Book Review

From Shawn Stufflebeam, About.com Guest

Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight recounts the horrific plane crash that he survived in 1979 and the results of the author's recent attempts to contact the other survivors, bystanders and first responders. Best known for his book about the 1970's cocaine craze Snowblind, Sabbag proves capable in relating the kind of story that no author ever really expects that they might need to write.

The book starts strong by giving the reader what they came for right off the bat - a first person blow by blow description of the actual plane crash itself. The idea that a successful author would be among the passengers who survived such a trauma, an event that most people in the developed world share as a common dread, and then tell the tale is a gruesome yet enticing premise. It appeals to the secret rubber-necker in all of us, drawing our focus and sideways glances as we try not to look at what we are approaching amid the flashing lights and ambulances.

But what is a memoir if not an invitation to gawk at another's life, their most personal thoughts and emotions? The implied purpose is to allow the reader a candid look into another's mind, one of the truest gifts a person can give the world, a shameless, honest stare at the heart of another, dark or light, perhaps most often both.

In this instance it is a shameless, honest stare into the heart of a man who states over and over that he doesn't really want to talk about it. This must have been a terribly difficult book to write, as evidenced by the nearly thirty-year hiatus between precipitating event and the telling of the tale. The story has been begging to be told all along, and in fact it seems inconceivable in this age of tragedy-exploitation that the author did not capitalize on this nightmare before now.

But that's the thing: this event was a nightmare. It was something so awful to have lived through that several people associated with the event still do not want to talk about it, and the author was clearly upset by the very notion of calling on his fellow passengers and their families. On that night in 1979 people made mistakes, people became heroes, people made extremely difficult decisions, and some people were maimed or killed. And because the crash took place on the small island of Cape Cod, many of these people were connected to one another in more than one way.

Sabbag does his best to piece together a meaningful hodge-podge of reactions to the crash from everyone who will talk about it, but resists the obvious temptation to find some overly-sentimental Hollywood ending to what amounts to a group of people making the best of a terrible accident. Sabbag himself is still clearly battling demons of guilt over decisions he made in the emergency situation in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and his sometimes overly-confident tone reveals a more insecure person than it intends to project. The author's inability to hide from his readers' prying eyes is what makes Down Around Midnight both haunting and worthwhile, and all that much more disturbing. It would seem that some wounds run thirty years deep.