Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Finally, Don DeLillo has written a novel about September 11, 2001. I say finally because it seems that everyone in the literary world has been waiting for DeLillo more than any other author to address the events of that day, events that reverberate to this day nearly six years later. Sure, other writers have attempted to write 9/11 novels, but only someone of the stature of DeLillo could truly address it on not only on a worldwide scale but also probe deep into the psyche of those affected and dissect the mood in which the events of that Tuesday morning changed us all, for better or worse. As he has shown in the past, DeLillo can dissect the mood of America and place it in a more stable context. His previous novels have shown that much. Underworld, a sprawling epic that addressed the effects of the Cold War on society, happened to also have the Twin Towers as its cover image. But more than that, DeLillo has addressed issues of terrorism in Mao II, an "airborne toxic event" in White Noise, and the Towers themselves have been featured in his books for quite some time. So if anyone is qualified to analyze the affect of 9/11 on us as a society, it's Don DeLillo.

I'm sorry to say that it's not the case. Falling Man is a failure on all fronts, and one of the worst novels I've ever read.
DeLillo's writing isn't the problem in this book; it's how he chooses to deconstruct the events of that day and tries to put them in a proper context that falls flat; it's also the execution. Many factors contribute to this.

First, as with many of DeLillo's novels, there is no real sense of narrative. Reality, in his eyes, doesn't flow forward fluidly, but is simply a series of vignettes that bare little or no relation to the previous ones. That's not a problem when he's addressing something as sprawling and epic as the Cold War. After all, that took place over decades of time, and to think that all the events flowed one into the other seamlessly is probably asking for too much and would lead to nothing short of an unreadable list. However, when addressing an event like 9/11, it seems to me that it might require a more deliberate exactitude in dissecting the inner lives of those affected, especially since it occurred on United States soil and, clearly, affected everyone in some way or another. What DeLillo settles for, though, is a novel that has 9/11 on the periphery and not as an overarching event that drives the novel forward. One can easily take the characters and replace 9/11 with any number of tragic events and one would hardly notice the difference in the text.

Second, the characters themselves are so far from being sympathetic that it's tough to even imagine DeLillo thinking that we as readers would have any sympathy for them. Keith is a stereotypical male in fiction these days that I could really care less about, and he's the one who survived the attack. I'm so sick of the "I'm too complex for any woman to understand me, so I'll cheat on my wife and go live in a bachelor pad" male. It's an insult to men, and I find it hard to believe that DeLillo would think this type of character would be a wise choice to have survive the attack. And DeLillo compounds this with having Keith seem to spend the entire novel in some sort of "postmodern" fugue. There is nothing that would suggest that Keith is actually, say, human in any sense of the word. Again, this is typical DeLillo, but the effect does not work in this context and seems rather alien to me.

Third, and related to the above, DeLillo chooses to focus on characters that are, what I would term, yuppies. Keith is obviously a yuppie since apparently only yuppies worked in the World Trade Center, or could afford a pricey bachelor pad close to Ground Zero, or play professional poker instead of returning to his real line of work. Lianne, his estranged than reconciled wife, is even worse. A freelance book editor, another total New York cliche, and who runs an Alzheimer's support group, but apparently does little else other than sit and ponder in a confused state of being. Her mother, Nina, is an art historian with, of course, a married lover, Martin, who is yet another typical DeLillo character, a mysterious art dealer who has changed his name and who used to be involved in some sort of radical organizations in the 1970s. He is annoying for many reasons, but most of all for his all knowing demeanor that offers explanations for everything but leaves one more confused than previously thought. He knows why we were attacked and why we deserved it. If one can determine why from his scant dialogue, I'm not one of them.

As an aside, apparently there aren't any marriages in the world where the men are faithful to their wives, and, to some extent vice versa, but primarily the former. That's such a tiring attribute, and I'm not sure what that has to do with making any character more interesting, and in this book, as with most male writers, it's the male who is unfaithful, while the one woman, Nina, was involved with Martin while she was married, but her husband killed himself, so, apparently, that excuses some of that transgression. It's another cliche that I find troubling, insulting, and just plain stupid, and it seems to proliferate with writers like DeLillo and Philip Roth, or anyone who focuses primarily on domesticity. The males are inevitably portrayed as being too complex and too restless to be devoted or satisfied with one woman, while the women are either hapless victims wracked with some form of mental deficiency, willing participants on their own, or simply powerless. What's troubling is that's it seems to be thrown in simply as an aside, especially in this novel. Martin, "might be married." Is that supposed to add some sort of intrigue to him that couldn't be achieved by simply having him be mysterious in other ways? It's also troubling that it's just so effortlessly pulled off in the course of a novel. Keith, for instance, after the attacks starts visiting another survivor, a woman of course, whose briefcase Keith unbelievably made it out of the Towers with. It's hard to tell if the affair is sexual in nature, as with much DeLillo it's rather vague, but it does present a problem for Keith, briefly albeit, regarding how to explain the time he was spending with this woman. Finally, what's troubling is that it never seems to be about sex, rather it's about something else, what I'm not sure, but it ventures pretty closely to, what I would almost term, obligation. Marriages are apparently obligated to disintegrate like this.

Finally, DeLillo's use of dialogue to further muddy the waters of the fugue like state of all involved is by now a given in his work. His dialogue has always been odd in structure and cadence, more like random thoughts or observations than fully formed ideas and real conversations. Nobody talks like they do in novels, but really nobody talks like they do in DeLillo's novels.

Ultimately, the novel is an exercise in creating a mood that provides little or nothing close to insight into how the events of 9/11 affected us as a society. DeLillo took a stock set of characters, had 9/11 occur in the background, and decided to let the novel run its course. It almost appears as if it were a novel written out of a sense of obligation rather than a real desire to provide insight or actual interest. I, personally, have a problem with the idea that 9/11 is something that could and should be used as an emotional provocation. But I'm not opposed to the idea of someone, especially a novelist, attempting to capture the mood of that day. DeLillo, though, isn't the one to do so, and it appears to me that he isn't very interested in it anyway.