Unique and commendable novel. It is infectious to read to see how the disjointed narrative can be stitched to form conjoints; finding the end of the book returns back to the beginning. Threading the dislocated lives together and watching them at times stretch and split at the seams only to realize the patterned fabric are what they rely on to be somewhat sane. There's an understanding that by being in a group and also applying repetition, helps one to stabalize some normalcy - whatever that means.

I find DeLillo's work to be fundamentally a psychological commentary of characters living in contemporary Americana. Falling Man is very much this way. Piercing into the skin and looking around using some fictional creations to describe views of one of the most impactful moments of our history. The ripple is still being felt today, 8 + years later. Fear is expanding each and every day concerning terrorist attacks.

Do we try to forget? This is a major question raised in the book. It had me reflect alot on 9/11. It's really helpful to do this for some context of then and now and later. Falling Man is a medium to bring about contemplation about ourself, our country (whatever country that is) and the planet. So this is a groundbreaking achievement, then, now and the future to come. Because we can read this again sometime to see what DeLillo's really saying (which is always mysterious) and to see how we've changed and the country and world around us.

In the end, it's a nice piece of art worth having and maybe hanging from time to time to ponder.

I'm not sure what I learned from this book but, sentence by sentence, I loved it. Stylistically, it reminded me more of Delillo's "Libra" than "White Noise," although as other readers have noted, "Falling Man" is somewhat light on plot. This is an atmospheric read. It is well-researched -- the book is firmly grounded in New York City geographically and sociologically, and the segments told from the point of view of nascent terrorist Hammad are convincing -- but not much happens to the characters. The September 11th scenes that bookend the novel are viscerally affecting and dreamlike. If you're looking for a timeline or a blow-by-blow account, this isn't it. Anyway, "Falling Man" places most of its emphasis on the emotional aftermath of the attack.

Delillo concentrates on Keith, a lawyer who was in the south tower of the World Trade Center when it was hit, and his estranged wife Lianne, thoughtful upper-middle-class white people in their early forties, and follows them for about three years, along with some of the people with whom they come into contact -- relatives, neighbors, poker players and strangers like the woman whose briefcase Keith inadvertently rescues from the collapsing tower. There is no big satisfying emotional denouement for Kevin and Lianne. The satisfaction I felt after finishing had more to do with Delillo's use of language and tone than with where he left his characters.

People seem to have very definite expectations for a novel about September 11th. This one isn't really about how or why the planes hit the towers. It's about what happens to two particular New Yorkers afterwards, and it is beautifully written.

I've never been really able to get into a Don Delillo book after 'White Noise'. He is a brilliant author, but his terse prose, while definitely one of the trademarks of a wordsmith worth his salt, also tends to leave the reader (this reader, at least) struggling to keep up with the turns each character takes because so much is ellipted. The non-linear, stream-of-consciousness narrative confused me quite a bit.

His focus on the effects of 9/11 on a middle class Manhattan family gave a very human angle to the macro-event, but somehow, I don't feel very engaged with the characters.

And the 'Falling Man', a performance artist who appears all over town free-falling with nothing more than a safety harness after the catastrophe, is meant to be significant as some central motif, and represent the free fall and randomness of life, perhaps, but it felt too random. Maybe that was the whole point of it?

This book opens with an apocalyptic-type scene where a man is walking through ash and debris. Three pages later we realize that the scene is New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Keith is a lawyer who escapes from the South Tower and goes home to his estranged wife Lianne and young son Justin. He brings with him a briefcase belonging to Florence Givens, who lost it during a fall in the stairwell. The book is about these 4 people, primarily Keith and Lianne, plus Hammad, one of the terrorists. The Falling Man is a performance artist who seems to re-enact the leaps from the burning towers by falling head first with a harness and a non-bungee-like tether. (My favorite image is that of the Falling Man as a Tarot card.) Symbolically, Keith is the falling man, though, as he has a brief affair with Florence and then becomes a full-time poker player--possibly in some kind of homage to his poker-night friends who died in the World Trade Center. DeLillo makes copious use of pronouns, so that it sometimes requires several paragraphs of reading to determine who is the antecedent of "he" or "she." This technique emphasizes the disconnectedness of the characters that is prevalent throughout the novel. The tragedy has caused them to become somewhat robotic and caused me to consider the lives of the survivors and their families. The inclusion of Hammad's story, brief and incomplete, seemed unnecessary to me, and he doesn't come to life nearly as well as the terrorists did in The Garden of Last Days by André Dubus III. As far as Keith and Lianne are concerned, DeLillo sums them up in what is probably the most quoted and most telling line in the novel: "She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

DeLillo's 9/11 terrorists read like a weak echo of earlier DeLillo gangs - most notably, of the Moonies of Mao II who sit in their van, intensifying their all-excluding faith. "They looked through the windows and saw the faces of fallen-world people. It totalised their attachment to true father. Pray all night at times, all of them, chanting, shouting out, leaping up from prayer stance, lovely moaning prayers to Master, oh please, oh yes ..." Here is Hammad, similarly pitying of unbelievers, similarly tunnel-visioned: "This entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever, illusion. In the camp on the windy plain they were shaped into men. They fired weapons and set off explosives. They received instruction in the highest jihad, which is to make blood flow, their blood and that of others." There is a definite decline in the quality of the writing. The middle two sentences about the "windy plain" and "explosives" could come from an Andy McNab novel. A few years ago, DeLillo's weapons wouldn't have been merely "fired" nor his explosives "set off". This isn't seeing-saying, it is repeating. For the truth is that, in Mao II, DeLillo had already written his great 9/11 novel, long before the specific date and the event happened to come around. He even identified the target: "Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word 'loomed' in all its prolonged and impending force."

I don't doubt this writer's talent, but this novel is not engaging. In my view, a good novel will ponder the human condition, so my bias is that it should have realistic characters. And it doesn't matter to me if a character is from a remote time and place; if that character is sketched realisitically,I will be able to identify with his/her human element. In this novel, I felt no empathy for any character. (What parents refer to their child as "the kid"? That's so idiotic). I really feel as if only a handful of people who live in Manhattan, specifically, could relate to any character in this novel.

Spare me the the diatribes about post-modernism and all that. I don't read novels to engage in an intellectural/theoretical activity. Novels engage me when real human nature is reflected in them and they express a truth about humanity that is so accurate that it's beautiful.

This post-9/11 novel features DeLillo's detached, reflective perspective. The prose, while at times moving and well-crafted, retains its distance from trauma. This may mirror the shock of Keith, an executive in the Twin Towers who escapes, and his estranged wife Lianne's own complicated emotions when she finds him, a victim of "organic shrapnel," at her doorstep where he's staggered post-blast. Yet, I rarely felt drawn in to the pain of their revived relationship, nor did their son Justin's own reaction, or that of Lianne's mother or her lover keep me immersed in their responses to that memorable day and its aftermath.

However, Lianne's mother, Nina, and her enigmatic German paramour Martin do engage in spirited debate about the role that God played on 9/11. Both the perpetrators and their victims called out His name in their last moments. DeLillo's at his strongest when he considers the role that faith plays in Lianne and Nina's lives, or its lack. Nina rails: "God used to be an urban Jew. He's back in the desert now." (46) Martin ripostes: "One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die." (46-47) Whether its a social revolt or a fundamentalist surge charges Martin and Nina's conversations with an energy often lacking otherwise in these pages.

Hammid, a German-educated hijacker, one of the nineteen, earns his own small role, yet these chapters do not flesh out his character much. I compare this with the attempt of a similar work (also reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog), John Updike's "Terrorist," to delve into the mind of a Western-schooled Islamic jihadist. DeLillo and Updike plant their young fanatic into the suburban malaise of our nation, yet DeLillo holds back his descriptions, favoring restraint. This stance permeates the whole novel.

Therefore, some may welcome this tamped-down delivery. I found it, on the other hand, too far away from what I wanted to find out about Keith and Lianne. Keith gets into gambling, and while this realm's detailed extensively, it failed to engross me; similarly, a subplot with Florence, a fellow survivor of Keith's tails off abruptly. DeLillo does this as before, as in "Underworld," and while this adds verisimilitude, it doesn't satisfy the reader wanting more fictional standards of closure.

Lots of this story drifts along as if hermetically sealed off. I understand this intent, but it fails to move me. The couple's son, Justin, speaks for a portion of the plot in monosyllables as an experiment, and I felt like DeLillo almost was parodying his own minimalism. Echoes of a less-foul mouthed Mamet echo in many sentences here, so pared down are they.

So, while this novel leaves me with enough to think about, there are far fewer particular sentences that stand out. The passages on belief stick longest. Lianne near the end of the story goes to Mass and wonders: "She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

God is the voice that says, 'I am not here.'

She was arguing with herself but it wasn't argument, just the noise the brain makes." (236)

Such moments make the novel worthwhile, but it's an uneven (as in the anti-war march attended by Lianne and Justin, or the Falling Man performance artist's appearances) rendition of the aftermath of the attacks on NYC. Martin sees a painting reminding him of the attacks, with "the two dark objects, too obscure to name," (49) and in such instances, the dread reverberates well before it fades into the airlessness of most of this text. Again, while this may capture the dislocation of contemporary New Yorkers in the early decade, it may not satisfy those expecting a more in-depth, less pared-down depiction of these domestic upheavals.