Falling Man: A Novel [Paperback]

Don DeLillo (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 3, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Scribner Trade Paperback Edition edition (June 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416546065
• ISBN-13: 978-1416546061
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of fourteen novels, including Falling Man, 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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars DeLillo in Context June 10, 2007

By Ryan Silberstein

Format:Hardcover

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.

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Transience of Consciousness and Identity June 12, 2007

By Ryan P. Dowd

Format:Hardcover

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.

42 of 49 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Vaguely dissatisfying June 26, 2007

By J. Grattan TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.