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: #12119 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
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
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

DeLillo in Context
I enjoyed this book very much, having enjoyed some of Don DeLillo's other novels. A couple things to know about this book:
1. This is not mainstream fiction. DeLillo uses his own conventions and the conventions of postmodern fiction to great extent.
2. This novel is not primarily a retelling of the events of 9/11. Rather, it is an exploration of the mindset of New Yorkers (and one European) after 9/11, how this particular watershed event changed people's worldview.
3. This is not a political work. It does not seek to espouse any political point of view.

That being said, I very much liked this book. I found it very chilling at some points, and difficult to read. I found myself dealing with emotions I had not felt since the days just after 9/11 (deftly referred to in the novel as 'since the planes'), and an exploration much different from the film United 93.

I did feel some of the characters were hollow, but that is kind of typical of DeLillo's storytelling style. Characters in DeLillo works tend to be people to whom things happen, reactors as opposed to actors. I felt that this helped enhance the feelings of some of the characters in this work, accentuating the helplessness and fear I know I certainly felt in the wake of 9/11.

While the book does deal directly with the events of 9/11 (those were some of the most emotionally difficult to read), it is primarily an exploration of the 'post-9/11' world. In this, I feel it succeeds, and is a brilliant work.

Vaguely dissatisfying
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.

The Transience of Consciousness and Identity
There exists an event in each of our pasts that haunts all of our potential futures. "Falling Man" explores one such event that we are all connected to, some directly (like those in the Towers or in NYC or DC or in an airport, etc.) and others who experienced it on television, in the papers, on the radio. We all have individual memories of what happened, where we were, how it affected us. Yet we continually share the experience repetitively through a collective memory comprised of images on TV, photographs of the planes striking the towers, overheard conversations in restaurants or subways, images of the pristine towers in a longshot from an older movie or television program, etc. In some ways the events of 9/11 define us as individuals and in some ways the events define us all.

This book made me think about myself in ways that few books do. I didn't so much imagine "walking in the shoes" of the characters so much as I thoughtfully considered their actions and reactions in search of some understanding, or empathy. Actions and behaviors that would otherwise appear selfish, Delillo exposes as superficial manifestations of penetrating emotional wounds. It is not always our actions that define who we "are," but rather the events in our lives that shape the consciousness and identity from which our actions result. In "Falling Man", Lianne is not obsessed with the degradation of her own memories (or potential onset of Alzheimer's) as one could conclude. Instead, Delillo gives us the opportunity to see Lianne as a woman traumatized by her father's suicide, which had been prompted by a seemingly rapid onset of Alzheimer's while Lianne was in college. Likewise, Keith's experience of having been in the South Tower when it was first struck altered his sense of self and the life he was choosing to live. Delillo allows for no moral judgments to be made against his characters, or against us by proxy. Instead we delicately observe the frailty of the human condition. Delillo shows that at our best, we are all simply walking on a path, unable to know if it is the right one. There is no proof of salvation, just a set of possible outcomes, some expected and foreseeable, and others that are not.

Other reviewers have wondered why the plot seemed to be missing from this novel (not an ignorant question on its face). To those with similarly open questions I ask this, if someone was writing the story of your life or mine, what would the plot be? In this novel the plot is of little significance. What is important are the themes and how they are interwoven, like memories forming a consciousness. Delillo explores the subtleties between understanding and faith, memory and history, realities and fictions, and how there are few, if any, certainties.

Reality and fiction, history and memory, the differences between each is a matter of perspective. How is it that two people witnessing the same event often present completely different versions of what happened, yet genuinely believe they are themselves correct? Just as many believe accepting Christ is the path to salvation, the Koran professes that it is the one book of truth. These issues are irresolvable; it is impossible to know in this life which, if any path, is correct.

Again, in this life we are all looking for "the" right path, at least those of us with a choice. Just like the people in the Towers when they were attacked, those lucky enough to try an escape could have either walked up or down the stairs, a choice that ended up being one of life and one of death. Others, trapped above the fires, faced a much deeper dilemma and had to choose between two types of death. Those who survived are left with ever-fading memories and the burden of knowing that it was nothing more than chance that kept them alive; except for those who attribute their survival to some divine intervention without explaining why others were then "selected" to die.

There is no way to understand how another would feel after making a choice that ends up being, in hindsight, one between life and death. Even more impossible would be to predict how someone should react in the aftermath. Delillo captures the essence of these experiences, both the personal experience and the one that we all share. In the end we are left with a beautiful story which reflects our own set of moral and spiritual ambiguities, our lost and faded memories, and our shared version of these events that altered the course of history.