Rent: Falling Man: A Novel
By Don DeLillo
About Falling Man: A Novel - Book Description
The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man. Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and survivor of the attack, arrives on his estranged wife Lianne's doorstep, covered with soot and blood, carrying someone else's briefcase. In the days and weeks that follow, moments of connection alternate with complete withdrawl from his wife and young son, Justin. He begins a desultory affair with the owner of the briefcase based only on their shared experience of surviving: "the timeless drift of the long spiral down." Justin uses his binoculars to scan the skies with his friends, looking for "Bill Lawton" (a misunderstood version of bin Laden) and more killing planes. Lianne suddenly sees Islam everywhere: in a postcard from a friend, in a neighbor's music--and is frightened and angered by its ubiquity. She is riveted by the Falling Man. Her mother Nina's response is to break up with her long-time German lover over his ancient politics. In short, the old ways and days are gone forever; a new reality has taken over everyone's consciousness. This new way is being tried on, and it doesn't fit. Keith and Lianne weave into reconciliation. Keith becomes a professional poker player and, when questioned by Lianne about the future of this enterprise, he thinks: "There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not." DeLillo also tells the story of Hammad, one of the young men in flight training on the Gulf Coast, who says: "We are willing to die, they are not. This is our srength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom." He also asks: "But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?" His answer is that he is one of the hijackers on the plane that strikes the North Tower. At the end of the book, De Lillo takes the reader into the Tower as the plane strikes the building. Through all the terror, fire and smoke, De Lillo's voice is steady as a metronome, recounting exactly what happens to Keith as he sees friends and co-workers maimed and dead, navigates the stairs and, ultimately, is saved. Though several post-9/11 novels have been written, not one of them is as compellingly true, faultlessly conceived, and beautifully written as Don De Lillo's Falling Man. --Valerie Ryan
Falling Man: A Novel Reviews by BookSwim Members
The story is itself a lot like performance art: a shaggy dog story, a drama without climax, catharsis or denouement. If this were a painting it would be an abstract still life, notwithstanding the violent events that begin and end the story. The "plot" as such, of calculated murder, of survival, of marital infidelity and reconciliation, of lives and relationships -- unraveling, reconstituting themselves, ending -- is almost incidental to the oppressive and suffocatingly intense soliloquies and focused conversations of the various characters (mostly New Yorkers), male and female, young and old. I found myself approaching nausea wading through the conversations of the self-absorbed, affected, "precious," and, frankly, unsympathetic and boring protagonists. Like listening to the guy holding forth in the line at the movies in "Annie Hall" crossed with the tape loop repetitions and disorientations of "Last Year at Marienbad". Hieroglyphs, whispers, mirrors, ephemera, navel gazing.
DeLillo writes beautifully crafted prose, and there are flashes of profound insight in this work. But, ultimately, this is an exercise in reflection, a study of memories (everyone is caught up in their memories, even the Alzheimer's patients with whom Lianne works with to help them tell their stories before they forget). Ostensibly "about" 9/11 and its aftermath, it is difficult to articulate what "moral", if any, "Falling Man" is meant to convey about ourselves or the event that has defined our lives, other than that we pass through life as though in free fall, weightless for a brief instant, and at the end of the day unremarked.
Inside the book I remained with the clouds never quite sure who was talking, and maybe that was the point, but I don't want to reread the same passage five times to make sure I know who is talking. The story floats and barely exists, again maybe the point of the story, but we really never know why these people do what they do. To point to the attacks and blame it solely on those attacks is shallow and cheap. We are in motion at all times and 9/11 served as the catalyst to alter these lives, which I have a feeling were on the same course but just got there faster. The WHY is just never explained.
A much better read on this subject is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which ironically shows the falling man but never discusses him, but handles this tragedy with a deft touch and leaves you thinking unlike
Falling Man which left me as empty as the characters upon finishing.
It's a fascinating and gripping move - making the event larger by `reducing' its impact to a few individuals forced to live not just through, but after the tragedy. The author masterfully draws out the experience from minutes to weeks, months and years. While the approach verges on the melodramatic at times, it is through the dramatic long-term impact of the towers falling that allows the reader to re-examine the significance of the event. This aspect of the novel is executed with a clear, painful, and emotional intent resulting in a powerful impact.
But DeLillo doesn't stop there. Memory, privilege, fidelity, time, childhood, friendship, destiny, religion and countless other themes also interject themselves into the piece. This is a jarring choice, leaving the reader scrambling to discern meaning from this overwhelming agenda DeLillo sets out for his work. With this multitude he takes what could have been a moving reading experience and reduces it to incredibly clever minutia, which I doubt was DeLillo's intention. Rather than focusing his energies on one sizable aspect of 9/11, he instead hops around, moving from one concept to another and exploring them in clever, thought-provoking ways, but failing to give any of them the space, time and thought that they deserve in the novel, leaving gaping holes that readers must fruitlessly attempt to fill to get any satisfaction from their respective reading experiences.
Never sloppy but rather careless, DeLillo reduces the impact of his work through trying to do too much in a novel that isn't hefty enough to support the entirety of the subject matter he is attempting to address.
So, the book gets three stars for verging on excellence but utterly failing to deliver that excellence in a powerful, restrained, way.
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| Published | 05/15/2007 |
| Similar Subjects | Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction |
| Publisher | Scribner |
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| Purchase at | Amazon |
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