Falling Man

Difficult, difficult, difficult. Reads oblique and milky and opaque, studded with some hard islands of fierce, sharp-eyed prose. Delillo dodges the obvious drama and easy, available sentiment (rage, sorrow, indignation, LITERATURE), and conjures up page after page of shock, numb, silly, ringing,

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and infinite. Some people (Michiko! Andrew!) did not like this! They did not like the stilted, disengaged, coldly analytical prose (admittedly, sometimes a little jarring and frustrating); and they did not like the lack of killer instinct. Falling Man in no ways tries to home in on the pulpy, beating heart of 9/11, and instead seems to skirt the edges. Also Things They Didn’t Love: the lack of any real skeleton. Again, Falling Man feels loose, anecdotes of Small Shit bobbing around around in the aftermath of a typhoon.

However! I think the lack of any truly solid, coherent narrative (jesus, THIS IS NOT A BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT. It just, uh, sounds like one.) is sort of deliberate! And also infinitely more honest and complex. We tell stories to make sense of things (hay Didion), but who can honestly make sense of 9/11 in all its dimensions? A few of the characters try, but their sparring arguments seem so sparse and brittle and obviously lacking. Also! The command immediately afterwards (hay, Bush) was to resume normality: to go shopping of all things. Delillo knows that, remembers that despite the heroic myth we’ve erected around the event, so much more of what happened that morning was this utterly lost, alienated fumbling.

And Falling Man is that, that feeling of limbo after disaster: that moment of dust rising, debris settling. It’s not the 9/11 novel we want - there’s so little heroism, so much pettiness, so much self-absorption - but it’s the one we’re going to get.

PS: Not without fault though; some of Delillo’s old tricks verge on parody here which, uh, NO GOOD. The usual sharpness of his parody and humor gets blunted by the sheer magnitude of the event he tries to describe.

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Don Delillo is widely recognized as being one of America’s finest postmodern writers. With Falling Man the author unleashed his mature and formidable talents in a heroic effort to create the quintessential 9/11 novel. But did he succeed?

Delillo is famous for his exquisite writing and carefully

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crafted prose. He is also noted for novels that focus on important contemporary social issues. That he would eventually turn his talents toward writing a book about 9/11 is not surprising.

Falling Man is an extremely difficult book to read. First of all, the subject matter is emotionally disturbing. But the real difficulty comes with Delillo’s choice to write this novel in a seemingly chaotic literary style. The author does everything he can to put the reader off-balance—to make the reader unsure about the “who, when, and why” of practically every segment. The prose is disjointed. It is easy to find yourself totally lost and confused. But that is exactly the emotional state that Delillo wants his readers to be in. He wants his readers to feel that they are in the chaos of the moment, experiencing, through artful prose, this most bewildering of world events. Life lived in the moment is jerky and disjointed. On this point, the author succeeds brilliantly; however, just like the original event, this literary event can leave the reader completely benumbed.

The plot concerns 9/11 survivor Keith Neudecker. In the opening chapter, we find Keith staggering out of the North Tower, encrusted in soot, grime, and blood, wandering the streets of New York. The animal part of his brain guides him toward home, but not to his own place, rather toward the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their young child, Justin. They comfort each other in shock and start living together once again as a family. Over the course of the next few weeks, we meet other essential and superfluous characters that populate this couple’s life during the weeks following September 11th. We get to see how these characters interact with one another. Delillo focuses on human behavior through a microscope. We never see the whole picture at once. We view every interaction through a chaotic mix of tiny snippets. In our minds we create the overall picture, and it is one of people in deep emotional pain and turmoil—people trying desperately to transition to a new reality anyway they can.

Delillo’s goal is to put the reader in the experience, not to explain what caused this catastrophe or how to avoid further incidents like this in the future. The plot is really not that compelling. Like the chaotic, jerky prose, the plot is disjointed and unsettling.

And to make all this even worse, the author’s purposeful chaotic prose and plot devices make it virtually impossible for him to deliver characters that the reader cares about. The characters in this book are altogether emotionally remote, not only from themselves and each other, but from the reader, as well.

Falling Man comes tantalizingly close being the quintessential novel about 9/11, but on many levels the novel falls short. What the book does best is to recreate the feeling of being there, and actually living through those hellish events. Perhaps it will read better with future generation of readers who have not directly experienced the events of 9/11.

Despite its undeniable sparkling and brilliant prose, Falling Man was, for me, disturbingly dull. Then why am I so pleased that I read this difficult book? Perhaps because on some visceral level, I am amazed that an author has it in his power to put me once again in the moment of that unforgettable event. So, I recommend it to those who want to live or relive the 9/11 experience. I also recommend it to readers who want to experience a unique, but ultimately flawed, display of Don Delillo’s literary talents.

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This is a novel written post 9/11 and begins with a man staggering down a New York street bloody and covered in ash after coming down the stairs from the World Trade Centre where he works . He arrives at his estranged wife and son's apartment and is taken to the emergency department. He is treated

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by a young doctor who examines him and explains the incidence of 'organic shrapnell' where pieces of human flesh become embedded in the skin.
The novel centres on one survivor and his estranged family and how they are reunited by a tragic event. There is also several chapters from the perspective of one of the hijackers who is preparing for this fateful day which is chilling......... 'Those men who did this thing. They're anti-everything we stand for. But they believe in God.'

A novel about what it was like for ordinary New Yorkers in the aftermath of that defining moment in history where life has changed for us all.

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A story about a family directly involved in 9/11 and what their lives were like immediately following (days, months) the terrorist attacks. The "falling man" was a performance artist who recreated the bodies falling from the towers on that day, but really represented the protagonist, Keith, who was

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in Tower 1 on 9/11. It was really slow-moving and its only redemption for me was the last chapter, which re-created Keith's life when the plane hit and his descendance down from the tower and to his ex-wife's home. Agonizing.

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Delillo's method of writing in Falling Man is deliberately fragmented, in time and in place. It is worried, confused and unreal - despite its premise lying in a harsh reality outside of fiction - and Delillo's prose conjures up a detached experience of events. He forms vignettes of narrative and

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character thought, heavier than I found in White Noise - which takes some effort by the reader - but the overall effect, once past the intense climax, makes it more than worthwhile. The horrifying image of the falling man is the ghost that haunts this novel.

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This was never going to be an easy book to read - much less to review. There is always going to be something discomforting involved in the creative act when is focus is that terrible day in September 2001. There is no room for fluff, lightness, sweetness here. As Picasso indelibly reminded us with

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his Guernica , war is so not conveyed in comfortable aethetics. Jonathan Safran Foer had the same issue as he wrote his 9/11 tribute, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. A pastoral eulogy just isn't going to work, here.

So DeLillo (and to be fair I have not previoulsy read him) sets out for fragmentation and alienation. This is "The Wasteland", not "In Memoriam". There is here no neat and tidy closure, not even a carefully delineated timeline. Shit, when it happens to be writ large, leaves no such aesthetic. It leaves broken, bewildered, dysfunctional lives, unanswered questions, an anti-aesthetic. DeLillo captures all of that.

Which makes for one of those anti-delight experiences. There is somewhere a cutting snarl by a literary critic about 'a novel I couldn't wait to put down'. Falling Man is that. This is no Georgette Heyer historical romance or P.G. Wodehouse escapism. This is a novel about events that are still sandpapering the DNA of a nation and a generation. For most of us 9/11 is now our JFK moment, so that we know exactly where we were when first we encountered 'the horror'. But this novel is not about those of us who stood glued despondently to our TV sets. This is about those who clawed their way from the ash cloud, out into a world whose rules and parameters had irrevocably changed. Sure, I couldn't wait to put this novel down, but equally surely I knew that if I put it down just because I couldn't face the tortured fragmentation, the Picasso-esque alienation, then I, not DeLillo, was the poorer for it.

This is a brutally discomforting novel - in the end victim and perpetrator merge in an inseparable blur. There are no tidy narratives, no clear characterizations, no sweet conversations, no comfortable endings. That is because great writing captures realities, and in the merd-saturated realities of 9/11 and its on-going legacy there is only putrid dust and tumult reverberating around the globe and its human societies.

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I read White Noise a long time ago and really enjoyed it, but I found this one to be overly "literary" and esoteric. He's a good writer, but it was a bit too much for me. Maybe a smarter person would appreciate it more, I'm not sure.

A September 11th novel. Moves from victims to perpetrators, but focuses mainly on Keith, a survivor, and the psychic toll the event has taken on him. It returns him to his estranged wife, but the marriage is not happy, their child is angst-ridden, and Keith--even as he resumes his marriage--has an

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affair with another survivor whose briefcase he has "rescued" from the collapse of the towers. Keith ends up a poker player, flying to and from his family. Poker games are described as being "like a seance in hell."
DeLillo is amazingly talented. The writing at times is breathtaking. However, he is also amazingly frustrating. He seems to be in love with pronouns. Sections begin with "He did this or that . . ." and then the reader is required to figure out who "he" is through context. Annoying and self-conscious. Same thing with the central metaphor. Failling Man is a performance artist who keeps 9/11 on the minds of New Yorkers by "falling" out of buildings. He's harnessed, but the falls are not bungee jumps. They cause real pain to Falling Man and real pain to those who see him fall. Just a bit too tricky.

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I never read DeLillo before, and after this probably never will again.

I tried with this book. I really did. I couldn't finish. I just didn't care anymore. For one, the use of pronouns in this book drove me crazy! Half the time I just spent trying to figure out which He or She DeLillo was referring to. The basic story line was okay. A family intertwined after the

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events of 9/11. The story line was a bit hard to follow at times. A couple brought back together, a couple torn apart. A child scared and making up ideas of what actually happened, or not believing what actually happened. In the end, I just gave up. I didn't care about the characters anymore. I liked Windows on the World or Extremely Loud and Incredibly close much more.

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One of the best 9/11 novels I've read so far. DeLillo brings in a lot of major themes relating to the trauma of the WTC attacks without getting too lost in cheap comparisons. The attention to memory (of trauma, Alzheimer's, stream of consciousness) makes it worthwhile.

This book seemed to give first hand insight into the world of a 9/11 Survivor. DeLillo did a good job of taking the reader into the buildings on that day. At times the heaviness of the language can become suffocating and the chronology can become broken, but I do not think that this was done

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accidentally. That fragmentation and disorientation allows the reader to physically feel the part of the main character. Great book and nicely done!

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In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Manhattan, many were looking to quintessential New York author Don DeLillo to take on the unenviable task of explaining to us what it all meant.

DeLillo’s stories have always dealt with the twin specters of terrorism and mass psychosis. It made perfect

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sense to want to search for deeper meanings lurking just under the surface of his latest novel.

To his credit, DeLillo didn’t exactly deliver what was expected of him. Instead of a myopic study of events on 9/11, Falling Man is a deeper exploration of loss in all its subtle and insidious forms.

When Lianne’s estranged husband Keith walks away from the collapse of the Twin Towers relatively unscathed and ends up on her doorstep, it is her volunteer work with elderly patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s that helps her maintain some sense of normalcy. The intimate description of the slow erosion of what has defined those few lives actually threatens to emotionally eclipse the larger tragedy for all its wide-screen horror.

That is until the novel’s final act, where DeLillo takes us inside a doomed plane and the resulting inferno to show us what those struggling to escape had to go through. DeLillo’s careful, claustrophobic depiction of the exodus from the north tower rivals Hampton Sides’ piece in Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier for all its nightmarish immediacy.

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Falling Man is about Keith Neudeckor, a survivor of the World Trade Center attack, who flees the smoke and ash to make his way uptown to his estranged wife. She takes him in, and the two of them cope with the aftermath in different ways. Keith has a brief affair with a fellow survivor, and

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eventually turns all his attention to high-stakes poker. Lianne, his wife, is consumed by anger and anxiety to the point of physically assaulting a neighbor playing Middle Eastern music. Their child searches the sky for returning planes and makes a game of talking only in monosyllables.

This is my first DeLillo novel and I found it difficult going. The main characters seem disconnected from each other; their most intense experiences occur alone. The writing is deceptively lean, using short sentences and disjointed phrases to convey complex ideas. It took me about 100 pages to feel anything about these people at all; then I surrendered to the book's odd rhythm and got involved in spite of myself. I need to think about this one some more.

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Interesting, but depressing. A 9/11 survivor goes back to his ex-wife -- he walks from the falling towers to her apartment building. The story was hard to follow, characters weren't always identified as to who was speaking.

Where were you when 9-11 happened? What if you were in New York City, near the Twin Towers? In the moment the the planes hit, or the towers fell, did you know what was happening, or why, or by or to whom? Probably it was chaos—and that’s exactly the feeling you get when you read Falling Man.

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Delillo is considered a master writer and has the credentials to back that up (National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last 25 years by NYTBR). The reason you may not keep track of who the characters are or what they’re doing is that DeLillo doesn’t really want you to. The Falling Man of the novel is a performance artist in New York who dangles, suspended in the air. Yet he could be anyone, including Keith—who walks away from the Twin Towers after they fall, his estranged wife Lianne, who struggles to understand the new version of Keith who walks back into her life, or their young son Justin, who with his friends continuously scan the skies waiting for more planes to arrive. DeLillo’s skill as a writer keeps you off balance, unsure, and struggling to find reason. You might come away with more questions than answers, but ultimately you know something of profound importance has just occurred.

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I was intrigued by this post 9/11 story. It is such a unique take on the subject. The prose are very sparse and the images are very real. This is my first book by DeLillo and I don't think it will be my last. The characters are not all that likeable, but the are well written, interesting

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characters. It is a short book to listen to, but worth the time.

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9/11 is just there in the background, and the "falling man" in the title is not the "falling man" we would all think of. Setting off on that wrong foot, and then finding that the book is in fact a very unclear and very uninteresting story, I could be nothing but very disappointed.

Wow. Now THIS is a book. It is terse, yet expansive. Beautiful, but not annoyingly lyrical. Rich and restrained. Don't be turned off that it is about 9/11 (as I was) it overcomes even its own subject matter. Divine.

Writing is pretentious at best and megalomaniacal in the worst places. I say this in complete disregard to the plot of the story, which I found interesting and promising. DeLillo is clearly a technically skilled writer, but he abuses the craft without earning it in it "Falling Man". The dialog is

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unrealistic. People just do not converse this way. In addition, the thoughts of each character are impossibly grand at each moment. Even during times of crisis I find it hard that people would become this poetic philosophical or have an almost omniscient understanding of their thoughts and feelings. If the pretentiousness could be scraped out of the book it may make for a good read. As it stands it feels like engorging oneself on a dozen rich brownies. As a result I found no reason to finish the book.

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The story of a family who survives the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 and how their lives change as a result. Another briefer plot thread follows one of the terrorists as he becomes indoctrinated in radical Islam and comes to the U.S. to flight school. I think this book really captures the

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feeling of 9/11--the confusion and helplessness we all felt.

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This was a quick read, but also hard to read in places. Falling Man by Don DeLillo follows a survivor of 9/11. It begins with Keith walking away from the World Trade Center covered in ash and blood. In the aftermath of the disaster, he moves back in with his wife and son, whom he had been separated

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from at the time of the attack.

There are parts of the book, when the characters are recounting their experiences of the day, trying to get out of the tower, that are downright haunting. Some were very difficult to read, so overly detailed in places so that I felt like I was there. The book left me with a bit of a heavy heart, though being a book about 9/11, it wasn't as thought I was expecting a feel-good read.

I just finished the book a few minutes ago, and I'm not sure yet if I liked the book as a whole. It could be that I still need to absorb it, let it sink in or whatnot, but I'm on the fence. I liked parts and I hated parts.

The book is narrated in the third person and follows several people. Sometimes the transition from one character to the next was so abrupt that I found myself getting confused as to who it was referring to. One minute we're with Keith, then a few paragraphs later we're with his wife or someone else, often with little warning. It would take me a few lines to realize we were suddenly in a different place or time.

The dialog was also bit awkward in places and almost hard to follow, everyone seemed to speak abruptly and only one sentence at a time. Though these are characters in turmoil and Lord knows I wouldn't be too chatty if I went through something like that. It's just that most of the conversations seemed like they were on a bad first date; question, quick answer, one line comment, rinse and repeat. People just don't talk like that on a normal basis.

What I did like about the book was that these were real people trying to make sense of the tragedy and dealing with the aftermath. Keith's young son begins watching the skies for more planes, his wife, Lianne, lashes out at a middle eastern neighbor and doesn't seem to understand why. These are not heroes such as a firefighter or policeman. These are just normal and flawed people adjusting to life 'after the planes', as they put it.

In the end, I think I liked the overall story behind the book but had a problem with the execution of that story. The rapidly changing POV's tended to pull me out of the story as I had to reread passages to figure out what was going on. I do think I would still recommend it to other though. The good far outweighed the bad in my eyes. Just be prepared for a few gut-wrenching moments.

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Wow, I really struggled to get through this. I do think this is one of the most unremarkable books I've read in a long time, and I suspect I'll forget all about it within a few hours of finishing. I feel guilty saying that about a 9/11-themed book, but there you go. Having not read DeLillo before,

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I wasn't sure what to expect, but I'd added this to my wishlist some time ago based on a good review I'd read. I would hope this is not one of his best. The plot was so disjointed -- jumping around in time, changing perspective constantly, and just really not resonating with me at all in the whole. There were some well-written lines & phrases, but the story itself was so dull & confusing, I just bided my time until it was finished. I listened to this on audio, and I think that the transitions between viewpoints were harder to follow because of this. In the dialogue sections, I had an extremely difficult time telling who was saying what. And the ending was so abrupt that I thought for sure my audio cut off unexpectedly. Based on this book, I don't think I'll run out & read another book by this author.

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For myself, this novel of DeLillo's was hard to place. My favorites among his many have been The Names, Underworld, White Noise, End Zone and Great Jones Street. This, however, is so different. It is hard to say that the scope isn't grand in the way that the scope in Underworld was - after all the

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attack on 9/11 on the World Trade Center is at the heart of this novel - yet there is something so intimate, so personal in this narrative as to defy the grander scale. It is as if DeLillo were saying that the tower's fall was personal. Given his relationship to New York City I would not doubt this one bit. One of the most amazing parts of the novel is towards the end when he begins describing the emotions of one of the hijackers on the plane about to hit the towers and segues seamlessly into the thoughts of Frank, the main character, as he is in his office in the tower that is first hit. DeLillo remains to my mind one of the most important American writers of the last 50 years.

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