FALLING MAN
Don DeLillo
Scribner
Fiction
ISBN-10: 1416546022
ISBN-13: 9781416546023

• Read an Excerpt

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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