Review by New York Times Review
NO matter where you stood in the city, the air was thick after the towers fell: literally thick with the soot and stench of incinerated flesh that turned terror into a condition as inescapable as the weather. All bets were off. New Yorkers who always know where they're going didn't know where to go. Cab drivers named Muhammad were now feared as the enemy within; strangers on the street were improbably embraced like family under a canopy of fliers for the missing. Such, for a while anyway, was the "new normal," though the old normal began to reassert itself almost as soon as that facile catch-phrase was coined. Today 9/11 carries so many burdens - of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war - that sometimes it's hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we've built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.) In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night." He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now. Though the sensibility and prose are echt DeLillo, "Falling Man" is not necessarily the 9/11 novel you'd expect from the author of panoramic novels that probe the atomic age ("Underworld") and the Kennedy assassination ("Libra") on the broadest imaginable canvas, intermingling historical characters with fictional creations. With the exception of Mohamed Atta, who slips into the crevices of "Falling Man" as an almost spectral presence, DeLillo mentions none of the other boldface names of 9/11, not even the mayor. Instead of unfurling an epic, DeLillo usually keeps the focus on an extended family of middle-class Manhattanites. If "Underworld" took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, "Falling Man," up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups reminiscent of the domestic anomie of the New Wave. In DeLillo's hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There's a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers the reader into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror. Humor is not this novel's calling card, but there is one tongue-in-cheek passage mocking an unwieldy nonfiction 9/11 manuscript that, we're told, is a legend in publishing circles: "a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher's planned catalog copy - a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the 21st century." DeLillo can laugh because he has been there and done that long ago, back when such projects really were visionary as well as prescient. The newly constructed twin towers, for instance, make an appearance in one of his early novels, "Players" (1977), when one of its characters goes to work for a counseling organization called the Grief Management Council: "It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?" A DECADE later came DeLillo's premonition of national apocalypse, the "airborne toxic event" of "White Noise," and, in 1991, "Mao II," which opens with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's mass wedding of 6,500 couples at Yankee Stadium and ends in the hell of Beirut. Moon, Mao, the Ayatollah Khomeini: today "Mao II" seems one of the most forceful harbingers, among the countless that were ignored, of the steady march of international terror toward the locus of Boston, New York and Washington. Bill Gray, the reclusive, Pynchonesque writer at the center of "Mao II," laments that terrorists, the bomb makers and gunmen, have annexed the territory that once belonged to the novelist: the ability to "alter the inner life of the culture." As he sees it, the "news of disaster is the only narrative people need," and "the darker the news, the grander the narrative." After 9/11, DeLillo picked up his fictional alter ego's point in an essay for Harper's, "In the Ruins of the Future," that grappled with how a novelist might respond to terror now that it had hit home. "The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative," DeLillo wrote. "People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us" because "they take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being." An event like 9/11 cannot be bent to "the mercies of analogy or simile." Primal terror - "the cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women" - has to take precedence over politics, history and religion. "There is something empty in the sky," he wrote. "The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space." Since then, writers as various as McEwan and Updike, Neil LaBute and Ken Kalfus, among many others, have tried to answer the call of 9/11 in myriad ways. DeLillo's readers were disappointed when the first novel he produced after 9/11 ("Cosmopolis") was not the book his Harper's essay seemed to promise. In "Falling Man," he delivers it. Its premise is archetypal almost to a fault. Keith, a lawyer nearing 40, narrowly makes it out of one of the buckling towers, then turns up, "all blood and slag" and with "a gaze that had no focus in it," at the door of the wife, Lianne, from whom he has long been separated. He arrives carrying someone else's briefcase, which will soon lead him to a sporadic liaison with a fellow survivor, a "light-skinned black woman," from whom he seeks memories of "the dazed reality they'd shared in the stairwells" more than sex. Whether Keith and Lianne will reconstitute their marriage is almost irrelevant to what DeLillo is up to here. In the ruins of 9/11, relationships are a non sequitur. Disconnectedness is the new currency. Language is fragmented. Vision is distorted. Even when the characters look at the bottles and jars in the composition of a beloved Giorgio Morandi still life, they still can't help seeing the towers. While there are just enough signposts to keep "Falling Man" tethered to a recognizable reality, it's an askew, alternative-reality variation on the literal, as if we, too, were taking it in through Keith's unfocused gaze. The entire city, not just downtown, is in the physical and emotional limbo of a frozen zone. When "Falling Man" sporadically leaves Keith and Lianne behind to retrace 9/11 from the point of view of the hijackers, that spell is broken. These brief interruptions seem potted, adding little beyond mellifluous writing to the journalistic record. Far more arresting are the clusters of elderly and young characters who serve as the novel's sparingly deployed Greek choruses: a group of early Alzheimer's patients whom Lianne tutors in a therapeutic journal-writing class, and a pair of kids who hang out with Lianne and Keith's only child, Justin. The kids are not all right. Staring through binoculars from the 27th floor of a high rise, they keep searching for more planes sent by an enemy they've phonetically approximated as "Bill Lawton." If that figurative villain is as close as bin Laden comes to an appearance in "Falling Man," so it seems for much of the way that DeLillo's title, its spiritual connotations aside, is going to remain tied to a mysterious, fictional performance artist who starts to pop up around New York after the attacks. Falling Man's shtick is to appear unannounced and terrify onlookers with daredevil headfirst falls that in the end are broken by a safety harness. A New School panel discussion can't decide whether he's a "Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror," but in any case he touches the third rail of 9/11 taboos. In "Falling Man," as in life, no one wants to watch a reenactment of the Associated Press photo of a man falling headfirst from the north tower - an image that was largely pulled from circulation after 9/12. But DeLillo is not being cute. His ersatz Falling Man is just a warm-up act for the novel's depiction of the actual men and women jumping and falling to their deaths. As Keith tries to move forward - enlisting in the pro poker circuit in half-articulated solidarity with a poker buddy who didn't survive - the past keeps coming back to claim him. Lazarus cannot rise until he fully remembers his fall into the underworld. Keith must descend back into the hell of 9/11 if DeLillo is to provide the counternarrative to terrorism he promised, the story that takes us beyond the hard, anonymous numbers of the dead to retrieve what he called in Harper's "human beauty in the crush of meshed steel." And so Keith does return to the inferno, his gaze no longer unfocused. What we see through his eyes in the tower's stairwell is an apocalypse as vivid as Nathanael West's burning of Los Angeles, but all the more harrowing and touching for its historical reality and for the innocence and heroism of the victims. This time the falling men and women tumble before the reader with no safety harness, no net of simile or irony, nothing to break their fall. It is not performance art but the real thing, and it brings at least a measure of memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space. 'Falling Man' is not necessarily the 9/11 novel you'd expect from the author of 'Underworld' and 'Libra.' Frank Rich, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, is the author, most recently, of "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
There have been a number of novels written in the past years about 9/11 that have attempted to come to grips with what that horrible day means to us. None of them are like this one, although Jess Walter's The Zero (2006) comes closest in terms of re-creating the emotional reality of the post-9/11 world. The novel's searing opening pages follow lawyer Keith Neudecker, who has just emerged from the World Trade Center, as he makes his way up the street, fighting raining debris and seismic tides of smoke. It's not until he's almost there that he realizes where he's heading--the apartment of his ex-wife and son. And over the succeeding months, we are made privy to the family's reactions to that heartbreaking day. Keith's young son plays a game with his friends in which they search the sky with binoculars, looking for signs of planes and for Bill Lawton (their misheard name for bin Laden); meanwhile, Keith's ex-wife is both mesmerized and horrified by a performance artist dubbed the Falling Man, who, dressed in a blue suit and tethered by a bungee cord, launches himself headfirst off train tracks and balconies. Keith, having learned firsthand the benevolence of luck, dedicates himself to playing poker, elevating the rituals of the game to a sacred rite. Inevitably, inexorably, DeLillo ends his devastating novel with the sights and sounds Keith's experiences on 9/11 as he watches his colleagues die while slumped in their office chairs. And it's a testament to DeLillo's brilliant command of language that readers will feel once again, whether they want to or not, as scared and as sad as they felt that day. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower--as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad--until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named "Bill Lawton." DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who "was very genius"--Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness--save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld--with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics--converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"He tried to tell himself he was alive but the idea was too obscure to take hold." A dazed, injured attorney emerges from the crumbling towers and finds himself reunited with his estranged family. (LJ 5/15/07) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The contemporary master's 14th novel is a pulsating exploration of our recent history akin and comparable to such predecessors as White Noise (1985), Libra (1988) and Mao II (1991). It's a subtle deployment of intersecting narratives which begins on September 11, 2001, as the Twin Towers are falling. Keith Neudecker, a New York City office worker who survives the disaster, returns, not to the apartment where he has lived since separating from his wife Lianne, but to her and their young son Justin: a gaunt, wraith-like figure covered in ashes, broken glass and blood, carrying a stranger's briefcase. In brief, cryptic segments that move backward and forward in time, we learn of the couple's past difficulties and nominal "reconciliation," in relation to Lianne's troubled closeness to her elegant mother Nina and memories of her father, her volunteer work with a neighborhood Alzheimer's patients' support group, the poker playing cronies with whom Keith has led a separate life and the owner of the briefcase he carried out of the Tower (to whom he impulsively returns it, with whom he forges a mutually consolatory intimacy). DeLillo subtly connects these and numerous other episodes and motifs, introducing the figures of an Iraqi true believer preparing himself for martyrdom, a jaded European (Nina's lover) who confidently predicts America's impending downfall and the eponymous "performance artist" whose seemingly suicidal plunges increasingly clearly adumbrate and embody the experience of "free fall" toward which all this ruthlessly compact novel's characters are leaning. Exquisitely written sentence by sentence, perfectly constructed and infused with a harrowing momentum that never relaxes its grip on the reader's nerves, this is arguably the crowning work of DeLillo's estimable career: a compassionate and despairing dramatization of current events that shows how inextricably the political and the personal worlds are fatefully entwined. You'll scarcely be able to draw a breath throughout its lucid, overpowering climactic pages. Beauty from ashes. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
