Falling Man
By Don DeLillo
My uncle worked in the Pentagon—in a wing that has been entirely remodeled within the last 7 years. He abruptly stopped working there about 7 years ago. Because of scale, attention, and video footage, the Twin Towers have always been surrogates in a story I’ve never fully imagined or sought. So how then does a writer at the forefront of abstract “postmodernism” begin to unravel monumental tragedy?
Beginning with the event itself, the novel centers on Keith Neudecker—a middle-aged lawyer who escapes one of the towers. He appears at the doorstep of his estranged wife Lianne whom he hasn’t spoken to in years. He is covered in blood and clutching a briefcase—neither of which belongs to him. Bookended between two vivid depictions of horror are these non-chronological scenes of attempted recovery, brutal prologue, and thoughtful memory.
Filling these vignettes is a cast of characters as impersonally inhabited as they are introduced: There is the owner of the briefcase who finds a victimized camaraderie with Keith, the European Lover who is convinced of America’s decline, the reticent Jihadist who becomes more and more convinced as he follows Mohamed Atta, the members of an Alzheimer’s writers group who record their memories not for themselves, the Poker night regulars who cannot bear to meet once two of the chairs remain empty, the children who watch the skies for a man named “Bill Lawton” after mishearing the name of the Al-Qaeda founder, and the titular falling man who does acts of performance art by hanging himself posed as the famous photograph of the man leaping from the World Trade Center.
Most of these characters are only named after a prolonged exposure to them in the third-person as a he or she; is the pronoun-effused anonymity of the novel’s body supposed to mirror the eardrum ringing confusion of the aftermath? Besides masterfully capturing the tragedy, horror, and confusion, I am unsure as to what DeLillo was trying to do. Perhaps he explains it through the Alzheimer’s writers who write for posterity. Perhaps the advice I received about the book also reinforces its role as history: don’t begin to read DeLillo with this book.
