Books : Falling Man: A Novel

Rating: - A NOVEL THAT MERITS ATTENTION

While there have been millions of words written about 9/11 surely few are as trenchant and poignant a those penned by award winning author Don DeLillo in Falling Man. He presents the small moments, minute observations, which in everyday life would be fleeting but in this case are crucial to the character's state of mind.

Readers are immediately caught by one of the most devastating opening lines in fiction: "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night." With those few words one is transported back to the shock, the horror of that dreadful day that changed our lives forever.

We see the devastation through the eyes of Keith Neudecker whose office was in the south tower. He emerges dazed, confused, carrying someone else's briefcase. When a helpful truck driver offers a ride he asks to be taken to the apartment of his wife, Lianne. They have been separated for some time and have a young son, Justin.

Lianne seeks to know why Keith has returned to her, while Justin responds to the tragedy by scanning the sky with binoculars - searching for another plane. As time passes Nina, Lianne's mother, reconnects with her lover and Keith finds common ground with another survivor.

Landscaping the emotional terrain of these people is DeLillo at his finest - staccato voices, brief phrases, revealing so much.

Later in the book we are privy to the thoughts of Hammad who "...thinks of the rapture of live explosives pressed to his chest and waist."

Reading Falling Man is almost painful, a reopening of old wounds. Yet DeLillo has so precisely captured the then and now of 9/11 that it merits attention by all.

- Gail Cooke

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Rating: - review for Falling Man
"Falling Man" is a novel which investigates how a person might react days and weeks after being a central participant of 9/11. It is told from the perspective of a man who was in one of the towers, his family's reaction to him and how a child might no longer feel safe. The author also tried to let us know how one of the terrorist might have felt which I felt could have been left out. This book should certainly be read but read but with the understanding that it is only how one family of fictional characters reacted, not how people in general would have reacted. The writer has already proven himself as a creative and prize winning novelist and I am just an average reader. However, I found the book troublesome to follow because I was constantly having to back up to see who was speaking.

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Rating: - Not an easy read
The novel seems short, but it isn't. DeLillo requires extraordinarily close and careful reading; he packs an enormous amount into every page. The theme is stated at the beginning and then explored relentlessly: how, over the space of days and months, 9/ll altered the lives of those immediately affected by it (the main character was in the first tower to be hit, and most of the other characters are either closely related to him or similarly situated), but also, by implication, the lives of all of us. The lasting result is a descent into personal confusion, which is often reflected in a prose that jerks abruptly from paragraph to paragraph and from section to section. If you are patient, however, you can follow the thread. In the end, I found the book deeply moving even though it remains largely unemotional, almost clinical, on its descriptive surface. There have been a fair number of other novels recently taking on 9/11 themes, but this quiet meditation is, in my opinion, far and away the best.

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Rating: - Disappointed
The biggest virtue of this book is its brevity--only 240 pages. It is rambling, incoherent, and totally unsatisfying. The characters don't make sense, the symbolism is overdone, and the whole book was overwritten.

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Rating: - Another 9/11 Ripoff
This book should be thrown away, not clutched as one reviewer. I will grant that the few pages devoted to the scenes in the towers are gripping...the rest of the book and its pathetically dysfunctional characters was an absolute waste of time. I would have much rather read a book about the impact on a family that basically were "normal" and what this kind of things this tragic event could do, rather than read about people who I could quite honestly give a rat's butt about.

Sure as heck, did not need 9/11 to tell this tale.