A moving novel from a normally stoic writer

books:


	• Falling Man: A Novel Don DeLillo Scribner, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 79 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

The Lingering Aftermath

The start is simple. A businessman staggers down a New York street, bleeding and covered in ash from the World Trade Center, where he worked. Eventually a stranger offers him a ride, and takes him to the apartment where his estranged wife lives with their young son. She takes him in, and together they begin the process of knitting their lives together again. He is one of the lucky ones.

The back cover suggests that this man is only the first of several New Yorkers whose stories DeLillo tells, and indeed the book is divided into three parts, each bearing a man's name: Bill Lawton, Ernst Hechinger, and David Janiak. But these names turn out to have only an oblique significance. The fleeing businessman, a lawyer named Keith Neudecker, and his wife Lianne are the subjects of the entire novel. The main distinction between the three parts of the book is the time-scale over which they trace the aftermath: a span of days, then of months, then of years.

Standing by itself as a novella, the first part ("Bill Lawton") would make a rather beautiful story of a family coming back together after a catastrophe. As it happens, I read this book immediately after THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard, which also deals with the repair of a marriage. DeLillo's writing is tougher, his pacing has a greater urgency, his characters are surprised by emotions and compunctions that they scarcely understand, and his resolutions are less neat. Keith and Lianne are concerned, for instance, about the behavior of their son Justin, who apparently spends most of his days at the window in a friend's house, scanning the skies for more planes. But they come together in talking to him, trying to help him; there is progress, if no conclusion.

For the book does not stop there. Keith and Lianne develop their own obsessive behaviors, and must learn to deal with them. Their lives spread outward like ripples, sometimes smoothly intersecting, sometimes conflicting, moving out into the unknown even as they reflect back to redefine their separate centers. While still based in New York, Keith reaches outward to distant locations, there to create an almost hermetic bubble where he can come to terms with his inner self. Lianne, by contrast, inhabits a rich life in the city, comprising her profession as an editor, her work with Alzheimer's patients, some social activism, her mothering of her son, and her conflicted relationship with her mother and her mother's mysterious lover Martin. But she too is searching for something that will enable her to move beyond the legacy of that one dreadful day.

It is not a matter of avoiding spoilers that keeps me from saying how the novel ends; DeLillo's point seems to be that there are no neat endings. Lianne reaches a quiet interior resolution; Keith arrives at a greater understanding of who he is; but most questions concerning their marriage are still left open. Indeed, there are few dramatic events anywhere in the novel, as though there is no place for drama after that first cataclysm. Instead, DeLillo ties it all up by almost magical sleight of hand. As part of his flexible treatment of time, he had introduced a thread beginning in the months before September 2001. Now at the very end of the book, he links this thread to the plane crash that propelled Keith Neudecker into the street where we first saw him. Curiously enough, the effect is to fill an inhuman event with touching humanity. Like Joseph O'Neill in NETHERLAND, another magnificent post-9/11 novel, DeLillo's greatest gift is to show the reactions of ordinary human beings in all their fallibility and confusion. The result may be untidy, but it is full of feeling, always intelligent, occasionally spiritual, and oddly if obliquely consoling.

[Reading DeLillo's much earlier book PLAYERS has shown me this book in a slightly different context. See my review of that, if interested.]

for more information click here

Catharsis Now

This was the first DeLillo novel I read. The subject of 9/11 would be difficult for any writer to handle but DeLillo defines his parameters quite well. He takes a look at the way a single family is changed by this horrific event.

Keith Neudecker is a real estate lawyer working in the World Trade Center when the plane hits. He survives and walks back into the life of his estranged wife right after the accident. In these tragic circumstances they try to patch up the remnants of their relationship. They have a precocious seven year old son, Justin, who doesn't say much but is affected enough by the attacks to start taking a binocular to the skies in search for more planes. Neither Lianne or Keith are especially sympathetic characters, but it's hard to tell if it's them or the way their personalities have been affected by the attacks. Near the end of the novel they are discussing what each wants and Lianne tells Keith, "You want to kill somebody". One of the things that is a bit perplexing about the story is we don't really know exactly what kind of people they were before the attacks. Keith's taciturn nature is what seems to have separated him from Lianne and the tragedy just magnifies this to a point where he drops out of life, he is so numb. Also, because of the attacks, both of them are on edge, prone to rage and have episodes of violence.

I actually came to appreciate the novel a little bit more after finishing it than while I was actually reading it. This was partly due to the vague writing style of DeLillo. He seems to be trying too hard, and the prose sometimes comes off a bit pretentious like a young novelist trying to find himself at a creative writing workshop. Give me the prose of John Irving, Russell Banks or Cormac McCarthy any day. The sections of the book dealing with Lianne's senior citizens' writing group and Lianne's mother and her German art dealer lover were particularly excruciating. And boring. But the impression the novel leaves as a whole is that this was a point in time that clearly separates everything that came before from everything after.

The best writing actually occurs in the closing sections of the three separate parts of the book which trace the doings of Hammad, one of the terrorists who ends up on the plane to hit the first tower. And the seamless way he connects Hammad and Keith at the end of the book is quite good.

Some people have mentioned that this novel wouldn't be a good choice for the first DeLillo novel to read. They may have been right. But I still plan to read "Underworld" and "White Noise".

** 1/2 stars (maybe ***)

for more information click here

Surreal Memories

There was a certain dissociation from life that DeLillo gets. It's not easy to read in a lot of ways. It made my own experience reverberate afresh.

I was in suspended animation having my teeth cleaned. Pricked and scrubbed with the forceful persistence of sterile steel tools and empathy from an hygenist who understood how miserable the whole experience could be.

The Pentagon already compromised.

The suction tool in my mouth. Vacuuming out the refuse of my teeth. The report came over the radio in these exact words:

"The second tower has come down. (2 long seconds) It's gone." After about 10 seconds of silence on the morning radio in New York, which is about 10 minutes in NYC time... "I don't know what to say. Could cry."

Fire, smoke, dust. Papers of careers hat no longer matter.

I went home and watched the news. I did not call in to work that day. I assumed the world was halted. All machineries of progress were stopped. The sound of F16 jets overhead.

Silence.

What just happened.

Is this reality or some bad Tom Clancy novel?

Surreal.

A plane down near Pittsburgh.

Why are they attacking every place I have ever called home? Can't they leave my home alone?

Don DeLillo captures the surreal strangeness of 9/11 in Falling Man. I am about 70 pages into it and I can take only about 5 to 10 pages in each sitting. He nailed it. As a New Yorker he knows what we were thinking at the time in such an intimate manner that it is continually mind numbing all over again.

No-one but those in NYC and those in the NYC metro area have the same sense of what occurred that day. We still are numb by it. We try to cover it with consumerism. But the memory is haunting and jarring. The city became a chapel. It was a sanctuary of mourning. It became holy in that moment. Candles burning for the memories of the lost and missing we knew were no longer going to add to our consciousness in the same way.

I have problems reading this book because no other format has revealed what that day means and what we experienced. I still see the smoke over my home. Trailing southward. Looking for a home that it will not find.

As painful as this novel is to read, I want to thank Don DeLillo. He has given us both the gift of death, and the gift of hope. I could cry with each page. Visceral memories trapped in nothingness. A hurt we need to remember each day of our God gifted lives. I don't want to finish it, but I feel like I have to. Like a faithful Catholic holding the blessed host of Christ in his hands.

Maybe it was too abstract. Maybe it was too close to home.

for more information click here

A moving novel from a normally stoic writer

The jacket copy of this book describes it as a 9/11 novel unlike any other (Or something like that). I would have to agree. I've always thought of DeLillo as a poet's writer with his tight sentences and stingy emotion. The kind of writer that hits you when you're not looking. Since I tend to like long, rambling novels that capture the intricate details of a time and place, I was surprised to find myself so drawn to this one. BAsically it's the story of a family that's coming together at the same time it's falling apart. Each character is confronted with the realities of death and dying in his or her own way, and each contends with his or her fears through unique and touching methods. My husband and I disagree whether this is a hopeful or bleak story so I guess it's a bit of both. It's definitely more than a 9/11 story and isn't as fraught with the paranoia that one often finds in De Lillo's work. I would definitely recommend it for the mood it evokes and the beauty of the language.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.

Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his es-tranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.

Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.

for more information click here

hot or not? What's your opinion? Write a review and share your thoughts!

recommendations

Postmodern books to chew on
Milton Book Club Selections
Some Fascinating Fiction
Some Savory Fiction
Falling in Love

man

Man's Search for Meaning
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email & Over 100 Pages of Other Cool ...
Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

search for books
falling, man, novel

Impressum / about us