'Falling Man': The day it all came down

In DeLillo's fictional take on 9/11, it's society that seems to be collapsing.

By Heller McAlpin

from the May 29, 2007 edition

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Remember those writing assignments where a teacher challenged you to depict boredom without being boring? Well, acclaimed author Don DeLillo, in his eagerly anticipated novel about Sept. 11, has not only captured the fraught numbness that followed the World Trade Center attacks – he has written a book that is itself numbing.

The most surprising thing about Falling Man is its directness. Rather than approach the attacks obliquely, DeLillo's novel about a lawyer who escapes from the towers and returns to his estranged wife confronts them head on. His fidelity to his source material brings us back to those awful days, but adds little new perspective.

In occasionally stunning but frequently affected prose, DeLillo evokes images that are still fresh in our minds. His portrait of Keith Neudecker and his wife, Lianne, is consistent with the case studies in Gail Sheehy's "Middletown," which chronicled the post-traumatic stress suffered by New Jersey's hardest hit community.

After the planes struck in 2001, we knew it was only a matter of time before writers would tackle this defining moment in our history. Recently, it has figured, with varying degrees of success, in novels by Jonathan Safran Foer, Claire Messud, and Jay McInerney, among others.

Expectations were high for DeLillo's take on this disaster, which even as it was happening seemed like a scene from one of his novels. In his best books, including "Libra," a blend of fact and fictional speculation about John F. Kennedy's assassination, and "White Noise," about a toxic chemical cloud that captures the menace of modern life, DeLillo demonstrated an often prophetic apocalyptic vision.

"Falling Man" opens with the visceral, exquisitely wrought image of dazed 39-year-old Keith Neudecker walking north, pierced by glass shards and coated in ash, out of the rubble. "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night," DeLillo writes. "The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now."

Unthinkingly, as if on auto-pilot, Keith heads uptown to the apartment where his estranged wife lives with their 7-year-old son. They've been separated for a year, their marriage eroded by his infidelities.

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