Falling Man: A Novel

In the past, however gratuitous or disagreeable the political opinions with which Don Delillo's novels were larded, the clarity and sinew of his prose always had to be acknowledged and respected. At his most confident and accomplished, DeLillo can write. But Sept. 11 seems to have paralyzed him stylistically. The prose here often reads as if it were an entry in the annual Bad Hemingway competition, or perhaps a parody of Joan Didion at her most strained and breathy:
" 'What's next? Don't you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.'
" 'Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what's next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there's no reason to be afraid. Too late now.'
"Lianne stood by the window.
" 'But when the towers fell.'
" 'I know.'
" 'When this happened.'
" 'I know.'
" 'I thought he was dead.'
" 'So did I,' Nina said. 'So many watching.'
" 'Thinking he's dead, she's dead.'
" 'I know.'
" 'Watching those buildings fall.'
" 'First one, then the other. I know,'
her mother said."
Precisely what DeLillo means this gibberish to signify is a complete mystery. Near-speechlessness in the face of incomprehensible calamity? Profundity so deep that only monosyllables can express it? Who knows? What is certain, though, is that people simply don't talk that way. Obviously, a writer of fiction is free to have his characters talk in any old way he likes, but if they end up babbling like caricatures, they forfeit all claim on the reader's credulity. If this were satire, it might work, but it isn't. It's the exact opposite: DeLillo is dead serious, solemn to the max.
Okay. The "he" to whom Lianne and her mother refer is Keith Neudecker. He is in his late 30s, and he was in the first tower when it was struck. He managed to get out and to stumble to Lianne's apartment on the Upper West Side. They had been separated for months, but instinct guided him back to her and their young son, Justin. Keith was injured (a torn cartilage in his left arm) and dazed, but sentient. He wanted human contact and so did she, and now that's what they have.
He also has a briefcase, "smaller than normal and reddish brown with brass hardware." He took it away from the World Trade Center, but it isn't his. Among the items inside are a "wallet with money, credit cards and a driver's license." He gets the owner's number and calls her, so he can return everything. Her name is Florence Givens. She is "a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side." They start to talk, and they like each other. Later he returns to her apartment:
"There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn't know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he'd lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they'd shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women."
Of course they end up in bed together -- from the minute Keith first walks through Florence's door, the reader knows they're going to end up in bed -- because, naturally, human contact is needed here, too. Their affair doesn't last long, and it ends with regret and mutual respect, but it's meant to be the connection Keith makes with what happened in the tower, a connection that Lianne cannot give him for the obvious reason that she wasn't there.
At one point in Falling Man, DeLillo writes: "They were still talking ten minutes later when Lianne left the room. She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in the mirror." Well, unfortunately most moments in this novel seem false to me. None of the characters ever emerges from cardboard wrapping, and none of the emotions DeLillo tries to arouse feels earned. He's letting the shock of Sept. 11 do his work for him, supplying the passions that his own surprisingly limp and lifeless prose cannot.
Apart from the three members of Keith's little family and Florence, there are a few other characters: Lianne's mother, Nina, and Nina's lover, Martin, a mysterious European who supplies the hint of darker things without which a DeLillo novel would not be a DeLillo novel; the men with whom Keith played poker in his bachelor apartment before the towers fell; playmates of Justin's with whom the boy speculates about a man called Bill Lawton, i.e., Bin Laden; older men and women, teetering toward Alzheimer's, who participate in "storyline sessions" that Lianne monitors; and a performance artist known as Falling Man. Lianne sees him near Grand Central Station:
"A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible. . . . He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. . . . Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body's last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we'd not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all."
Sorry, but that doesn't work. Once again, DeLillo is merely piggybacking on Sept. 11, counting on those vivid images cemented in our memories to give this novel the force he's unable to instill in it himself. In the past, DeLillo has been a notably chilly writer, clinical rather than compassionate toward his characters, more interested in what he wants them to stand for than who they are. Here he's obviously trying to invest them with more human qualities, and he gets points for the effort, but he can't pull it off. The only emotions in this novel come from outside, from pictures on television, and that's not good enough.
Presumably this won't bother DeLillo's many admirers, and perhaps they will be able to find virtues in Falling Man that have eluded me. Fine. But this novel never pulls the reader in, never engages the reader with the minds, hearts and lives of its characters, never manages to be what readers most want from fiction: a story with which they can connect. "Learn something from the event," Martin tells Lianne, and that's not bad advice. But there's nothing to be learned from Falling Man about September 2001 -- or about anything else -- that you don't already know.

In this relatively slim book DeLillo has captured the essence of what it was like to live in New Yrok City during the tragedy and in the months afterward. By concentrating on two characters he reveals how the events changed us all, forever. This is not mean feat. Also, he, and only he thus far, has been able to contain the horrors of the day itself in an art which both fixes and transends understanding.

Was an intriguing read throughout. Sometimes I felt a bit lost and confused....things got a bit too circuitous for too long and parts felt like it was dragging. At times I really liked it and at others I was just dying to be done with it.

An emotional, breathtaking work that captures 9/11 and it's aftermath superbly. In Delillo's masterful style there is amazing insight into what it was truly like for those who survived the nightmare. It also addresses the lack of emotional connection between people before the tragedy and how the human heart both fears and needs closeness with others. Simply a masterpiece. Delillo is one of our greatest living novelists.

Here, Don strikes a chord of how a culminating event can snap one from their semi-homogenized/self-absorbed reverie and lead to an enhanced personal awareness level. Transformations of Keith, Lianne, Justin, and I supppose Hammad, are portrayed with minimal back-story. Although not as disturbing as "Libra", Delillo's characters each hit home in their own unique way.

The most confusing part of this book is how slight and quiet it is. DeLillo is known for his ability to create apocalyptic literary maelstroms, but except for the very beginning and end, DeLillo doesn't rely on this skill. Instead, we have spare little scenes of odd, stylized dialogue and stream-of-consciousness personal moments that faintly sketch the lineaments of New York's post-9/11 psychology.

As NPR critic Maureen Corrigan puts it in a negative review, "For page after muted page, Falling Man catalogues post-traumatic numbness." She continues, "Here he shrugs off or simply can't fulfill the mission" of "offering moral judgment" or revealing the "larger significance in mundane events... Falling man is just a series of gestures."

She's right, in a way. Still, I think the reticence of the book is at the core of its purpose. It's not that DeLillo "shrugs off or simply can't fulfill the mission" of finding the meaning of 9/11. Rather, he apparently tried to write a book that acts as an antidote to this impulse to go trawling for the White Whale of deep meaning. (In any event, that's the effect the book had on me.)

All those odd, quiet scenes form a sort of counter-narrative to the likes of Chomsky, Bush, and the rest of the latter-day Hegels loudly proclaiming the supposed meaning of 9/11. They help you to see the event and what followed from a more detached perspective, in a more clinical light. And maybe, in the end, that's the best way to view it.

After reading the NY Times review of Falling Man, I couldn't wait to read it. I am a reader and a writer and have very little time to spend reading books that are not going to tell me anything I don't already know, show me a new way of looking at things, or provide insights into everyday life, such as Joan Didion does in "The Year of Magical Thinking," in which she takes the commonplace occurence of becoming widowed in an instant, while weaving a beautiful, touching, and melancholy story we read though we know the endgame in the first chapter. Much is the same for Falling Man. We know 9/11 happened, we live with the tragic aftermath everyday. Many non-fiction books cover the event from a religious, policitcal and socialogcal angles. Falling Man is one of the few to attempt to use the backdrop of 9/11 to recount the personal histories of, for the most part, everyman-type of characters. There is nothing interesting about them except they were in NYC or in the Towers for the attack. Maybe that is the point the author is trying to make. I think writing a novel about 9/11 is a difficult endeavor as it was an event that eclipsed any sort of fiction that anyone could have imagined and therein lies the problem. When real life is stranger than fiction, perhaps it is time to write non-fiction?

This was my favorite book I read this summer. Untraditional narrative, with a good open feel to the story. I did not find it confusing like other reviewers. However the book was almost too light considering the subject matter. Hence 4 instead of 5 stars. I will definitely keep DeLillo on my radar.

This novel is a rather halting and not very satisfying attempt to capture the impact of 9/11 on immediate survivors and their families. Keith Neudecker, a lawyer on an upper floor of the first tower, covered in soot and blood inexplicably finds his way to his estranged wife Lianne's door. Whatever their differences, apparently grateful for his survival, all seems to be forgiven as Keith is allowed to recover at his own pace with no demands placed. Their precocious yet reticent son Justin is engaged in a never understood game with the Siblings, brother and sister neighbors, looking for Bill Lawton, aka Bin Laden. In addition, Lianne makes regular treks to her art professor mother Nina's apartment where she also engages with her mother's secretive art collector lover Martin.

The book consists of rapidly shifting, mostly short, disconnected scenarios involving these characters. The book in essence mirrors the disorientation undoubtedly felt by those who endured the 9/11 catastrophe. Whether intentional or not, the characters exhibit limited emotional range, unable to fully engage with life. One exception is the intimate connection that Keith makes with fellow survivor Florence when he returns her briefcase, which inadvertently wound up in his hands as he stumbled down the stairs of the tower, a week later, though he had not known her pre 9/11. The device of interspersing a "falling man," mimicking those who were forced to jump from the towers, jumping from structures in full public view with a concealed harness to stop his fall is unnecessary.

Overall the book, the story, and the characters are lacking in capturing post 9/11 life. Keith becomes ever more detached as he winds up living a reduced life playing five-card stud in Las Vegas with the pretence of maintaining a relationship with his wife and son. Given the backdrop of 9/11, the expectation is for a fuller, more meaningful account. As it is, life is excessively bleak in the author's post 9/11 world.

I was profoundly insulted by this book. Who are these characters? No answer to that question since they are two dimensional. One hardly knows which character is speaking, the dialogues are so stilted and so poorly constructed. What matters to these people? It's impossible to say and shouldn't I know this by at least the MIDDLE of the book?

The portrayal of the terrorist was so different from those of the other characters as to suggest it was not really part of the book, rather inserted, perhaps the rest of the characters were created because of this one.

The fall of the Towers was (and I don't have to point this out) cataclysmic on every level of existence, and for the entire world. To use it as part of some artistic effort toward some sort of "sophisticated" writing technique is anathema. The effort failed, abysmally, and left me angry.

This was my first DeLillo novel and I'm generally unimpressed. Maybe I'll try "Underworld" and see what the hype is about. In "Falling Man" we are dropped in on a family on 9/11. We don't get to know them very well; they are joyless and seemingly soulless (especially Keith) and while that's understandable on 9/11 there is no indication that they were ever anything but. Then we drop in on them 3 years later and they are still joyless and still navel gazing. We also drop in on one of the 9/11 terrorists. I'm not sure what we are supposed to get from him. For a clearer view of a young terrorist's mind set read: "Terrorist" by John Updike.

There are interesting themes of forgetfulness (Alzheimer's disease is a sub-plot) and the question of what we forget and what we remember could have been interestingly explored as related to 9/11 as we, as a country, both remember and are forgetting that day in different ways...but that theme doesn't really resonate as it could have.

As has been stated before, the best parts of this book (beginning and end) are the descriptions of Keith's actual experiences on 9/11.

Nit Picking: Why does DeLillo call cookies biscuits? He isn't British and neither are the characters eating the dang things. Stuff like that really grates - it's so pretentious.

This book was like reading a loosely put together collection of stories of how 9/11 affected a husband, his estranged wife, their child (the kid), and others. The characters are hard to connect with and even harder to keep straight. DeLillo jumps from charcter to character with the ease of a jackhammer and the charcters are not at all interesting. Even the eventual story of the main character's escape from the Twin Towers was anticlimatic. All in all this is a book that tries, and fails miserably, at capturing our thoughts about that fateful day and the reactions we had to it. I found myself struggling to finish this book and would not recommend it to anyone.

The main character of Falling Man survives the collapse of the towers, reconnects with his estranged wife, and embarks on a brief relationship with the owner of a briefcase he inexplicably retrieves from the scene. His wife contemplates: her father's death, her mother's lover, the lover's wife and her own life. Their son, often referred to by his parents as "the kid," searches the skies with his friends for "Bill Lawton," the bad guy behind the buildings' collapse. Additionally, there is talk of the intriguingly grotesque "organic shrapnel," (bits of exploded human flesh), a subplot about a performing artist named Falling Man, and a bit about one of the terrorist pilots. With thousands of true stories about victims of 9/11, an historical fiction-like story about it, especially an utterly boring one, is superfluous: Falling Man falls flat. Fortunately, 102 Minutes by by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn is a five star read.

What a disappointment! This novel is impressively bad. UNDERWORLD and LIBRA are two of my all-time favorite books, but I barely made it through FALLING MAN. In fact, with ten pages left, I considered putting it down. DeLillo offers little new insight into an already exhausted topic. The characters are flaccid; there's little to no plot; DeLillo neglects his usual ingenious details and fills the novel instead with vague suggestions at what his generally listless and disaffected characters could be. It felt like he had drawn details from a hat--alzheimers, briefcase, gambling--and plugged them into a dramatic mad-lib-cum-novel about 9/11. Logistically the novel needs some work--I'm a good reader, but with little but ambiguous pronouns to go on and unmarked jumps in time, this book could have used a strong editorial hand. I felt like I was reading a late Philip Roth novel, and I don't mean that as a compliment. If you want to read a stunning piece on 9/11 check out the story "The Suffering Channel" in David Foster Wallace's OBLIVION.

This book should be thrown away, not clutched as one reviewer. I will grant that the few pages devoted to the scenes in the towers are gripping...the rest of the book and its pathetically dysfunctional characters was an absolute waste of time. I would have much rather read a book about the impact on a family that basically were "normal" and what this kind of things this tragic event could do, rather than read about people who I could quite honestly give a rat's butt about.

Sure as heck, did not need 9/11 to tell this tale.

Other reviews have criticized DeLillo's book, but I found it sad and hard going. What he realizes is that people changed because of 9/11. One survivor wanders the country playing poker simply to study the chips. He is totally empty. His wife starts going to church. Her lover, a German, criticizes America. Outside the ambit of the book,the president immediately plans to start a war. The image I can never forget of that morning is the TV shot of people jamming to line up at the office windows of the north tower. The camera zoomed in and panned over their faces. They were holding white handkerchiefs, some of them, as the announcer said they were waiting for rescue by helicopter. That footage was never shown again. We now know that hundreds of people jumped, that the ledges were littered with briefcases, purses, shoes, laptops, all kinds of personal belongings. And the empty hospitals waited for survivors to be brought in. It is heroic of DeLillo to attempt to reconstruct that awful day, including a view inside one of the planes and a view inside the tower itself. These views, and his view of the emptied fire trucks, lights still flashing, tell it all. Read it and weep.

what was this author thinking? i have no clue! this much acclaimed book left me not feeling anything , in fact i did not finish it.
i love a good way out there book but this was too far out. maybe that was the idea,but it missed me by a mile. i never knew who he was talking about with his use of pronouns and not names. life is too short to read such a convoluted book! it did not even make my 100 page limit!

I read lots of popular books. Some disappoint, some are OK reads but not great--rarely do you find a book that is one of your favorites or that make you angry that you wasted your time. This is one of the latter for me. I can't believe I wasted my time to the end. My advice to anyone thinking about investing their valuable reading time on this tripe should think twice. DeLillo should realize, if he is capable, that you shouldn't write in a language that only fellow psychotics will understand.

FALLING MAN is a brilliant and beautiful novel. One must read it carefully. This relentlessly unsentimental novel is deeply moving and powerful. Every sentence in it is necessary, every thought in it is true.

The three stars are for great descriptive moments. The best of which are the first two pages. But I did not really like this book. DeLillo does a pretty good job of capturing the "feeling" of 9/11, but there is really no actual insight (that I could find), and the story itself is kind of blah. At the same time, however, I sympathize with Delillo; he is the writer that everybody thought should write a 9/11 novel. He was the first writer I thought of after 9/11 happened. It must be a lot of pressure.

Anyway, even though this seems like it should be comparable to Libra in that it treats a national tragedy, this is really more along the lines of The Body Artist, which I also was not a big fan of.

I'm a Delillo fan though, so I am willing to have my mind changed.

The biggest virtue of this book is its brevity--only 240 pages. It is rambling, incoherent, and totally unsatisfying. The characters don't make sense, the symbolism is overdone, and the whole book was overwritten.