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Falling Man: A Novel
by: Don DeLillo

List Price: $17.99

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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Kindle Edition
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Kindle Book
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: May 15, 2007
Publisher: Scribner
Release Date: May 15, 2007
Studio: Scribner
Sales Rank: 2867

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Editorial Review:

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 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.-

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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- "The two dark objects, too obscure to name"
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- Disappointing execution of an important story
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.

Rating:

- After The Planes
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 ... Read More

Rating:

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

Rating:

- DeLillo's sad concession to a career obsession
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 ... Read More

: Falling Man: A Novel