Product Description

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.

Falling Man begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few individuals. Theirs are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.

‘These are pages of magnificent force and control, DeLillo’s genius at full pelt. Reading them, you have to remind yourself to keep breathing’ New Statesman

‘Searing, profoundly unsettling. An unforgettable novel’ Sunday Times

‘A revelatory piece of writing that will stand as a testament to DeLillo’s genius’ Times Literary Supplement

‘As fine a thing as DeLillo has ever made. There are those who have called him a cold writer; I challenge them to read the astonishing and deeply moving closing pages of Falling Man without weeping’ Scotsman

'Complex, thrilling, awesome . . . This is a tremendous novel by a genuine master’ Irish Independent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20273 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Evening Standard
This is an intricate work of memory and forgetting.

Independent on Sunday
'There is consistently great writing in this book, including both expertly orchestrated set pieces and indelible details.'

Daily Telegraph
'It contains many brilliant passages...many awe-inspiring moments.'

Customer Reviews

Feeble and empty-headed...
What is it about 9/11 that turns any book about it into an incoherent, smug, self-satisfied mess? Surely seven years after is enough time to make some kind of sense of what it was, what it meant, what it led to? This book has all the puffed-up intentions of placing the day into context, and making `profound' and `unsettling' observations that will have us all revising our views and stereotypes. What it delivers is lame; a feeble failure of a novel that angers with its' sheer incompetence.

Any book on any large event (see my review of Tin Roof Blowdown) struggles with a basic problem - the event is too colossal for individuals to really understand. Better, then, to tell it through several interesting individuals, rather than try to provide the whole sweep of it. Dellillo picks as his vehicles several of the most annoying, pretentious and dull characters you'll ever meet. Stupid monologue conversations that no human being would actually have; clever-clever references even from the ten-year-old kid; fractured ideas that have no currency in the real world. You simply cannot imagine these people ever drawing breath, in any context or at any time. Therefore, you couldn't care less what happened to them. All I wanted to do was jump in the book and punch them.

Allied to this is a foolhardy and frankly laughable attempt to `get inside the mind of the terrorist'. This is both too shallow and slight to actually be cohesive or relevant, but uses up too much of the book to make sense with the rest of the narrative. It is an unnecessary intrusion that advances nothing.

Why does no author actually have anything to say about 9/11? Is it lack of imagination? Lack of perspective? Lack of skill? Surely there's enough evidence of its' impact and reverberations for someone to say something that isn't either self-evident, or idiotically pretentious crap?

This book joins the legion of other books about 9/11 that purport to be terribly important, but are actually devoid of any insight whatsoever. Since it was trying to say something important about something important, its' failure is all the greater. It is a miserably tedious, empty, air-headed failure.

Look Elsewhere....
This novel is so badly written that at times it's laughable: 240 pages of vacuous pseudo-profundity resembling poetry written by a precocious teenager with no life experience. The characters are self-absorbed non-entities inhabiting clichés of lifestyle and character - eg: don't give a damn poker-player; twittering, anxious mother; shady art dealer astride the continents.

White Noise was great, thanks mainly to the humour, but this is another plotless exercise in self-reverence by this most overrated of novelists. The only thing more predictable than the book itself is the praise heaped on it by critics desperate to find something which only they can appreciate. To that end, what better than a novel that can turn the defining moment of our times into something so dull and uninteresting?

If you're looking for insight into 9/11, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a great novel, look elsewhere. In fact, whatever it is you're looking for, look elsewhere!

Some superb passages but not a favourite.
In places this book explores the terror and horror felt by the survivors of 9/11, their sense of shock and amazement at the events in which they had been entangled. De Lilo's accounts of the stupified crowds trying to find out a way of the towers is powerful and absorbing yet it is these short passages that are most memorable in a novel that focuses on the experiences of one family, brought together again by the atrocity trying to find new directions and certainties.

DeLilo's exploration of the family is less certain- they seem to exist as seperate beings following their own paths after a brief moment of mutual understanding and as the novel moves on to develop Keith's fascination with poker, so incidental characters move in and out, their purpose never clarified- perhaps this is the aim of the novel to show how the messy uncertainties of everyday life can be pulled together only at moments of the greatest crisis yet this means that the narrative begins to feel haphazard and my interest in the characters waned.