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 people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.

Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, cathartic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194741 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Kirkus
'Exquisitely written...perfectly constructed...You'll scarcely be
able to draw a breath throughout its lucid, overpowering climactic pages.'

Publishers Weekly, March 22, 2007
'This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer
could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here'

Irish Times, April 21, 2007
'a novel that, sentence by sentence, builds into a masterpiece.'

Customer Reviews

A brilliant return to form for an American master
`Falling Man' opens amidst the chaos of 9/11 as Keith Neudecker stumbles dumbstruck away from the Twin Towers. He is in a daze, can barely comprehend that anything is out of the usual. He makes his way to his ex-wife's house, to a life he knew before any of this happened. The novel follows Keith and the people around him as they struggle to understand an event that is beyond anyone's power of comprehension.
Keith's wife, Lianne, is reeling from the death of her father almost twenty years before. Now she runs writing sessions for those with dementia and worries that her own mind is fading. Their child, Justin, searches the sky with binoculars for Bill Lawton (Bin Laden) who speaks in a monosyllabic language and is certain to return. Lianne's mother and her art dealing lover Martin argue over the nature of God and jihad. Keith himself can only begin to remember that crazy morning by meeting with a woman who was there as well.
All the while a street performer named Falling Man is performing stunts across New York, leaping from heights and hanging frozen in the air, daring people to remember.

This is the world Don Delillo presents, a world which started long before 9/11 but whose consciousness was created in that fateful morning. If anyone should write a book about this subject then this is the man. With `White Noise' he expertly tackled the Cold War fear of nuclear fallout and death and now here he is tackling the modern paranoia: terrorism. He is a master of plotting the psyche of terror and this is every bit as good as `White Noise'. Falling Man is exactly what you wish for in a book, intelligent, witty and intensely poignant. Take this dialogue, could anyone else delineate that disbelief better?

"It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking it's an accident."
"Because it has to be."
"It has to be," he said.
"The way the camera sort of shows surprise."
"But only the first one."
"Only the first," she said.
"The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a little older and wiser."

`Falling Man' is caught in the crossfire between remembering and forgetting, it is a hazy, snapshot view of the lives that 9/11 shaped. It is written in a distorted, confused manner, with shifts in character and plot and time. This makes it difficult to follow, hard to understand, but then, nothing about the subject is easy to understand. There are those with dementia who can't help forgetting and the rest of the people who can't help remembering, those stumbling out of the grey dust of 9/11 and those who are inevitably falling into the grey mist of memory loss.
This is the mirage into which Delillo watches everything merge into uncertainty. The Twin Towers emerge from a still life painting, Keith struggles to tell what is live action and what is a replay in the sport on TV, religious belief leads to disbelief and vice versa, and Keith enters the world of professional Poker playing, desperate to recreate the Friday night game he enjoyed with friends before all of this happened.
You must read this book. Don Delillo has mapped the psychological fallout of 9/11 more superbly than I imagined possible.

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

Decline and Fall
Having read a large quantity of DeLillo's previous work I knew exactly what to expect with this novel. And that is part of the problem.

This is DeLillo doing DeLillo doing 9/11. Like all his novels, it has a searingly good beginning and a profound and suggestive ending, with the body of the terrorist Hammad melding into that of Keith, just as the prose at the finale does. Perhaps our greatest contemporary set-piece writer, these two pieces, both focused on the immediate aftermath of the planes hitting, are among DeLillo's finest. However, in between them what we have is a series of occasionally insightful but often bland observations given to us through characters that are, as usual, no more than cyphers.

Not since Libra has DeLillo written a really good character, one that can give a book a centre from which all the philosophical nuances can be registered as affective and felt. The point is not that characters need be warm and amusing, but that they be real and self-conscious in the way human beings actually are. Lianne, Keith and Justin think and speak in detached and discrete segments that give no sense of people actually involved in the lives they lead. Always at his best when thinking conceptually, DeLillo has at this stage turned everything into a concept, in a way that I, as a human being, find unrecognisable, and that reduces the potential drama to nil.

The great 9/11 novel will be written by someone whose worldview and aesthetic were profoundly formed by what happened to the Twin Towers. Perhaps it is too much to expect an established and older novelist to react in a new and inaugural way to such a new and inaugural event. On this evidence, certainly, DeLillo's best work is behind him.