Falling Man: A Novel

by: Don DeLillo

Published by: Scribner

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

It’s been three days since I finished Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man: A Novel. I’m not sure if I liked it or loved it. As it is about 9/11, I feel guilty if I say I only “like” it. DeLillo’s is the first true piece of “literature” I’ve read–with the event acting as a character, a setting, and a backdrop.

The story opens with Keith walking out of the smoke cloud from a falling tower. He was covered in ash, wearing his suit jacket and tie and carrying a briefcase, bits of glass were stuck in his face and hair. Instead of going to a hospital, he got into a stranger’s truck and went to his estranged wife’s apartment; the same apartment he shared with Lianne and their young son, Justin. They walk to a hospital where Keith has the glass shards removed.

The story that unfolds depicts the uncertainty that New Yorkers must have felt in those days after the planes. Keith is ambling around the house, Lianne is not sure what do think or do about Keith’s return. Justin and two friends watch the Manhattan skyline with his binoculars–waiting and watching for “Bill Lawton.” It took DeLillo explaining to me that Bill Lawton was what the kids heard as bin Laden.

The story develops gradually. The days will pass and Lianne begins to think of each episode as “three days after the planes,” “five days after the planes,” and so on, in a non-random order ending with approximately “thirty-six days after the planes.” Then the story flashes forwards to 2003, and we see what has become of Keith and Lianne–how they’ve coped, or not. DeLillo does not allow the novel’s narrator to recall how Keith escaped and what he saw until the end of the novel, which makes it all the more unsettling as it brings back that day in all its horrific detail.

And set against all of this, is a performance artist known as Falling Man. He appears without warning and in a variety of places, depicting that image of the man in the white shirt falling/jumping from the tower, his white shirt billowing behind him.

In these days leading up to the sixth anniversary 9/11, Don DeLillo’s novel, Falling Man: A Novel will bring back that day in a way and with an intimacy that no news show can convey.

Armchair Interviews says: From the title on, this book is very moving.