Falling Man
By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 2007

      Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is a novel about September 11, delivered as if 9/11 novels were something anticipated and unprecedented. In fact, the genre of 9/11 literature is well stocked, perhaps the most abundant category of fiction in recent years. Given all that’s been written, said and experienced since the fall of 2001, DeLillo’s novel, based mostly on the undigested horror in the immediate aftermath of the event, feels late and inadequate now, nearly six years after the attack and in the face of events that have significantly changed the world in the interim. But that’s a minor concern; the novel has major flaws well beyond its late arrival.

      The book is studiously devoid of plot and character. There are people in it, however, and, although they don’t do anything, they have thin back stories. Keith is a financial services worker who was employed in the World Trade Center. After the disaster and his escape from the building, he makes his way to the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne. Keith was a cad in his pre-9/11 life (he played poker with his friends), but he returns to his wife after the attack; he’s not sure why. Lianne works with people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, encouraging them to write stories to stimulate their memories; Lianne’s father was also afflicted with Alzheimer’s, signaling that the loss of memory is an important metaphor in the novel.

      And there are others. Justin is Keith and Lianne’s young son; he and his little friends stare out the window waiting for more terrorist attacks. Nina is Lianne’s mother; she is a bitter academic. Martin is Nina’s boyfriend; he is a European. Florence is another WTC survivor whose briefcase Keith carried out of the building; she and Keith understand one another. Hammad is a terrorist; he hates the West, and he is very different from the other people in the book because he is not American.

      DeLillo writes in a labored, anti-naturalistic style. His characters (the word is barely accurate to describe the people in his book) speak in non sequiturs and think in disjointed metaphors. Dialogue is prevalent, but the characters speak past one another; very little is ever communicated between them, making the intellectual core of the novel’s world diffuse and unconvincing. No one speaks or behaves in a way that anyone speaks or behaves, even in the wake of 9/11. They speak and behave in the way that we thought we would, that we wish we had; they are profoundly affected in the manner that seems appropriate in the face of such a tragedy; they are introspective and thoughtful to the point of irrationality. In short, they are not real, and that is an unsatisfying artistic response to 9/11, an event that has become such a monumental landmark in our lives precisely because it is horrifically, undeniably real.

      This book is what we were supposed to wait for. Artists would take time, we were told, to figure out what to do with 9/11. Everything had changed, after all. From this point on, all of us, all Americans, would be more sensitive. We would read poetry to help us make sense of the new world. We would turn our backs on violent, mean-spirited entertainments, and we would only be interested in happy things filled with goodwill toward our fellow man. Artists – filmmakers, writers – would seek out the truth behind the new us; they would determine what we’d become, and when they’d figured it out they would tell us.

      With such unrealistic expectations, we were almost certain to be disappointed by what our most celebrated artists came up with. The old guys in the literary canon in particular have not fared well in their awkward attempts to confront the subject. John Updike’s Terrorist, an embarrassingly ill-conceived psychosocial attempt to explain the mind of a young Islamic extremist, did little more than show that Updike could think of nothing important to say about 9/11. DeLillo probably has more to say, but he has already said it; his White Noise effectively communicates the fear, confusion, and hypocrisy that is the American reaction to disaster. That book is fictional and was published in 1985, but it is a much better 9/11 novel than Falling Man.

      The problem is that 9/11 resists metaphor. It happened, and it doesn’t mean more than what it is. Terrorists perpetrated an attack of unprecedented violence, many people died and the rest of us were angry and afraid afterward. That’s really all there is to it, but we’re so used to looking for meaning beneath our essentially meaningless facade (what does America’s obsession with "American Idol" say about us, for instance?) that we find it difficult to comprehend when something obviously important happens to us. The truth is, though, that with 9/11, it’s all right there on the surface. We were shocked and terrified by it, but it didn’t change us. Sure, we’ve changed over the past six years, but that has more to do with Iraq and the Bush presidency than with 9/11, a bigger idea than books like Falling Man are willing to address.

      The literati who have enthroned DeLillo as the reigning king of American letters will insist that Falling Man is the definitive literary proclamation on 9/11, but I predict that the book will not have a significant impact on literary history. Perhaps it will persist as an example of a narrow genre – the self-important, angsty, post-9/11 New Yorker novel – but it will more likely stand beside books like Terrorist: impotent reactions to the event, perhaps necessarily cathartic for the writer, but ultimately artistically empty. The definitive 9/11 works will be, instead, The 9/11 Commission Report and perhaps Paul Greengrass’ film, United 93, works that present the unadorned reality of the event.

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