Product Description

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 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13356 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.

Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and survivor of the attack, arrives on his estranged wife Lianne's doorstep, covered with soot and blood, carrying someone else's briefcase. In the days and weeks that follow, moments of connection alternate with complete withdrawl from his wife and young son, Justin. He begins a desultory affair with the owner of the briefcase based only on their shared experience of surviving: "the timeless drift of the long spiral down." Justin uses his binoculars to scan the skies with his friends, looking for "Bill Lawton" (a misunderstood version of bin Laden) and more killing planes. Lianne suddenly sees Islam everywhere: in a postcard from a friend, in a neighbor's music--and is frightened and angered by its ubiquity. She is riveted by the Falling Man. Her mother Nina's response is to break up with her long-time German lover over his ancient politics. In short, the old ways and days are gone forever; a new reality has taken over everyone's consciousness. This new way is being tried on, and it doesn't fit. Keith and Lianne weave into reconciliation. Keith becomes a professional poker player and, when questioned by Lianne about the future of this enterprise, he thinks: "There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

DeLillo also tells the story of Hammad, one of the young men in flight training on the Gulf Coast, who says: "We are willing to die, they are not. This is our srength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom." He also asks: "But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?" His answer is that he is one of the hijackers on the plane that strikes the North Tower.

At the end of the book, De Lillo takes the reader into the Tower as the plane strikes the building. Through all the terror, fire and smoke, De Lillo's voice is steady as a metronome, recounting exactly what happens to Keith as he sees friends and co-workers maimed and dead, navigates the stairs and, ultimately, is saved. Though several post-9/11 novels have been written, not one of them is as compellingly true, faultlessly conceived, and beautifully written as Don De Lillo's Falling Man. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

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. 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.

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.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Falling Man
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.

An Enigmatic and Difficult Novel
The title "Falling Man" refers to a performance artist in the novel who appears in various venues around New York City following 9/11. His "art" or "statement" - such as it is - is to hang upside down in a harness he wears underneath a blue business suit: from highway overpasses, train trestles, building cornices, balconies, etc. His "falls" are in full view of commuters, pedestrians, concert goers, etc., he says nothing. He merely hangs upside down, silent, posed the same way, leg bent, arms at his sides, disturbing simply by being. An emblem of those who leaped or fell from the burning World Trade Center towers.

The story is itself a lot like performance art: a shaggy dog story, a drama without climax, catharsis or denouement. If this were a painting it would be an abstract still life, notwithstanding the violent events that begin and end the story. The "plot" as such, of calculated murder, of survival, of marital infidelity and reconciliation, of lives and relationships -- unraveling, reconstituting themselves, ending -- is almost incidental to the oppressive and suffocatingly intense soliloquies and focused conversations of the various characters (mostly New Yorkers), male and female, young and old. I found myself approaching nausea wading through the conversations of the self-absorbed, affected, "precious," and, frankly, unsympathetic and boring protagonists. Like listening to the guy holding forth in the line at the movies in "Annie Hall" crossed with the tape loop repetitions and disorientations of "Last Year at Marienbad". Hieroglyphs, whispers, mirrors, ephemera, navel gazing.

DeLillo writes beautifully crafted prose, and there are flashes of profound insight in this work. But, ultimately, this is an exercise in reflection, a study of memories (everyone is caught up in their memories, even the Alzheimer's patients with whom Lianne works with to help them tell their stories before they forget). Ostensibly "about" 9/11 and its aftermath, it is difficult to articulate what "moral", if any, "Falling Man" is meant to convey about ourselves or the event that has defined our lives, other than that we pass through life as though in free fall, weightless for a brief instant, and at the end of the day unremarked.

Falling Flat
When I picked up this book and I was instantly reminded of the eerie cover photo for the (much better) book Underworld, with the two trade centers surrounded by clouds and I believe Trinity Church (been there only once)with its cross dissecting the two predicting the omen that was to become 9/11.

Inside the book I remained with the clouds never quite sure who was talking, and maybe that was the point, but I don't want to reread the same passage five times to make sure I know who is talking. The story floats and barely exists, again maybe the point of the story, but we really never know why these people do what they do. To point to the attacks and blame it solely on those attacks is shallow and cheap. We are in motion at all times and 9/11 served as the catalyst to alter these lives, which I have a feeling were on the same course but just got there faster. The WHY is just never explained.

A much better read on this subject is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which ironically shows the falling man but never discusses him, but handles this tragedy with a deft touch and leaves you thinking unlike
Falling Man which left me as empty as the characters upon finishing.