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Falling Man A Novel Don DeLillo Books

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Falling Man A Novel Don DeLillo Books

This is a beautifully written short novel showing the searing impact of the 9-11 attacks on the lives of several New Yorkers. For several years now I have been focusing on how our best and brightest minds have responded to the horror that descended on us all that Tuesday morning. This is easily the most direct and dramatic response I have discovered. It starts with an office worker who escapes one of the towers and then centers on the impact on his life and his family and a woman who he meets shortly later. At the end of the novella he circles back to the events of that morning and basically puts the reader inside the WTC along with his central character.

I strongly recommend this book. However, if you have not yet reas Collin McCann's Let the Great World Spin, I suggest you read this short novel first. McCann provides an equally well written narrative that counterpoints the magic and wonder of the high wire walker in 1974 with the tragedy at the same site 27 years later. It is the most positive and spiritually moving consideration of the books I have read that consider 9-11 and it is one of the best novels I have ever read.


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Falling Man A Novel Don DeLillo Books Reviews

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.
DeLillo is an examiner of American culture. Whether it's the underlying sea of memorabilia (Underworld A Novel) or the hysteria and machinations of the JFK assassination (Libra), or the group mentality of crowds (Mao II A Novel), DeLillo is probably one of our best writers of the modern American character. While Cormac McCarthy may be showing us the roots of the American spirit from the midwestern lands of yore, DeLillo examines us in the heat of our corporate and internationally connected lives, so it was probably only inevitable that he address 9/11.

_Falling Man_ focuses on Keith and Lianne, a New York couple who have direct experience with the plane attack on the Towers. Keith was actually at work in the Towers that day, and though he escaped with little more physical injury than a damaged wrist, he and Lianne, who had previously been separated, come back together as a reaction to this tragedy. Keith has even escaped what one doctor calls 'organic shrapnel' pieces of human that get propelled into victims' bodies as the result of a suicide bomber.

But this organic shrapnel is one of the metaphorical centers of this book. The blowing apart of humans, the scattering of humanity, so that they are clutching for whatever they can find that gives them meaning. Lianne explores art and volunteering for an Alzheimer's writing group. Keith throws himself into poker and his estranged wife's bed and an obsession with a briefcase he carried out of the Towers without thinking.

But DeLillo, as any great writer does, examines to actualities of existence, the search for meaning that will almost always direct one down a different path than planned. Memory and philosophy intermix just like bits of suicide bomber flesh may bury itself into the face and chest of the bystander, and the result is that a horrifying event such as this will always be a part of you. Keith and Lianne are looking for a way to live with what has happened to them, and sometimes the bravest thing one can do is accept the realities of themselves and not accept a false change done out of fright. Just like the strange wisdom of Lorne Michaels' question to Giuliani on Saturday Night Live when, weeks after 9/11 he said, "Can we be funny again?", DeLillo shows us that there is courage in allowing yourself to fall short of being a good person, if that is where you were headed all along.
I agree with other reviewers that this book is not linear, not meant to offer a compelling plot. It is one artist's expression (and DeLillo, by the way, is an artist; if you doubt it, read White Noise), in prose, of the aftermath of 9-11. As such, DeLillo does not try to make sense of the event itself--how can we, when it was senseless? He simply does what all artists do He observes, then records, from his own perspective, what he sees. And what apparently he continues to see in the aftermath of The Event is the toll in psychological suffering (including--thank you--what has befallen the children who watched the events unfold), the confusion of the time, the anger and hate which continue. This book, from page one, raised my anxiety level--as it should, if the artist's work is effective. I hurried to finish it only because I wanted to get back to a place of safety and comfort... which I realize now may never be fully possible again.
This is a beautifully written short novel showing the searing impact of the 9-11 attacks on the lives of several New Yorkers. For several years now I have been focusing on how our best and brightest minds have responded to the horror that descended on us all that Tuesday morning. This is easily the most direct and dramatic response I have discovered. It starts with an office worker who escapes one of the towers and then centers on the impact on his life and his family and a woman who he meets shortly later. At the end of the novella he circles back to the events of that morning and basically puts the reader inside the WTC along with his central character.

I strongly recommend this book. However, if you have not yet reas Collin McCann's Let the Great World Spin, I suggest you read this short novel first. McCann provides an equally well written narrative that counterpoints the magic and wonder of the high wire walker in 1974 with the tragedy at the same site 27 years later. It is the most positive and spiritually moving consideration of the books I have read that consider 9-11 and it is one of the best novels I have ever read.