Beyond biography

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
By Ken Dornstein
Random House, 304 pp., $23.95

When Libyan terrorists blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the skies over Scotland in 1988, propelling the obscure village of Lockerbie into global consciousness like a bloody harpoon, a 25-year-old aspiring writer named David Dornstein was among those who fell 6 miles to the earth.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his brief and burning life was the extent to which he saw this coming. As a student at Brown University, for instance, David wanted to write a fictional autobiography. ''The idea?" his brother would write later. ''An unknown young writer dies in a plane crash leaving behind lots of notebooks and bits of stories, and the narrator sets out to piece it all together into a story of the unknown writer's life."

Afflicted with a painful case of logorrhea but no apparent sense of craft, David did in fact leave an avalanche of notebooks and other fragmentary writings -- works that his younger brother, Ken, would later use to piece together not just David's life but his own.

The resulting volume -- ''The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky" -- is not just the memoir of a brother's loss or even the autobiography of a life cut short. It's more like a full-scale attempt at resurrection, or at least a part of such an effort, the same larger effort that the book itself chronicles. For the fullness of the attempt goes so much further than mere biography. The author, who lives in Somerville, made saving David -- if not from death, then at least from disappearing into the forgetfulness of the living -- first into a job and then into something like a life.

Ken didn't just visit the remains of the Boeing aircraft and determine where David sat in relation to the fateful load of Semtex explosives. He pored over his brother's most private writings. He interviewed David's friends. He tracked down his brother's childhood sexual abuser. He became romantically involved with not one but two of David's main love interests. Eventually he married one of them.

Maybe because we can never understand sudden loss or abandonment, we naturally undertake the more manageable task of understanding the life that was lost. In this age of memoir, ''The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky" is a particularly interesting -- and affecting -- example of a type we've seen before from such writers as Germaine Greer and Geoffrey Wolfe (who both wrote about their father) and Fergus Bordewich (who wrote about his mother). In this subgenre, the author struggles to come to terms with a loss by delving into the late loved one's mysterious life, often discovering startling facts unknown while the person lived. Shaping these into a book seems to help exorcise grief and bewilderment -- and often produces unusually intimate memoirs.

In this case the author's struggle to come to grips with his own demons (David's death among them) makes for only intermittently interesting reading, but that doesn't matter because of the book's larger triumph: the vivid portrait of a singular young man that emerges in its pages. If the goal was to rescue David in some way, at least from the quicksand of time, then in this at least his younger brother can take comfort in having succeeded magnificently.

Brilliant, handsome, restless, irresistible to women (and sometimes to men), alternately charismatic and crazed, David was in some ways the ideal older brother. His aspirations for himself were boundless but frustrated, and soon enough, as if sensing what was coming, he transferred them to Ken, to whom he wrote with heartbreaking candor of his affection: ''You are beautiful and your nature is a narcotic to me, my time is not ever so blissful and rich and fulfilling as when I am in contact with you. . . . I have absolute trust and belief in you. Just keep growing."

By the time you finish it, this is a hugely satisfying book. David's letters and diaries add psychological horsepower and tragic heft at every turn, and his faith in his brother's talents is redeemed as well. Ken is a talented writer who is sensitive to the literary and cultural context of everything he sees and feels (including his attraction to his dead brother's lovers). His journey into the heart of David, moreover, reveals not just truths about the Dornstein brothers but about love, loss, and ultimately life's inescapable transience.

This is a book full of people who knew David in his -- and their -- bloom of youth, a time in which David remains tragically fixed. But the people he knew are different now. His closest friend in New York, Billy, was a rebellious rock singer and graduate student, but when Ken finds him he's become a sober attorney concerned about financial security. Amy, a former roommate, ''had found a place in an established dance company," Ken writes. ''But fifteen years later, I found her living in Minnesota, just starting maternity leave from General Mills Corporation." One former friend, who knew David as a larger-than-life figure at Brown, recognizes what such a life might have meant for him: ''Perhaps he is better off having lived the fast life he did. Better off not having to have compromised the mythic Dornstein for Dornstein the Neighbor, Dornstein the Editor, Dornstein Who Has to Answer to Someone Else."

When David was killed, some of his friends feared that the great novel he might have been working on perished aboard the plane with him, destroyed along with all those lives. Probably there was no such novel. But by re-creating a single life in such fullness and glory, such genius and foolishness, David's brother has thrown merciless light on the much greater tragedy of all the potential that was blown out of the sky over Scotland.

Daniel Akst is the author of ''The Webster Chronicle," a novel. See ''Bookings," below, for information on a local appearance by Ken Dornstein.