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Oct
11
Just Read It: DOWN AROUND MIDNIGHT by Robert Sabbag
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Originally published June 2009 by Viking, now available in paperback.
When Geoffrey Jennings of Rainy Day Books handsells Down Around Midnight, he says,
Down Around Midnight is a book about a plane crash on Cape Cod…if Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was just a book about a murder in Savannah.
I know because that’s basically what he said to me when I visited the shop in September and asked him to hook me up with some great nonfiction. And HOO BOY is he ever right about it.
In an explosion of tearing sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting through thick stands of oak and pine for a distance of three hundred fee. Whatever memories time erases, it will never erase the memory of the sound of it.
On June 17, 1979, Robert Sabbag is riding high on the success of his first book Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade and has just fulfilled the lifelong dream of buying a home on Cape Cod. He and seven other passengers are aboard Air New England flight 248 on a foggy night when the plane crashes into deep woods, and it takes more than two hours for help to arrive. Twenty-seven years later, Sabbag realizes he hasn’t ever really put together the pieces of what happened the night. Down Around Midnight is his exploration of the events that led up to the crash and the effects it had on him and the other passengers.
[It is] a story of survival, of varying displays of courage attended by the ever-present fear of failing to display it, of a dark night of the soul and the days and years that followed, in the end it is a story about memory. About the things we can never forget.
The exploration of memory that Sabbag mentions in the quote above is what makes Down Around Midnight more than a memoir about a plane crash. As he researches the lives of the pilot (who died in the crash), the co-pilot, and his fellow passengers, Sabbag discovers that many of their lives were connected before they ever boarded the flight, and they have unknowingly crossed paths in the years since. And just as much as Down Around Midnight is a memoir, it is also an examination of what it means to survive a traumatic event. Sabbag doesn’t pull any punches when he discusses the experience.
You don’t recover, you simply recuperate. Belief in the proposition that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is just another form of denial.
As he interviews his fellow survivors and their families, Sabbag reflects about the writing process and realizes that, though he is accustomed to being asked to describe the crash, he “never counted on how difficult those questions would be to ask,” and as he hears about the various ways in which passengers made sense of the crash and moved on from it, he pauses to consider the larger biological imperatives that make the event impossible to forget.
The evolutionary viability of the species depends on the permanent processing of traumatic memories. We are supposed to remember bad things forever.
A tidy explanation of post-traumatic stress disorder? Sure. But it is also an illustration of the ways in which Sabbag makes Down Around Midnight much more than a memoir about an horrific event. Yes, it is a story about the power experiences have to affect our lives, but it is also about our ability to take control and refuse to be victims of our circumstances.
There is nothing more debilitating than to think of yourself as a casualty. To measure yourself in terms of your inadequacies, to keep pausing to monitor your losses is more than psychological quicksand, it is physically unhealthy.
And that is why, though Sabbag acknowledges that “the crash is the biographical before and after,” he also states that “it doesn’t in any way define me. It never did. It’s part of my story.”
And the moral of this story? Not all of us will face trauma on the scale of a plane crash, but we all have something, and it is never too late, and never beyond our power, to make meaning from it and move forward.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky-ECACE895F7922991FC05155EADE49D7C27E203610CB4436294DFA13F479CE8F4–>
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