Books : Falling Man: A Novel

Rating: - Classic DeLillo
DeLillo peppers his novels with fictional characters, well rounded and believable, and stirs historical figures into the mix to center his story in reality. No one else writes about events "ripped from the headlines" as well as he does. DeLillo is an ellipitical writer -- he doesn't give everything away and makes his readers work for their supper. He writes beautiful, organic prose, can define a person with just a few lines ("He was usually jet lagged, more or less unwashed in a well worn suit, trying to resemble an old poet in exile"). It's no shame for a reader to admit that the point of the novel may escape them; DeLillo requires effort that some readers may not be willing to expend.

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Rating: - I did not get the point?
Like some of the previous reviewers I did not see the point in this book and became confused by the writing style. Maybe I am just not smart enough? Maybe it was just over my head? I enjoyed "Underworld" but this book was a mess for me.

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Rating: - Did Don get hit by a cheese truck?
What a disappointment! This novel is impressively bad. UNDERWORLD and LIBRA are two of my all-time favorite books, but I barely made it through FALLING MAN. In fact, with ten pages left, I considered putting it down. DeLillo offers little new insight into an already exhausted topic. The characters are flaccid; there's little to no plot; DeLillo neglects his usual ingenious details and fills the novel instead with vague suggestions at what his generally listless and disaffected characters could be. It felt like he had drawn details from a hat--alzheimers, briefcase, gambling--and plugged them into a dramatic mad-lib-cum-novel about 9/11. Logistically the novel needs some work--I'm a good reader, but with little but ambiguous pronouns to go on and unmarked jumps in time, this book could have used a strong editorial hand. I felt like I was reading a late Philip Roth novel, and I don't mean that as a compliment. If you want to read a stunning piece on 9/11 check out the story "The Suffering Channel" in David Foster Wallace's OBLIVION.

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Rating: - The events and aftermath of September 11th
When a novelist as fine as Don DeLillo addresses the events and aftermath of September 11th, readers of literature take notice. In FALLING MAN, the author has chosen a narrow focus on two New Yorkers, a couple named Keith and Lianne. Keith works in the World Trade Center and escapes death by making his way down the stairwell, one of a terrified crowd. Covered in glass shards and other people's blood, a dazed Keith finds himself on the doorstep of his estranged ex-wife. Together they walk to a hospital, where a doctor who is "propelled by events and could not stop talking" recounts as a curiosity the incidence in bombings of organic shrapnel, pellets of human flesh that get driven into the skin. "This is something I don't think you have," he says, tweezing glass out of Keith's face.

Lianne is glad to have Keith back, for her sake and also their son Justin's. However, over the course of the novel, we come to see the accuracy of Lianne's mother's assessment of Keith as a disaster of a husband. In the confusion of the attacks, Keith ends up with a briefcase that belongs to a woman who worked a couple of floors from him, a fellow survivor. They are drawn together to rehash events, as if to make them real. This intimacy becomes sexual, a fact that Keith doesn't share with Lianne. Keith lost several of his poker buddies in the attacks, and he becomes increasingly fixated on the game, spending weeks in Las Vegas and leaving Lianne and Justin to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, Lianne worries about her mother's failing health and does her own share of acting out --- with a fellow tenant who plays Persian music constantly, whom she punches in the face at her own doorstep (with no apparent consequence). Along with many of her fellow New Yorkers, she is outraged at a performance artist who appears dressed in a suit and tie, suspended upside down --- "the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all." Meanwhile, the boy, Justin, watches the sky with binoculars and whispers of a man named "Bill Lawton" coming back to destroy the towers; he refuses to accept that they are already destroyed. He decides to speak exclusively in words of one syllable.

In a DeLillo novel it doesn't much matter whether you like any of the characters, but I do like Lianne's mother. I like her stubborn certainty of her own opinions. Lianne meets her mother's train at Grand Central Terminal and observes, "People are leaving, you're coming back."

"Nobody's leaving," her mother said. "The ones who leave were never here."

"I have to admit, I've thought of it. Take the kid and go."

"Don't make me sick," her mother said.

The other main characters tried my patience. I don't need to like them, but in their disjointed dialogues, obsessions and self-involvement, Lianne and Keith never really come to life. They seem to signify something, like the Falling Man, but through pages of self-absorbed action I waited in vain for some evidence of transformation. I longed for more characters, more context, something to come from the suffering. Perhaps this is a point the author wishes to make --- that an event of the magnitude of 9/11 is nothing more than its collective effect on thousands of Keiths and thousands of Liannes.

Still, DeLillo can't be beat for the odd dry detail. We learn that Keith compulsively and secretly corrects the spelling of his name on mail --- except for "outright third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising mail...Junk mail was created for just this reason, to presort the world's identities into one, with his or her name misspelled." He is very good at conveying a sense of the immediate aftermath of the attacks. "The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river."

DeLillo is a master of non sequitur, and overall FALLING MAN is interesting if not compelling. Perhaps he is warning us when, early in the book, Lianne considers two still-lifes by Giorgio Morandi in her mother's apartment: "Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment."

--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol

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Rating: - Ho Hum
This was my first DeLillo novel and I'm generally unimpressed. Maybe I'll try "Underworld" and see what the hype is about. In "Falling Man" we are dropped in on a family on 9/11. We don't get to know them very well; they are joyless and seemingly soulless (especially Keith) and while that's understandable on 9/11 there is no indication that they were ever anything but. Then we drop in on them 3 years later and they are still joyless and still navel gazing. We also drop in on one of the 9/11 terrorists. I'm not sure what we are supposed to get from him. For a clearer view of a young terrorist's mind set read: "Terrorist" by John Updike.

There are interesting themes of forgetfulness (Alzheimer's disease is a sub-plot) and the question of what we forget and what we remember could have been interestingly explored as related to 9/11 as we, as a country, both remember and are forgetting that day in different ways...but that theme doesn't really resonate as it could have.

As has been stated before, the best parts of this book (beginning and end) are the descriptions of Keith's actual experiences on 9/11.

Nit Picking: Why does DeLillo call cookies biscuits? He isn't British and neither are the characters eating the dang things. Stuff like that really grates - it's so pretentious.