Biography of a restless brother
Ken Dornstein works through his feelings about his older brother, killed in the Pan Am flight 103 crash
THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY: A True Story, by Ken Dornstein. Random House. 304 pages. $23.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 9, 2006
David Dornstein is larger-than-life, an incessant reader and scribbler and arguer of all things literary and aesthetic, a self-styled modern-day Dharma bum. He sleeps on the floor with ramparts of books walling him in, and works odd jobs around New York City to support his Art. He starts stories, hundreds of them, and though he can't sit still long enough to finish any but a handful, he envisions himself as the next Great Novelist of his generation.
He sits in coffee shops for days at a time, smoking, pontificating, and writing in his notebooks. He writes his hopes, his frustrations, letters to his family and friends and Norman Mailer, even notes and suggestions to potential biographers, whom he just knows will read them once he is catapulted to fame by a tragic early death. He just barely graduates from Brown, where he makes an art of lengthy manifestoes on why he hasn't completed his assignments, and then takes off to travel.
He was in seat 40K on Pan Am flight 103 when it exploded six miles above Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.
The 25-year-old could not have known that his predictions of an early death would turn out to be right, nor that a biographer would indeed comb through his notebooks -- least of all that the biographer would be his little brother, Ken.
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is Ken's story as much as it is David's. It is a moving portrait, both of a restless and brilliant young man who died before achieving his potential, and of his crushed younger brother, who was also robbed of his potential by David's murder.
Ken is a reluctant biographer, but David is even larger in death than he was in life; in the 10 years after the bombing, Ken returns again and again to the notebooks, hunting for some secret that might release him from the crushing weight of David's shadow.
He begins a project that he calls the Dave Archives, in which he tracks down all of his brother's former friends, lovers (of which there were many), teachers and colleagues, and gathers recollections, photographs and letters.
This brings him to Kathryn, one of David's first and most serious girlfriends. They are surprised to find themselves falling for each other.
For years, Ken wavers, committing and then changing his mind, convinced that his true motivation must have something to do with David, haunted by contradictory but equally compelling Biblical mandates. Deuteronomy 25:6 commands that a dead man's younger brother must marry his widow, while Leviticus 18:16 says, "do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife." Not that David was married to Kathryn, nor were the Dornsteins religious, but Ken nevertheless feels "caught, roughly speaking, between Deuteronomy and Leviticus."
Ken is an editor at the PBS documentary series Frontline, and the prose of this book reads at times more like a documentary than a novel. But it is ultimately a heartbreaking and beautiful account, one of Ken's journey to know David, to find himself amidst the rubble of the tragedy, to write a book his big brother would have been proud of, and, finally, to finish the decades-long chapter on grief and start a fresh one on hope.
