suspicions that any such novel is poisoned by opportunism and

the author's partisan politics. It is an impossible space because

it is easier for critics to dream of Platonic ideals—and perhaps

for Shivani, the novel he is calling for is the novel he is writing—

than to engage with and bring to the public's attention what

has been written: this uneven, ebullient, and moving work. A

must-read.

Yet Falcons almost sinks itself in a prologue that would raise

Shivani's hackles. It is narrated by an American teenager whose

awe of his military-bound brother marks him as a future grunt

in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This prologue parallels the action

of the story proper: a hastily considered trek, a landscape

drowned in hazard, and arrival at a consequential threshold.

Specifically, the crush object of the soldier has suffered a family

misfortune, and he decides to console her in person; however, a

snowstorm has cut off roads and phone lines. Within the limiting

perspective of an adolescent, the drama is one of the character's

own invention, and in turn, his mock-heroic walk through

the woods is easily telescoped into insignificance by a skeptical

reader. Couldn't he just wait a day or two? Sirois, as if aware of

this, overwrites: "I walked with my head down. The ice-sharp

wind slicing hairlines in my shin bones." Heavy-handed assonance

wrecks these opening lines.

When we reach Khalil and Salim in Eallujah, Sirois has calibrated

his tone within a less obtrusive, functional register. After

the dreadful excitement of surveying the landscape of war

dawning in Eallujah and the propulsively written flight of the

duo from the city—"Salim knew if he stayed in Eallujah he

would die"—the story's tempo slows in a second beat that unpacks

the mutual histories of both characters as Salim types

notes into his laptop on the banks of the Euphrates:

Here's a list of the three things I'd wish for if we found

a lamp with one of those magic génies in it:

—a high speed internet connection.

—headphones. I forgot my headphones.

—a hot fudge brownie ice cream sundae from TGI Fridays.

You can blame my mother for the last one, too.

Worrying about the state of his laptop battery, fervently wishing

to be able to withdraw from the physical world and into the

agency and identity he finds online, Salim is as American as

apple pie. The mind of a middle-class Iraqi fleeing his home has

to be, by at least a degree, more tangled than this; consequently,

the more time Salim spends self-psychologizing, the more the

authenticity of the story is jeopardized.

The miracle of Falcons is that while there is a significant

amount of interior self-investigation, ultimately it becomes

something far different from a psychological novel. In its loose,

road-trip structure and anchoring friendship, it is much closer

to picaresque works such as Kim, Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn, and Don Quixote. In these works it is less important that

why the characters want something be sufficiently evidenced,

but that their desire and its pursuit be realistically dramatized

externally through their companionship. Every time Falcons

bogs down in Salim's thoughts, it is revived by the interplay

between Salim and Khalil. They are as callous and silly as any

pair of men who have spent their lives together:

—I wish we had some chicken, just a few bites is all I

need, I finally admit.

—Man. Some lamb kebab.

—Yeah.

—Marinated cabbage, cucumber.

—OK. That's enough.

—Pizza.

—Shut up, man. I say.

Lounging on the blankets, head to head . . . [Khalil]

pushes out a fart that's so impressive I can't believe he

did it on cue, and when I don't respond he asks what

happened.

Erom within the circle of their friendship, the dangers the pair

face take on a discomforting immediacy, whether it is being

forced by a Eedayeen leader to drive to the front in a shot-up,

blood-sticky truck or trying to read the ominous hieroglyphics

of the landscape as they follow the Euphrates: "To the north of

the farm there's a pyramid of cauterized date palms that've been

plowed and stacked on their sides and torched with gasoline....

We can't take our eyes off it, smoking like a dead black comet."

Like Twain's house and its dead floating down the Mississippi,

there is something close to scripture here, an image of original,

profound despair.

As the novel progresses Sirois handles the rhythm of their

journey with an increasingly sure touch, moving between the

comic and the horrible, charting the incremental punishment,

doubt, and disorientation flight inflicts on refugees as well as

the devastation war does not just to bodies and property but to

entire communities.

The terrible irony of this book is that while the desert inter-lude

deepens our understanding of Salim and Khalil and, crucible-

like, refines who they are and want to be, their hard-earned

and long-awaited arrival in Ramadi sets off a gripping, twisting

sequence where Sirois shows us how swiftly and decisively war

reduces each individual to simple categories: fighter, civilian.

We, with Salim and Khalil, endure, in the crisis of a single moment,

the wrenching consequences of these labels.

This moment strikes like lightning, because in its lead-up

Sirois allows Salim and Khalil to sprawl across the pages, to

remember and desire. In turn, the reader is lulled into thinking.

Yes, here we are in the psychological novel. A mind is turning

circles in the desert. Fingers are pressing keys on a laptop. There

is no door. There is nothing on the other side of a door. There is

no one with his or her head in a bag.

Reading Falcons is to witness the stunning, troubled metamorphosis

of one type of fiction into another. Our discussion of a new wave of 
politically engaged, outward-looking novels starts here.