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Falling Man: A Novelby Don DeLillo
Staff Pick
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.
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. Review-a-Day (What is 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 & ReviewsPublisher 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) 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.
About the AuthorDon 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. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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