"Falling Man" has the distinction of being one of those books that pulled a great tug emotionally while I never really understood what was going on most of the time.

The characters are fragmented because their lives are fragmented. Their lives are presented as shards because the book opens with the twin tower attacks. It's hard to unravel and probably even harder to take if you were directly affected by the attacks. I was vacationing in Manhattan for the first time while reading this book and it was remarkably easy to place myself on the same paths of the characters I was reading.

To be technical, this is the first DeLillo novel I've read. I started "White Noise," twice, and couldn't get through. I got so frustrated with the brainiac narrative that I just have to shelve it. Twice! But "Falling Man" felt too somber and sincere to have any kind of elitist agenda. This had to have been a difficult book to write. It sure was a difficult read for me. But I don't regret it.

Here, Don strikes a chord of how a culminating event can snap one from their semi-homogenized/self-absorbed reverie and lead to an enhanced personal awareness level. Transformations of Keith, Lianne, Justin, and I supppose Hammad, are portrayed with minimal back-story. Although not as disturbing as "Libra", Delillo's characters each hit home in their own unique way.

The title "Falling Man" refers to a performance artist in the novel who appears in various venues around New York City following 9/11. His "art" or "statement" - such as it is - is to hang upside down in a harness he wears underneath a blue business suit: from highway overpasses, train trestles, building cornices, balconies, etc. His "falls" are in full view of commuters, pedestrians, concert goers, etc., he says nothing. He merely hangs upside down, silent, posed the same way, leg bent, arms at his sides, disturbing simply by being. An emblem of those who leaped or fell from the burning World Trade Center towers.

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.

When I picked up this book and I was instantly reminded of the eerie cover photo for the (much better) book Underworld, with the two trade centers surrounded by clouds and I believe Trinity Church (been there only once)with its cross dissecting the two predicting the omen that was to become 9/11.

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.

In Falling Man DeLillo takes the big (let's be honest, enormous) event of September Eleventh and magnifies it through the eyes of a single family, Keith, Lianne and their son Justin.

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.

Based on the subject matter, I was ready for a great read... but, left with such disappointment. My book club of 5 read this book and we all felt the same... Many times, we didn't know who or what the author was talking about. The writing jumps from one character situation to the next and I expected it all to come together and make sense at the end, but it didn't.

This isn't exacly what I thought it would be. It is a good read. Book arrived in great condition

Falling Man is a return for Delillo to a style of writing that's both abstract and sparse that his last two works seemed to lack. Of his other novels, to me this was the closest to reading my favorite of his works, White Noise, in style. Delillo doesn't waste time with the trivialities of conversations and instead gives the meat leaving the reader to fill in the rest. Characters are roughly laid out, situations are vaguely described. In the end interpretation is left up in the air. Don't pick up this novel if you're looking for a blow by blow description of 9/11 or are looking for some deep insight as to why and what happened. This is a story of life, of lives that are effected and affected. A wonderful book.

In the past, however gratuitous or disagreeable the political opinions with which Don Delillo's novels were larded, the clarity and sinew of his prose always had to be acknowledged and respected. At his most confident and accomplished, DeLillo can write. But Sept. 11 seems to have paralyzed him stylistically. The prose here often reads as if it were an entry in the annual Bad Hemingway competition, or perhaps a parody of Joan Didion at her most strained and breathy:
" 'What's next? Don't you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.'
" 'Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what's next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there's no reason to be afraid. Too late now.'
"Lianne stood by the window.
" 'But when the towers fell.'
" 'I know.'
" 'When this happened.'
" 'I know.'
" 'I thought he was dead.'
" 'So did I,' Nina said. 'So many watching.'
" 'Thinking he's dead, she's dead.'
" 'I know.'
" 'Watching those buildings fall.'
" 'First one, then the other. I know,'
her mother said."
Precisely what DeLillo means this gibberish to signify is a complete mystery. Near-speechlessness in the face of incomprehensible calamity? Profundity so deep that only monosyllables can express it? Who knows? What is certain, though, is that people simply don't talk that way. Obviously, a writer of fiction is free to have his characters talk in any old way he likes, but if they end up babbling like caricatures, they forfeit all claim on the reader's credulity. If this were satire, it might work, but it isn't. It's the exact opposite: DeLillo is dead serious, solemn to the max.
Okay. The "he" to whom Lianne and her mother refer is Keith Neudecker. He is in his late 30s, and he was in the first tower when it was struck. He managed to get out and to stumble to Lianne's apartment on the Upper West Side. They had been separated for months, but instinct guided him back to her and their young son, Justin. Keith was injured (a torn cartilage in his left arm) and dazed, but sentient. He wanted human contact and so did she, and now that's what they have.
He also has a briefcase, "smaller than normal and reddish brown with brass hardware." He took it away from the World Trade Center, but it isn't his. Among the items inside are a "wallet with money, credit cards and a driver's license." He gets the owner's number and calls her, so he can return everything. Her name is Florence Givens. She is "a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side." They start to talk, and they like each other. Later he returns to her apartment:
"There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn't know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he'd lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they'd shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women."
Of course they end up in bed together -- from the minute Keith first walks through Florence's door, the reader knows they're going to end up in bed -- because, naturally, human contact is needed here, too. Their affair doesn't last long, and it ends with regret and mutual respect, but it's meant to be the connection Keith makes with what happened in the tower, a connection that Lianne cannot give him for the obvious reason that she wasn't there.
At one point in Falling Man, DeLillo writes: "They were still talking ten minutes later when Lianne left the room. She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in the mirror." Well, unfortunately most moments in this novel seem false to me. None of the characters ever emerges from cardboard wrapping, and none of the emotions DeLillo tries to arouse feels earned. He's letting the shock of Sept. 11 do his work for him, supplying the passions that his own surprisingly limp and lifeless prose cannot.
Apart from the three members of Keith's little family and Florence, there are a few other characters: Lianne's mother, Nina, and Nina's lover, Martin, a mysterious European who supplies the hint of darker things without which a DeLillo novel would not be a DeLillo novel; the men with whom Keith played poker in his bachelor apartment before the towers fell; playmates of Justin's with whom the boy speculates about a man called Bill Lawton, i.e., Bin Laden; older men and women, teetering toward Alzheimer's, who participate in "storyline sessions" that Lianne monitors; and a performance artist known as Falling Man. Lianne sees him near Grand Central Station:
"A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible. . . . He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. . . . Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body's last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we'd not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all."
Sorry, but that doesn't work. Once again, DeLillo is merely piggybacking on Sept. 11, counting on those vivid images cemented in our memories to give this novel the force he's unable to instill in it himself. In the past, DeLillo has been a notably chilly writer, clinical rather than compassionate toward his characters, more interested in what he wants them to stand for than who they are. Here he's obviously trying to invest them with more human qualities, and he gets points for the effort, but he can't pull it off. The only emotions in this novel come from outside, from pictures on television, and that's not good enough.
Presumably this won't bother DeLillo's many admirers, and perhaps they will be able to find virtues in Falling Man that have eluded me. Fine. But this novel never pulls the reader in, never engages the reader with the minds, hearts and lives of its characters, never manages to be what readers most want from fiction: a story with which they can connect. "Learn something from the event," Martin tells Lianne, and that's not bad advice. But there's nothing to be learned from Falling Man about September 2001 -- or about anything else -- that you don't already know.

generally I have liked his work, however I found this novel very disconnected, it was impossible for me to care about the characters much. I am a lit junkie, I read a lot. I was disappointed.

I am afraid I would have to disagree with the majority of reviewers. This book is poorly written. Dialogue is either predictable or close to being meaningless. Characters are absolute clichés. They have no life characteristics other than external veneer invented by the author for the purposes of his narrative. In other words the characters are one-dimensional. There are a group of boring people in a poorly written story. It is laughable to even suggest that this is some kind of a collective portrait of an American society post 9/11. Great writers take a local story and after finding a general human element in it elevate it to the level of larger Humanity. DeLillo took great tragedy of 9/11 and made a local, boring story out of it. If DeLillo would be the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" his version would be a local story about a poor family in a Columbian village......

DeLillo is to be commended for being the first of the major modern novelists to tackle 9/11. He does an admirable job of portraying the chaos of the events and their traumatic and hollowing effect on survivors and on Americans generally.

He jumps around in time, which is probably the appropriate device to convey the confusion and overwhelming nature of these events. His description of the scene inside the tower is done with remarkable economy and force. These are the best written passages of the novel. The ending scene of the shirt fluttering to ground has the ring of James Joyce's falling snow at the end of "The Dead" and is quite moving.

On the other hand: this guy can't write dialogue. His dialogue is neither compelling nor even believable. It's painful to read such good writing juxtaposed with such awful dialogue.

Character development (another fairly important part of novel writing) is also lacking. And some plot devices -- like Keith's affair with Florence -- seem totally contrived. I don't think two people would have an affair under those circumstances. I can see two survivors of the Towers having a very strong bond. But the sex seems gratuitous. It's as if you can see DeLillo thinking, "Hmmm, what happens next?... I know, let's have them f**k."

I continue to be disappointed with DeLillo as a writer. He's certainly a literary force to be reckoned with, but his flaws are too great to ignore.

I think the success of a novel like Falling Man hinges on the degree to which the author's characters engage the reader. As much as I appreciate the quality of DeLillo's writing, I can't say that these characters ever got into my head, ever got under my skin. I didn't think about them between readings while I read the novel, and now, having finished Falling Man almost a week ago, I can't say that I've thought much about it since.

The novel's weakness is inherent to the story. The characters, while realistic, have limited emotional range. They are disoriented and disconnected as a result of 9/11 and subsequently, this is reflected in the novel. Presumably this is the point, but the result is Falling Man didn't make much of an impression on me.

Falling Man is beautifully written and raises some provocative questions about faith and our place in the world post 9/11 but it also feels empty and in the end, not completely satisfying.

A careful, surreal, and gentle novel about the 9/11 event and its aftermath. Somehow DeLillo manages to simultaneously capture the immediacy, the chaos of 9/11 and still offer a subtle and humane assessment of America's collective actions since then (our disastrous war, our resurgent racisms). This is an accomplishment. But you can read other books for that.

Ultimately, "Falling Man" is a novel of a nation's collective grief. It is fitting that DeLillo - the last of the great Modernists - should weigh in on the traumatic beginning of the 21st Century with a book like this: balanced politically, devoid of conspiracy, and relentlessly sad. DeLillo has written a book for posterity here, an emotional chronicle. We will read it 50 years from now (along with "Underworld", to which "Falling Man" is the true sequel), as we wonder how our triumphant Idealistic Century came to an end, yielding finally to the (so-far) nihilistic 21st

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 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.

what was this author thinking? i have no clue! this much acclaimed book left me not feeling anything , in fact i did not finish it.
i love a good way out there book but this was too far out. maybe that was the idea,but it missed me by a mile. i never knew who he was talking about with his use of pronouns and not names. life is too short to read such a convoluted book! it did not even make my 100 page limit!

I love good writing, but I don't get DeLillo's writing style. Too many holes, too much symbolism, and not enough character development. I had great hopes that this novel would cover the ground that my friends in New York City (who witnessed 9/11) don't want to talk about.

None of that is here. What a waste of money.

Set in a post-9/11 world, Falling Man, Don DeLillo's most recent novel (May 2007), attempts to grapple with the social, interpersonal, psychological and, at times, spiritual impact of the destruction of Twin Towers. This impact is etched into the life of fictional Manhattan survivor, Kevin Neudeckor, and his family.

The themes, characters, structure, and plot of Falling Man raise many questions without providing all the answers. The reader is immediately thrust into a world "of falling ash and near night," and abandoned in anticipation to find his/her way through the achronological sequence of events that follow. Along the way we encounter a suit and tie performance artist who jumps from great heights while attached to a hidden safety harness, whose purpose is never made crystal clear. What would compel a man to do such a thing? This character is, of course, snatched from the controversial photo taken during 9/11 of a man free falling in front of the Two Towers (right).

Despite the disjointed, post-modern structure of the novel, its content is decidedly existential. We are given an embarrassingly privileged and gripping insight into how some people have and must still struggle with the force of this tragedy. As a result of reading this book, I already possess a greater empathy for the 9/11 survivors and victims' families.

The book moves beyond sentiment and compassion to wrestle with the connected and deeply philosophical, theological questions of epistemology, reason for being, etc. Some quotes...

"Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be."

"God used to be an urban Jew. He's back in the desert now."

"God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That's why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing. God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be."

"Twenty years. Eating and sleeping together. You don't know? Did you ask him? Did you press him?"

"They talked a minute longer, then went to their designated tables without making plans to meet later. The idea of later was elusive."

Falling Man has been criticized for being a "frustratingly disjointed novel" and praised as "pages of magnificent force and control." It would be best to read it and decide for yourself. But beware, if imperfect endings and unresolved conflicts bother you, this is not the book for you (or perhaps it is just what you need).

FALLING MAN starts well and then seems (note the use of seems, as opposed to does) to drift and suffer from a lack of purpose. Then you read the last ten pages and everything falls together like the last movement of a symphony in which themes developed over time are restated and developed in a magnificent conclusion.

The story concerns a lawyer who gets out of the World Trade Center alive and the way that his life goes off track. He becomes distant to other people. He gives up his law practice to become a professional poker player.

And it seems as if the author is indulging his whims and just trying to be More Post-Modern than Thou. But this is not the case.

Revelations at the end of the story put things in perspective. A book that had a 2 star rating at 9:45 last night had a 5 star rating fifteen minutes later.

By way of confession here I'll admit that I've read every novel relating to 9-11 that I could get my hands on, both those that deal with it directly (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel) and indirectly (Saturday). Maybe I'm obsessed with the topic. Good question.

Read FALLING MAN and find out for yourself if I'm right or wrong about it

For better or for worse, a literary cottage industry has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. This still recent horrific event - which ought to endure within the American psyche for decades, if not centuries - has become either the subject of several critically acclaimed novels, or a firmly entrenched background to the tales being spun by such gifted writers from Jonathan Safran Foer to William Gibson. Now one of the truly great writers of American fiction, Don DeLillo, has chimed in with "Falling Man"; a novel that is remarkable not only for its relative brevity, but also for delving deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers who witnessed the World Trade Center terrorist attack and are still coping with their psychological trauma years later. Quoting from its dust-jacket blurb, "Falling Man" is indeed a work of fiction that is "cathartic, beautiful and heartbreaking". Without question, it also demonstrates that DeLillo is still a worthy literary artist at the height of his creative powers; a keen observer of human nature in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. His latest novel also proves that DeLillo is an elegant storyteller delving into the lives of ordinary people who remain mentally imprisoned by the searing images and painful memories of that fateful, tragic clear blue September morning not so long ago. Without question, for these very reasons, "Falling Man" is one of the most impressive novels published this year.

DeLillo deftly weaves the narratives of three members of a rather unremarkable New York City family, whose lives remain touched forever by what they witnessed on 9/11/01; a dysfunctional American family which was tearing itself apart at the seams long before that September morning. We meet Keith as he stumbles through the grayish ash blizzard of building debris and human remains, soon after the collapse of the first World Trade Center building to fall, his face splattered by glass fragments and blood, pressing northward on foot towards Canal Street. Years later his estranged wife Lianne remains in a psychotherapy support group, reliving the grim memories of that day, recalling Keith's unexpected arrival at the Upper East Side apartment of herself and their young son Justin, whose hobby is to stare out of apartment windows, searching the skies with a pair of binoculars for more airplanes crashing into tall buildings like the World Trade Center towers. But is it really a hobby, or rather a phobia, brought on by witnessing the terrorist attacks from the window of a young friend's apartment not far from the World Trade Center? DeLillo's literary ambitions are so vast, that he takes us to an Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camp, and to Germany, allowing his audience to reside inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, right up to the final fateful moments of the terrorist's life. But this is an excursion that deflects from, not enhances, the powerful narratives he's created for his three main protagonists, and one that remains a rather facile effort in trying to explain the psychological motivation of one of the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers. It is also an effort that makes this figure sympathetic to the reader, as if his blind adherence to Islamofascism is one worthy of pithy; an effort that others, most notably John Updike, have handled far better.

This book was like reading a loosely put together collection of stories of how 9/11 affected a husband, his estranged wife, their child (the kid), and others. The characters are hard to connect with and even harder to keep straight. DeLillo jumps from charcter to character with the ease of a jackhammer and the charcters are not at all interesting. Even the eventual story of the main character's escape from the Twin Towers was anticlimatic. All in all this is a book that tries, and fails miserably, at capturing our thoughts about that fateful day and the reactions we had to it. I found myself struggling to finish this book and would not recommend it to anyone.

If you read any mainstream reviews about this book you got the distinct impression that it was sort of a dud. I could not disagree more.

I often struggle with what I call "period fiction," in which the author tries to encapsulate the feelings/mood of a perticular period/event through fiction. However, this book had me in its first pages. DeLillo does a terrific job of conveying the sort of numb anger that many of us felt along with the "now what" questions that we were left asking.

This is one of those books that you may read and enjoy but I did not truly appreciate how good it was until a few days after I had finished it and allowed my brain to process what I had just read. It was then that I began to think that this was one of the best books I had picked up in a long time.

For me, this book is a must read for anyone but especially if you are in that 18-34 age group, for which 9/11 is likely to be one of the major events of our lives. I suspect this is how many children of the Cold War felt when they read "Underworld." Kudos to Delillo for doing such a great job at capturing the emotion of such an event.

FALLING MAN is an unorthodox yet compelling novel of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath. DeLillo tells the story primarily through the eyes of protagonist Keith, a survivor who walked out of the World Trade Center that fateful morning with minimal injuries but sizable emotional scars. Plot lines follow his strained relationship with his estranged wife, a dalliance with another World Trade Center survivor whose briefcase he retrieves and a growing obsession with poker.

Parallel to this is a depiction of the Islamic "martyrs" who eventually hijacked the planes on their way to presumed Paradise. A recurring motif is a performance artist known as "Falling Man," who at random points throughout New York City pantomimes falls from buildings and structures as the essence of his "art."

If it sounds strange, it is, but oddly compelling nonetheless. The characters' dialogue is odd but weirdly believable.

On this sixth anniversary of 9/11, FALLING MAN prompts us to think of what meaning we invest in that experience. Perhaps there will be many more novels to come about that fateful Tuesday, but DeLillo has staked a claim for now to THE definitive 9/11 story.

An emotional, breathtaking work that captures 9/11 and it's aftermath superbly. In Delillo's masterful style there is amazing insight into what it was truly like for those who survived the nightmare. It also addresses the lack of emotional connection between people before the tragedy and how the human heart both fears and needs closeness with others. Simply a masterpiece. Delillo is one of our greatest living novelists.

It's been three days since I finished Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man: A Novel. I'm not sure if I liked it or loved it. As it is about 9/11, I feel guilty if I say I only "like" it. DeLillo's is the first true piece of "literature" I've read-with the event acting as a character, a setting, and a backdrop.

The story opens with Keith walking out of the smoke cloud from a falling tower. He was covered in ash, wearing his suit jacket and tie and carrying a briefcase, bits of glass were stuck in his face and hair. Instead of going to a hospital, he got into a stranger's truck and went to his estranged wife's apartment; the same apartment he shared with Lianne and their young son, Justin. They walk to a hospital where Keith has the glass shards removed.

The story that unfolds depicts the uncertainty that New Yorkers must have felt in those days after the planes. Keith is ambling around the house, Lianne is not sure what do think or do about Keith's return. Justin and two friends watch the Manhattan skyline with his binoculars-waiting and watching for "Bill Lawton." It took DeLillo explaining to me that Bill Lawton was what the kids heard as bin Laden.

The story develops gradually. The days will pass and Lianne begins to think of each episode as "three days after the planes," "five days after the planes," and so on, in a non-random order ending with approximately "thirty-six days after the planes." Then the story flashes forwards to 2003, and we see what has become of Keith and Lianne-how they've coped, or not. DeLillo does not allow the novel's narrator to recall how Keith escaped and what he saw until the end of the novel, which makes it all the more unsettling as it brings back that day in all its horrific detail.

And set against all of this, is a performance artist known as Falling Man. He appears without warning and in a variety of places, depicting that image of the man in the white shirt falling/jumping from the tower, his white shirt billowing behind him.

In these days leading up to the sixth anniversary 9/11, Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man: A Novel will bring back that day in a way and with an intimacy that no news show can convey.

Armchair Interviews says: From the title on, this book is very moving.

It's been three days since I finished Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man: A Novel. I'm not sure if I liked it or loved it. As it is about 9/11, I feel guilty if I say I only "like" it. DeLillo's is the first true piece of "literature" I've read-with the event acting as a character, a setting, and a backdrop.

The story opens with Keith walking out of the smoke cloud from a falling tower. He was covered in ash, wearing his suit jacket and tie and carrying a briefcase, bits of glass were stuck in his face and hair. Instead of going to a hospital, he got into a stranger's truck and went to his estranged wife's apartment; the same apartment he shared with Lianne and their young son, Justin. They walk to a hospital where Keith has the glass shards removed.

The story that unfolds depicts the uncertainty that New Yorkers must have felt in those days after the planes. Keith is ambling around the house, Lianne is not sure what do think or do about Keith's return. Justin and two friends watch the Manhattan skyline with his binoculars-waiting and watching for "Bill Lawton." It took DeLillo explaining to me that Bill Lawton was what the kids heard as bin Laden.

The story develops gradually. The days will pass and Lianne begins to think of each episode as "three days after the planes," "five days after the planes," and so on, in a non-random order ending with approximately "thirty-six days after the planes." Then the story flashes forwards to 2003, and we see what has become of Keith and Lianne-how they've coped, or not. DeLillo does not allow the novel's narrator to recall how Keith escaped and what he saw until the end of the novel, which makes it all the more unsettling as it brings back that day in all its horrific detail.

And set against all of this, is a performance artist known as Falling Man. He appears without warning and in a variety of places, depicting that image of the man in the white shirt falling/jumping from the tower, his white shirt billowing behind him.

In these days leading up to the sixth anniversary 9/11, Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man: A Novel will bring back that day in a way and with an intimacy that no news show can convey.

Armchair Interviews says: From the title on, this book is very moving.

Don DeLillo prepared many of us to cope with 9/11 long before the new century began. In this novel he directly tackles the aftermath of the tragedy by focusing on just a few survivors, and he succeeds in tapping the spirit of the age beyond any of his literary competitors. Keith, the novel's protagonist, is best seen at an angle - he never seems to stand still long enough for close examination. I didn't much like him, but from his attraction to gambling made so much emotional sense in a dead, dulled way, that I responded to him, especially because there's no way to reach out and save him. The misunderstandings and scarred emotional readjustments of the children in the novel were rendered with more power in DeLillo's shorthand account than in all of Foer's Extremely Loud. The passive way in which Keith's wife accepts him back into her life and faces changes in her mother's life felt familiar and deeply sad. Most characters move through Falling Man in a daze; they were in a daze before "everything changed," but the tragedy helps us see it more clearly. Reading this novel left me feeling powerless and enervated, but also wiser and more capable of seeing into the deadened eyes of the people around me. In the end, the first thing I think of when I look at the book's cover is the performance artist whose act provides the title. The rage that drives him to keep performing his outrageous statement burn through the clouds of smoke, confusion, and pride to spotlight the horror embodied in the falling towers. DeLillo, as usual, regards everyone with equal parts scorn and pity. Lost, we go on. I don't suggest reading this book to get your head around contemporary politics or to finally come to terms with anything. One suffers Falling Man, braced by the a dark vision of the way things really are, strengthened only in the tragic sense of being a little more prepared to face the worst. But that's why we turn to art in the first place.

I read Falling Man after my co-worker and dear friend had finished reading it. Together, like so many other Americans we had our eyes and attention glued to the TV (in our case it was located in the employee lounge) that horrible day on Sept. 11th. So, when this book was released that used 9/11 as a backdrop I could hardly wait till she passed the book on to me. In my opinion, I thought Don Delillo created an excellent story that gave me an insight into the lives of different people that lived through that terrible day; Keith Neudecker, the lawyer, his wife Lianne, and others, and how they struggled to cope with their lives afterward. The story moved along at a good pace and by the mid point I found myself reading page after page. Overall, I'm not sure what story would be a great read where the main theme is 9/11, but this book would rank right up there. I would gladly recommend this book to anyone.

Another human drama book that takes the reader into the lives of an excellent cast of characters is Gathering of Cans by Robert L. Saunders. I was absolutely amazed by this author's thoughtful plot and colorful storytelling abilities. I was turning pages all the way to the end. Alone, Zoie Baker, 55, gathers aluminum cans along dusty roads, because she wants to build a swimming pool for the local children. She stumbles on special cans, i.e, Nehi, Coke, Mountain Dew, etc., and each can takes the reader on a thrilling journey into the life of Zoie. From World War II, up to the 1980's. A terrific book. Don't miss this one you won't be disappointed. Bye.

Not really liking this book. I had to put it aside and will try at a later time to read.

It took a Vietnam War for the "Vietnam War genre" of novels to develop. This was my first novel in the post Twin Towers destruction era.

The focus here was on psychological torment. And yes, the victims here were the survivors, not those killed (they were victims of another kind... ones who didn't suffer beyond the moment). The main character barely escaped, and was not the same afterward. His family was affected, and he affected others as well. A terrorist was also affected, but his inclusion in the story made less sense to me.

I suspect this is the beginning of a literary theme we will see more of. I'll compare future readings with this one.

The main character of Falling Man survives the collapse of the towers, reconnects with his estranged wife, and embarks on a brief relationship with the owner of a briefcase he inexplicably retrieves from the scene. His wife contemplates: her father's death, her mother's lover, the lover's wife and her own life. Their son, often referred to by his parents as "the kid," searches the skies with his friends for "Bill Lawton," the bad guy behind the buildings' collapse. Additionally, there is talk of the intriguingly grotesque "organic shrapnel," (bits of exploded human flesh), a subplot about a performing artist named Falling Man, and a bit about one of the terrorist pilots. With thousands of true stories about victims of 9/11, an historical fiction-like story about it, especially an utterly boring one, is superfluous: Falling Man falls flat. Fortunately, 102 Minutes by by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn is a five star read.

Forgive me, but that was my first reaction to this book. The structure was just off-putting. All right, it's not completely random. There are three principal characters -- lawyer Keith Neudecker, his wife Lianne Glenn, and one of the September 11th hijackers -- from whose perspectives the story is told. While the hijacker is not the most sympathetic of the three, he is in an odd way more compelling because we know how his story will end and have a better handle on what motivates him. In fact, his story ultimately ends at the same time the story of Keith begins -- at the end of the novel. This narrative device might encourage us to believe that Keith has blocked out what happened to him in the north tower, but I don't believe that's the case.

Lianne seems motivated primarily by rage and pain, particularly in the scene where she attacks a neighbor for continuously playing vaguely Middle Eastern music. Keith seems so detached from everything, you wonder if he's human. He has his share of rage, which he lets out about halfway through the book on someone he thought was talking about his mistress, Florence Givens. But I really had no clue what motivated him.

These two characters are so utterly adrift that it's hard to believe their lives before September 11 made much sense. Their marriage was falling apart; in the book's third act, they salvage it, but at the price of seeing each other just a few days every month, as Keith gives up the law in order to become a full-time poker player traveling to tournaments around the world. Lianne imagines Keith having sex with prostitutes while on these trips. Perhaps the scarier reality is that Keith seems to have no need for sex by this time during his long absences from Lianne.

Perhaps this is too Hollywood of me, but I was hoping for just one scene where the characters break down and console one another, apologize to and forgive each other, admit they love each other, or something that would indicate that they are on some sort of path to healing. In Lianne's very last scene, we are informed that she was now ready to go back to "the way things were" before the attack, which may mean she is going to leave Keith again, but probably doesn't.

I did not care for this novel. It was very difficult to follow and seemed very disjointed.

Though Don DeLillo, the author of more than two dozen novels, is a gifted story teller, highly lauded, the laurels upon which he rests, nor the high praise from big house critics blinded to or generously dismissive of the transparency of the emperor's new suit cannot hide the simple truth that Falling Man is a dud.

That Delillo would explore the pyschological after-effects of 911 is indeed praise-worthy, but the self-consciousness of the writing, stylization that does nothing but draw attention to itself, made this a tedious read. I labored through these 246 pages for nearly a month.

The promising opening--a businessman, father, and estranged husband, covered in dust and blood meandering through the blighted streets of Manhattan minutes after the annihilation of the twin towers--is seriously crippled by episode after episode of psychological forensics. Most of the main characters are corpses; bloodless, heart-challenged, impervious to the pain of what has changed their lives forever.

The businessman Keith, passive as a wet noodle, responds to the tragedy by going from amateur poker nights with the boys to pro games in Vegas. His estrange wife still remains estranged while their son, who too-cutely refers to Bin Laden as Bill Lawton, is 'reported on' as using binoculars to search for more planes that might attack. Keith's mother-in-law reacts to the whole thing by dumping her bigoted German lover.

What is so distressing about Falling Man is that we are constantly told what these people do, yet we are given narry a clue as to why they do what they do; what their feelings are, what is ticking beneath those cold and numbed exteriors.

That the most humanistic, sympathetic, and fulling realized character in the book is one of the highjackers, giving me one of the few emotional jolts in an otherwise dead bolt battery, is most disturbing.

I must say that the last chapter is absolutely compelling. It's as if DeLillo woke up from a long sleep and became himself again. I am certainly not one to tell such an esteemed write how to structure his book, but if he would have opened it with the last chapter and let that dynamic dictate his story, a different and more deeply felt reader experience would have manifested itself.

But, alas, it is what it is. Yes, I read all the great reviews in the 'esteem press' and I ordered it immediately. No wonder they're losing their clout. It is becoming more and more evident each day that they're losing their game.

There is an under story in Dellilo's book that's easy to miss. I thought about the book for weeks after I read it. Something was wrong and I didn't know what.

I went back through it and I got it. It hit and it hit hard. For you who understood it first read, I'm impressed. For the rest, read it again. make a timeline. List the characters. I'm going to read it again slowly and do that. I want to see how Dellilo did what he did.

As someone in one or these reviews said, Don Dellilo is not an easy read. But he is an amazing author. I haven't read all his books, a mistake I intend to correct.

I'm a great Don DeLillo fan. I think White Noise, Libra, Mao, and especially Underworld are among the great novels of our time. His last three though fall far short of his best. The device of the performance artist "falling man" showing up from time to time through these pages just doesn't work for me and I can't get much interested in either of the main characters, who are bonded by their common experience on 9/11. Credit DeLillo as always for taking on the big themes, but a great post 9/11 novel has yet to be written.

While I know it will never happen, I think books such as this one, written about 9/11, along with all the pointless political tomes, should be ignored by publishers. Really, what do they propose to accomplish? "Falling Man" is just another in a series of worthless reads about all that has been going wrong in the United States since 9/11. We, as Americans, need to figure it out for ourselves, not by listening to all the blowhard pundits and authors who think that stream-of-consciousness novels will shed some light on the situation. Almost 6 years later, we're still baffled, and Don DeLillo did nothing to enlighten us.

I have never been able to get into a book by Don Delillo. There, I've said it. I've tried every novel and for some reason or other his writing just doesn't click for me. I don't need "traditional" text; I adore Henry James, Faulkner; love Cormac McCarthy and Michael Chabon, Virginia Woolf and contemporary writers in general. However, reviewer Mary Lins of Houston, Texas, nailed it on the head for me. I find his writing pretentious. Every word seems parsed...self-conscious. I don't like to have to be too aware of the writer in the writing. One scene in particular stands out: when Martin is talking about little Justin's portrait of Nina. She says that he always makes the faces white - that the paper is actually the painting. Martin says, "Does he have a white crayon?" That rang false, because Martin is a highbrow art dealer. No one steeped in fne art would say that. They would know that Nina was talking about the paper, in fact, she said as much. As a painter (and writer) myself, it seemed like another one of those awkward Delillo moments when he's "contriving" his story, rather than just letting go and writing naturally, from his gut, rather than his head. Yeah, I guess that's it. I don't care for writing that seems too cerebral. Sometimes it feels like intellectual twaddle, and there are many moments I would call "speechifying." I mean, people just don't talk this way. And this book - about a subject that is so close to our hearts - well, it just seemed like he went through mental torture to turn it out, and frankly, I feel that if a writer can't have a modicum of remove from a terrifying subject, it's just going to be a pain in the butt to endure. Still, I admire his creative effort. He's not a bad writer - just a tiresome one, at least for me. Chacun a son gout.

Don DeLillo is not an "easy" author but he is a smart one. He didn't set out to write the definitive take on that tragic day nearly six years ago...he wrote about the intimate effects it had on the lives of one family. Leave the splashy, soppy histrionics re: the day the Towers fell to the likes of Oliver Stone. Mr. DeLillo has condensed his narrative to the bare minimum. This book has nothing of the epic scale of UNDERWORLD, his best novel and, as noted by the NEW YORK TIMES, one of the best novels of the past 25 years. This is not a big narrative but a small-scale one and it is Mr. DeLillo's most human, most readable effort to date. He is, along with Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, the best of the best of American novelists and his books consistently challenge readers with their intelligence and grace.

"Falling Man" is a novel which investigates how a person might react days and weeks after being a central participant of 9/11. It is told from the perspective of a man who was in one of the towers, his family's reaction to him and how a child might no longer feel safe. The author also tried to let us know how one of the terrorist might have felt which I felt could have been left out. This book should certainly be read but read but with the understanding that it is only how one family of fictional characters reacted, not how people in general would have reacted. The writer has already proven himself as a creative and prize winning novelist and I am just an average reader. However, I found the book troublesome to follow because I was constantly having to back up to see who was speaking.

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

The novel seems short, but it isn't. DeLillo requires extraordinarily close and careful reading; he packs an enormous amount into every page. The theme is stated at the beginning and then explored relentlessly: how, over the space of days and months, 9/ll altered the lives of those immediately affected by it (the main character was in the first tower to be hit, and most of the other characters are either closely related to him or similarly situated), but also, by implication, the lives of all of us. The lasting result is a descent into personal confusion, which is often reflected in a prose that jerks abruptly from paragraph to paragraph and from section to section. If you are patient, however, you can follow the thread. In the end, I found the book deeply moving even though it remains largely unemotional, almost clinical, on its descriptive surface. There have been a fair number of other novels recently taking on 9/11 themes, but this quiet meditation is, in my opinion, far and away the best.

The biggest virtue of this book is its brevity--only 240 pages. It is rambling, incoherent, and totally unsatisfying. The characters don't make sense, the symbolism is overdone, and the whole book was overwritten.

This book should be thrown away, not clutched as one reviewer. I will grant that the few pages devoted to the scenes in the towers are gripping...the rest of the book and its pathetically dysfunctional characters was an absolute waste of time. I would have much rather read a book about the impact on a family that basically were "normal" and what this kind of things this tragic event could do, rather than read about people who I could quite honestly give a rat's butt about.

Sure as heck, did not need 9/11 to tell this tale.

FALLING MAN is a terrific book to read but a challenge to review. The reason lies with DeLillo's writing style, which is terse but suggestively profound. In FALLING MAN, this style delivers page after page of amazing observations, which are like tiny bursts of insight. These are absolutely true to the narrative moment but somehow incomplete and imply more than they actually say. Early in the novel, DeLillo writes: "Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment." This talent for the suggestive adds a special dimension to DeLillo's writing that is as strong a presence in this novel as any character. For a reviewer, this quality is easy to spot, hard to describe, and impossible to define. Suffice it to say that if you liked the detached ironic style of WHITE NOISE, you'll enjoy FALLING MAN.

The focus of FALLING MAN is the Keith and Lianne Neudecker and their circles of acquaintances and activities. The Neudeckers are separated but not divorced. Keith works in the north tower of the World Trade Center and has a weekly poker game. Lianne lives on the Upper East Side with Justin, the Neudecker's son. She has regular contact with her aging mother Nina and her mother's long-time lover Martin. She also leads a writing group for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Finally, Lianne's father committed suicide years before, after his own Alzheimer's diagnosis. This left Lianne with palpable dread that she too will experience the tragic fading of this disease.

DeLillo begins FALLING MAN with Keith Neudecker escaping from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and returning in a daze to his family. Basically, FALLING MAN examines the effects of this experience on Keith, who has big-time post traumatic stress syndrome and a pre-existing tendency to narrow his life to buddy-like isolation. And, the book examines the influence of 9/11 on Lianne, who mixes the shock of this event with her fixation with Alzheimer's. In the three sections of this novel, DeLillo shows what happens to these characters in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several months later, and in 2004. The novel also gives three snapshot chapters to Hammad, a 9/11 participant and enforcer in Mohammed Atta's plane, and glimpses of Florence, who escaped from the north tower with Keith. Finally, the book shows us The Falling Man. This is a performance artist who repeatedly mimics the horrible defenestration and fall of a white-shirted office worker from the north tower. Keith watched the guy shoot past.

Personally, I feel DeLillo does a fantastic job capturing the reaction to 9/11 and its power to deform and redefine our lives. Also, the final chapter, "In the Hudson Corridor" puts you in the moment, when a focus on an empty water bottle, rolling in an arc in the galley in American Airlines Flight 11 precedes the... "heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall."

DeLillo's terse and suggestive style might make him the perfect novelist for this horrible event, which defies encapsulation despite everything we know about it. READ THIS BOOK.

"Falling Man" is my favorite book for 2007. It grabbed me from the start and kept me totally and competely enthralled throughout. Don DeLillo is such an exquistely fine writer that I felt transported into another realm as I absorbed this masterpiece. He captures emotions following 9/11 that made me feel I had actually been there. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I did not see "United 93," nor did I see "World Trade Center." Too soon for me, I suppose. But when I, too, read the sparkling review given to this book, I thought I'd go ahead and foray into the inevitable fictionalized 9/11 literature and other media that will probably gather more and more momentum. My brother-in-law had also recommended that I read "Underworld," raving about it, and so I figured I had a book review saying that this specific book was great, as well as a person I actually knew telling me that the guy was a great author.

Plainly speaking, I was bored. I didn't find the novel compelling. Adding to the problem, I guess, is I really don't like DeLillo's writing style. To me, it was pronoun-laden, making it quite confusing oftentimes exactly which character he was referring to. Add this to the inexplicable and usually undefined jumps in time and I spent a lot of time wondering exactly what was going on. Never one to quit in the middle of a book unless it's absolutely excruciating, though, I held on to the end, at which point I felt I got a bit of a payoff. The description of the moments after the plane impacted the tower in which Keith was working is most definitely moving.

I was thinking I must be the only one who felt this way about this novel before seeing the other user's reviews, so it's good to see I'm not alone. I thought maybe I just didn't get it.

It's obvious that DeLillo is a good writer, but this one was just didn't hook me. I'll probably still give "Underworld" a chance based on my brother-in-law's recommendation, but I won't be advising anyone to read "Falling Man." It apparently just wasn't for me.

After reading the NY Times review of Falling Man, I couldn't wait to read it. I am a reader and a writer and have very little time to spend reading books that are not going to tell me anything I don't already know, show me a new way of looking at things, or provide insights into everyday life, such as Joan Didion does in "The Year of Magical Thinking," in which she takes the commonplace occurence of becoming widowed in an instant, while weaving a beautiful, touching, and melancholy story we read though we know the endgame in the first chapter. Much is the same for Falling Man. We know 9/11 happened, we live with the tragic aftermath everyday. Many non-fiction books cover the event from a religious, policitcal and socialogcal angles. Falling Man is one of the few to attempt to use the backdrop of 9/11 to recount the personal histories of, for the most part, everyman-type of characters. There is nothing interesting about them except they were in NYC or in the Towers for the attack. Maybe that is the point the author is trying to make. I think writing a novel about 9/11 is a difficult endeavor as it was an event that eclipsed any sort of fiction that anyone could have imagined and therein lies the problem. When real life is stranger than fiction, perhaps it is time to write non-fiction?