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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 es-tranged 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.

Average Customer Rating:

"The two dark objects, too obscure to name"

Customer Rating:

This post-9/11 novel features DeLillo's detached, reflective perspective. The prose, while at times moving and well-crafted, retains its distance from trauma. This may mirror the shock of Keith, an executive in the Twin Towers who escapes, and his estranged wife Lianne's own complicated emotions when she finds him, a victim of "organic shrapnel," at her doorstep where he's staggered post-blast. Yet, I rarely felt drawn in to the pain of their revived relationship, nor did their son Justin's own reaction, or that of Lianne's mother or her lover keep me immersed in their responses to that memorable day and its aftermath. However, Lianne's mother, Nina, and her enigmatic German paramour Martin do engage in spirited debate about the role that God played on 9/11. Both the perpetrators and their victims called out His name in their last moments. DeLillo's at his strongest when he considers the role that faith plays in Lianne and Nina's lives, or its lack. Nina rails: "God used to be an urban Jew. He's back in the desert now." (46) Martin ripostes: "One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die." (46-47) Whether its a social revolt or a fundamentalist surge charges Martin and Nina's conversations with an energy often lacking otherwise in these pages. Hammid, a German-educated hijacker, one of the nineteen, earns his own small role, yet these chapters do not flesh out his character much. I compare this with the attempt of a similar work (also reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog), John Updike's "Terrorist," to delve into the mind of a Western-schooled Islamic jihadist. DeLillo and Updike plant their young fanatic into the suburban malaise of our nation, yet DeLillo holds back his descriptions, favoring restraint. This stance permeates the whole novel. Therefore, some may welcome this tamped-down delivery. I found it, on the other hand, too far away from what I wanted to find out about Keith and Lianne. Keith gets into gambling, and while this realm's detailed extensively, it failed to engross me; similarly, a subplot with Florence, a fellow survivor of Keith's tails off abruptly. DeLillo does this as before, as in "Underworld," and while this adds verisimilitude, it doesn't satisfy the reader wanting more fictional standards of closure. Lots of this story drifts along as if hermetically sealed off. I understand this intent, but it fails to move me. The couple's son, Justin, speaks for a portion of the plot in monosyllables as an experiment, and I felt like DeLillo almost was parodying his own minimalism. Echoes of a less-foul mouthed Mamet echo in many sentences here, so pared down are they. So, while this novel leaves me with enough to think about, there are far fewer particular sentences that stand out. The passages on belief stick longest. Lianne near the end of the story goes to Mass and wonders: "She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice. God is the voice that says, 'I am not here.' She was arguing with herself but it wasn't argument, just the noise the brain makes." (236) Such moments make the novel worthwhile, but it's an uneven (as in the anti-war march attended by Lianne and Justin, or the Falling Man performance artist's appearances) rendition of the aftermath of the attacks on NYC. Martin sees a painting reminding him of the attacks, with "the two dark objects, too obscure to name," (49) and in such instances, the dread reverberates well before it fades into the airlessness of most of this text. Again, while this may capture the dislocation of contemporary New Yorkers in the early decade, it may not satisfy those expecting a more in-depth, less pared-down depiction of these domestic upheavals.

Disappointing execution of an important story

Customer Rating:

The author's description of the events of 9/11 are quite good and put you in the buildings and the horror of the area around the WTC during and after the attack. The story he wraps around it is halting and discombobulated (for lack of a better word). He makes no attempt to emotionally connect you with his main characters. In fact you grow to dislike the hero increasingly. Had he spent more time with the tragic character "The Falling Man" and that of the wife, the author might have had something. DeLillo's writing style is frustrating and dulling.

After The Planes

Customer Rating:

I couldn't pick this up when it first came out. I listened to it recently on CD during a long drive and with each mile, I felt the growing weight and gravity, lived with the men and women grappling with the aftermath, after the planes. There is a phrase in "Falling Man" that covers lots of ground about what this book is about: "beyond the limits of safe understanding." I think that's what DeLillo challenged himself to do, to understand beyond where we normally search for comprehension about our world. The tone here is dispassionate, almost like a list of details. I heard echoes of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," that same gripping weight. The word "ash" comes back over and over and that's what we were all coated with, the emotional ash, the "organic shrapnel" that might not at first be visible, that might take its toll slowly, over time. The mattress scene in "Falling Man" is a brilliant, along with the recurring performance artist, the gambling and the odd emotional connections forged and forced by the devastation of the attack. "Falling Man" starts shortly after the attack and ends up just before the attack, a haunting choice, taking us back to the beginning, to try and imagine how "God's name" could be on the "tongues of killers." Read "Falling Man" when you want to try and push the limits of your own understanding and/or you don't want to forget, for whatever reason.

Don't know if this qualifies as a 'review'.

Customer Rating:

As every one else in the US, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on 9/11. I turned numb, I recorded every broadcast for weeks afterwards. I've seen the photo of the falling man. A friend of mine was on the first plane. To this day I am tormented by thoughts of what he may have felt, feared, or experienced once he realized things went south. I started to read this book and made a lot of progress, but it became more difficult. Finally I could not control my emotions, my nights became an endless film loop of my recordings. I had to stop reading the book so that I can retain some semblance of control and acceptance. It was more than a novel to me.

DeLillo's sad concession to a career obsession

Customer Rating:

Is this great writing?: unassuming prose about earth-shattering events? Is this what Harold Bloom means by "canonical strangeness?" I am a recent convert to DeLillo: I picked up Cosmopolis some time back & couldn't get thru page 2. Then I found Underworld in the local library, about a year ago: the prologue was this unassuming prose about an iconic event; an American event: Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard `Round the World; refashioned here from the POV of FBI Dir. J. Edgar Hoover, Giants' announcer Russ Hodges, & a fictional gate crasher named Cotter Martin. Postmodernism as middle class value. Underworld was published in 1997, but I cite that only to note DeLillo's periodic obsession with...the Twin Towers. When character Brian Glassic climbs up on a hillock @New Jersey's Fresh Kills landfill & ponders a metaphysical connection between that & the Towers...well, chills up the spine doesn't quite capture the feeling. Now, in Falling Man, the death of the Towers (yet, DeLillo's too smart or too trusting of the reader to remind him that much rubble from the Towers was trucked to Fresh Kills) is the centerpiece: North Tower survivor Keith Neudecker wanders stunned & drifting, back into the lives of estranged wife Lianne & son Justin. Then he wanders back out again: such is life in the days & years after. Meanwhile, Lianne wants her writers' workshop of incipient Alzheimer's sufferers to tell how 9-11 affected them; Keith returns the briefcase he somehow acquired during the long trek down the stairwell to its owner ("Your heritage. Your cell phone"), with whom he has an intense yet transient affair; Justin pilfers a pair of binoculars & he & a coupla friends scan the skies for more of "Bill Lawton" (an errant understanding of "bin Laden")'s planes. Thruout the city, an anonymous man in a blue suit, white shirt, & harness throws himself off high platforms to dangle 20 feet above the fray in the pose from the famous photo. In the end, the years after play out like the days after: Keith will wander in & out of the lives of his wife & "kid"; the stunned & aching silences the only bridge betw. the ash & smoke & the nothing like anything in this world.