Books : Falling Man: A Novel

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 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.

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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.

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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 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.

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Rating: - disappointing
I've never read DeLillo and don't know if I will again. I thought the beginning was great and the ending was good but the body of the book was rambling. I understand what the author was trying to do, but I think the disjointedness of the middle was either overdone or poorly done.

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Rating: - A moving novel from a normally stoic writer
The jacket copy of this book describes it as a 9/11 novel unlike any other (Or something like that). I would have to agree. I've always thought of DeLillo as a poet's writer with his tight sentences and stingy emotion. The kind of writer that hits you when you're not looking. Since I tend to like long, rambling novels that capture the intricate details of a time and place, I was surprised to find myself so drawn to this one. BAsically it's the story of a family that's coming together at the same time it's falling apart. Each character is confronted with the realities of death and dying in his or her own way, and each contends with his or her fears through unique and touching methods. My husband and I disagree whether this is a hopeful or bleak story so I guess it's a bit of both. It's definitely more than a 9/11 story and isn't as fraught with the paranoia that one often finds in De Lillo's work. I would definitely recommend it for the mood it evokes and the beauty of the language.