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Falling Man is Don DeLillo's exquisite, memorable take on 9/11. Somewhat more stylistically spare than his earlier books, Falling Man nonetheless feels like the book DeLillo was meant to write; themes he has addressed throughout his body of work — terrorism, religion, signs and symbols — come together eerily in this novel, which is by far the most significant work of fiction about 9/11 to date. Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com
Falling Man is Don DeLillo's exquisite, memorable take on 9/11. Somewhat more stylistically spare than his earlier books, Falling Man nonetheless feels like the book DeLillo was meant to write; themes he has addressed throughout his body of work — terrorism, religion, signs and symbols — come together eerily in this novel, which is by far the most significant work of fiction about 9/11 to date. Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com
Review-A-Day
"[W]hat I asked of DeLillo's Falling Man was not that it be inventive, but that it be...commensurate to all the falling men, and the falling women, and their agony; commensurate, at the very least, to the capsule profiles that people forced themselves to read day after day, five years ago. And it's not. It's a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn. It captures our subsequent fall from grace...without ever suggesting a reason for it other than the fact that grace is awfully hard to come by DeLillo's world." Tom Junod, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
"More than towers fall in DeLillo's novel. But the social harnesses that keep his characters from hitting the pavement — marriage, family, church, poker — don't arrest their descents altogether. One wishes DeLillo had written a book that made us want to reach out and catch them ourselves." Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
"The book, one feels, should either have omitted the terrorists altogether or trained its gaze centrally on them, as DeLillo sustainedly pictured the impotence and resentment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra. As it is done here, the fleeting imagining of radical evil seems shallow, and only adds to the general impression of a book that is all limbs — many articulations and joints, an artful map of connections, but finally no living, pulsing center." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.
Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.
First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.
These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.
Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
Review:
"When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that 'the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.' DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower — as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad — until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named 'Bill Lawton.' DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who 'was very genius' — Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness — save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld — with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics — converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Nobody bothered to think about it at the time, but from the moment the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, one thing was inevitable: Don DeLillo would write a novel about it. DeLillo, as has been noted before in this space, is the novelist as op-ed pundit, a '60s recidivist who simply cannot resist the temptation to turn his novels into lectures or, upon occasion, harangues.... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) So, of course, DeLillo simply had to write about Sept. 11, even though — as the results all too clearly demonstrate — he has nothing original or interesting to say about it. Students of DeLillo's work (and university English departments are full of them) are going to be surprised by 'Falling Man' and not, I suspect, happily. In the past, however gratuitous or disagreeable the political opinions with which his 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. OK. 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. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com." Reviewed by Marie AranaElizabeth McCrackenMargaret MacMillanJonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"[A] devastating novel....And it's a testament to DeLillo's brilliant command of language that readers will feel once again, whether they want to or not, as scared and as sad as they felt that day." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"Falling Man feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate....Although flashes of Mr. DeLillo's extraordinary gifts for language can be found in his depiction of the surreal events Keith witnessed on 9/11...the remainder of the novel feels tired and brittle." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review:
"Falling Man feels like the first genuine work of art [about 9/11]. Literature, Ezra Pound said, is news that stays news, and reading Falling Man is like looking into a mirror and seeing the familiar face there as if for the first time." Newsweek
Review:
"[A] powerful and direct account of the atrocity and its aftermath....Reading the virtuoso first pages of his novel, we see the catastrophe anew...as if that September morning had dawned again, fresh and bright." New York Observer
Review:
"Falling Man...provides a context that only moves and engages us because our thoughts wander, away from the book itself, to our own memories of that ghastly day....Falling Man will be called a good book. It is not a good book." Daniel Handler, Newsday
Review:
"[A] gripping, haunting ensemble piece, much less about the public, historical event than about its psychological radiation through the lives of a single New York City family." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"[B]rilliant and awe-producing, incredibly close to a full-blown masterpiece and giving us plenty to ponder for a long time." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"Like an impressive spice collection, Falling Man has many elements to choose from the Sept. 11 drama. DeLillo's choices, though, produce a sharp, bitter aftertaste rather than a fulsome, satisfying meal." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Review:
"Nothing, no docudrama, fiction, theater or reporting, can match DeLillo's capture of the precise, concrete language by which we defined ourselves in the shadow of 9/11." Miami Herald
Review:
"Falling Man isn't one of DeLillo's best works, despite flashes of the intense, intellectually chilling writing that propelled Underworld....DeLillo is less successful in imagining the inner thoughts of the terrorists as the planes head for the World Trade Center. Here he seems more like Falling Man, whose art is mere re-enactment." USA Today
Review:
"Sept. 11, at least for a time, rubbed our noses in the immediacy and irrationality of death. In examining its effects on a few of the survivors, DeLillo is seeking to restore our collective awareness of the fragility of life....Reading this absorbing work makes one wonder what the hell we're doing with our lives." Houston Chronicle
Synopsis:
In this essential work of fiction, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships and reconfigured Americas perceptions of the world in a novel that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, redemptive.
Don DeLillo is the author of fourteen novels, including Underworld, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.
A R Pickett, June 28, 2007 (view all comments by A R Pickett)
The somewhat jerky pace of the book comes to abrupt and chilling coherence in the last ten pages, when DeLillo finally turns to portraying what the moment of impact must have been like. At that point the experience of reading the first two hundred pages comes close to seeming worthwhile.
I find I am a little exasperated that other equally worthy treatments of 9/11 have been ignored in the hoopla surrounding FALLING MAN. I refer other readers to Jess Walter's THE ZERO, S J Rozan's ABSENT FRIENDS, and Laila Halaby's ONCE IN A PROMISED LAND.
As writers of every stripe respond to that day, we will reap a rich heritage of worthwhile reading. Other authors have paved the way, let's not ignore them!
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (12 of 22 readers found this comment helpful)
Jan Warner-Poole, June 24, 2007 (view all comments by Jan Warner-Poole)
This is the first post 9/11 novel I have read. It did not disapoint. A beautifully written novel it follows several people during the event, days after, years after. The falling man of the title is not the image burned into our brains of the man jumping from the tower. It is a performace artist who acts out the event by falling from bridges, buildings all over NY. A must read for everyone who lived through the event, either at ground zero or across the country on TV.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (13 of 23 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
256 pages
Scribner Book Company -
English9781416546023
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Jill Owens,
Falling Man is Don DeLillo's exquisite, memorable take on 9/11. Somewhat more stylistically spare than his earlier books, Falling Man nonetheless feels like the book DeLillo was meant to write; themes he has addressed throughout his body of work — terrorism, religion, signs and symbols — come together eerily in this novel, which is by far the most significant work of fiction about 9/11 to date.
by Jill Owens
"Staff Pick"
by Jill Owens,
Falling Man is Don DeLillo's exquisite, memorable take on 9/11. Somewhat more stylistically spare than his earlier books, Falling Man nonetheless feels like the book DeLillo was meant to write; themes he has addressed throughout his body of work — terrorism, religion, signs and symbols — come together eerily in this novel, which is by far the most significant work of fiction about 9/11 to date.
by Jill Owens
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that 'the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.' DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower — as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad — until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named 'Bill Lawton.' DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who 'was very genius' — Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness — save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld — with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics — converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day"
by Tom Junod, Esquire,
"[W]hat I asked of DeLillo's Falling Man was not that it be inventive, but that it be...commensurate to all the falling men, and the falling women, and their agony; commensurate, at the very least, to the capsule profiles that people forced themselves to read day after day, five years ago. And it's not. It's a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn. It captures our subsequent fall from grace...without ever suggesting a reason for it other than the fact that grace is awfully hard to come by DeLillo's world." (read the entire Esquire review)
"Review A Day"
by Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor,
"More than towers fall in DeLillo's novel. But the social harnesses that keep his characters from hitting the pavement — marriage, family, church, poker — don't arrest their descents altogether. One wishes DeLillo had written a book that made us want to reach out and catch them ourselves." (read the entire CSM review)
"Review A Day"
by James Wood, The New Republic,
"The book, one feels, should either have omitted the terrorists altogether or trained its gaze centrally on them, as DeLillo sustainedly pictured the impotence and resentment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra. As it is done here, the fleeting imagining of radical evil seems shallow, and only adds to the general impression of a book that is all limbs — many articulations and joints, an artful map of connections, but finally no living, pulsing center." (read the entire New Republic review)
"Review"
by Booklist (Starred Review),
"[A] devastating novel....And it's a testament to DeLillo's brilliant command of language that readers will feel once again, whether they want to or not, as scared and as sad as they felt that day."
"Review"
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times,
"Falling Man feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate....Although flashes of Mr. DeLillo's extraordinary gifts for language can be found in his depiction of the surreal events Keith witnessed on 9/11...the remainder of the novel feels tired and brittle."
"Review"
by Newsweek,
"Falling Man feels like the first genuine work of art [about 9/11]. Literature, Ezra Pound said, is news that stays news, and reading Falling Man is like looking into a mirror and seeing the familiar face there as if for the first time."
"Review"
by New York Observer,
"[A] powerful and direct account of the atrocity and its aftermath....Reading the virtuoso first pages of his novel, we see the catastrophe anew...as if that September morning had dawned again, fresh and bright."
"Review"
by Daniel Handler, Newsday,
"Falling Man...provides a context that only moves and engages us because our thoughts wander, away from the book itself, to our own memories of that ghastly day....Falling Man will be called a good book. It is not a good book."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"[A] gripping, haunting ensemble piece, much less about the public, historical event than about its psychological radiation through the lives of a single New York City family."
"Review"
by Chicago Tribune,
"[B]rilliant and awe-producing, incredibly close to a full-blown masterpiece and giving us plenty to ponder for a long time."
"Review"
by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
"Like an impressive spice collection, Falling Man has many elements to choose from the Sept. 11 drama. DeLillo's choices, though, produce a sharp, bitter aftertaste rather than a fulsome, satisfying meal."
"Review"
by Miami Herald,
"Nothing, no docudrama, fiction, theater or reporting, can match DeLillo's capture of the precise, concrete language by which we defined ourselves in the shadow of 9/11."
"Review"
by USA Today,
"Falling Man isn't one of DeLillo's best works, despite flashes of the intense, intellectually chilling writing that propelled Underworld....DeLillo is less successful in imagining the inner thoughts of the terrorists as the planes head for the World Trade Center. Here he seems more like Falling Man, whose art is mere re-enactment."
"Review"
by Houston Chronicle,
"Sept. 11, at least for a time, rubbed our noses in the immediacy and irrationality of death. In examining its effects on a few of the survivors, DeLillo is seeking to restore our collective awareness of the fragility of life....Reading this absorbing work makes one wonder what the hell we're doing with our lives."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
In this essential work of fiction, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships and reconfigured Americas perceptions of the world in a novel that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, redemptive.
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