Falling, Anne Simpson

On the first page of poet and novelist Anne Simpson’s Falling, the reader helplessly witnesses a teenage girl drowning and screaming for help from her brother. Damian, her brother and the main character, finds Lisa’s body too late, and is subsequently wracked with guilt and grief. When Damian and his mother go to Niagara Falls to scatter Lisa’s ashes, Damian recognizes that “Sometimes he thought the urn of ashes lived inside him. Lisa, the memory of Lisa...boxed in and taped shut...He carried her everywhere he went, but soon he’d have to let go...It always happened like this. Things went away, leaving him behind.” 

Each of the characters in Simpson’s complicated, melancholy novel carries with them a loss or absence. Damian’s mother, Ingrid, struggles with missing her daughter and her ex-husband. Ingrid’s brother Roger, who hosts Damian and Ingrid in Niagara Falls, has lost his sight, and thus his career as a stuntman. Roger’s bizarrely named, mentally challenged son Elvis treasures a photograph of his absent mother. 

Simpson’s novel focuses on the instant connection between Damian and Jasmine, a beautiful girl with a “wide-open heart,” who works in a tattoo parlour. Simpson’s prose is articulate and precise in her description of Damian’s infatuation as a coping mechanism; her skill as a poet is evident in her dialogue and the ease with which she weaves memory with action. Unfortunately, toward the end of the book, Simpson includes a poetic, stream-of-consciousness section about Damian that feels tacked on and inconsistent with the rest of the narrative.