Falling Man: A Novel

Falling Man: A Novel Summary:

By Don DeLillo Narrated by John Slattery Unabridged

Publisher:   Simon & Schuster Audio

Number Of Pages:  

Publication Date:   2007-05-15

ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0743567188

ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780743567183

Product Description:

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.

Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his es-tranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.

Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.

Amazon.com Review:

The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.

Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and survivor of the attack, arrives on his estranged wife Lianne's doorstep, covered with soot and blood, carrying someone else's briefcase. In the days and weeks that follow, moments of connection alternate with complete withdrawl from his wife and young son, Justin. He begins a desultory affair with the owner of the briefcase based only on their shared experience of surviving: "the timeless drift of the long spiral down." Justin uses his binoculars to scan the skies with his friends, looking for "Bill Lawton" (a misunderstood version of bin Laden) and more killing planes. Lianne suddenly sees Islam everywhere: in a postcard from a friend, in a neighbor's music--and is frightened and angered by its ubiquity. She is riveted by the Falling Man. Her mother Nina's response is to break up with her long-time German lover over his ancient politics. In short, the old ways and days are gone forever; a new reality has taken over everyone's consciousness. This new way is being tried on, and it doesn't fit. Keith and Lianne weave into reconciliation. Keith becomes a professional poker player and, when questioned by Lianne about the future of this enterprise, he thinks: "There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

DeLillo also tells the story of Hammad, one of the young men in flight training on the Gulf Coast, who says: "We are willing to die, they are not. This is our srength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom." He also asks: "But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?" His answer is that he is one of the hijackers on the plane that strikes the North Tower.

At the end of the book, De Lillo takes the reader into the Tower as the plane strikes the building. Through all the terror, fire and smoke, De Lillo's voice is steady as a metronome, recounting exactly what happens to Keith as he sees friends and co-workers maimed and dead, navigates the stairs and, ultimately, is saved. Though several post-9/11 novels have been written, not one of them is as compellingly true, faultlessly conceived, and beautifully written as Don De Lillo's Falling Man. --Valerie Ryan

Summary: Feelings, not facts Rating: 4

I'm not sure what I learned from this book but, sentence by sentence, I loved it. Stylistically, it reminded me more of Delillo's "Libra" than "White Noise," although as other readers have noted, "Falling Man" is somewhat light on plot. This is an atmospheric read. It is well-researched -- the book is firmly grounded in New York City geographically and sociologically, and the segments told from the point of view of nascent terrorist Hammad are convincing -- but not much happens to the characters. The September 11th scenes that bookend the novel are viscerally affecting and dreamlike. If you're looking for a timeline or a blow-by-blow account, this isn't it. Anyway, "Falling Man" places most of its emphasis on the emotional aftermath of the attack. Delillo concentrates on Keith, a lawyer who was in the south tower of the World Trade Center when it was hit, and his estranged wife Lianne, thoughtful upper-middle-class white people in their early forties, and follows them for about three years, along with some of the people with whom they come into contact -- relatives, neighbors, poker players and strangers like the woman whose briefcase Keith inadvertently rescues from the collapsing tower. There is no big satisfying emotional denouement for Kevin and Lianne. The satisfaction I felt after finishing had more to do with Delillo's use of language and tone than with where he left his characters. People seem to have very definite expectations for a novel about September 11th. This one isn't really about how or why the planes hit the towers. It's about what happens to two particular New Yorkers afterwards, and it is beautifully written.

Summary: Random Chaos Rating: 3

I've never been really able to get into a Don Delillo book after 'White Noise'. He is a brilliant author, but his terse prose, while definitely one of the trademarks of a wordsmith worth his salt, also tends to leave the reader (this reader, at least) struggling to keep up with the turns each character takes because so much is ellipted. The non-linear, stream-of-consciousness narrative confused me quite a bit. His focus on the effects of 9/11 on a middle class Manhattan family gave a very human angle to the macro-event, but somehow, I don't feel very engaged with the characters. And the 'Falling Man', a performance artist who appears all over town free-falling with nothing more than a safety harness after the catastrophe, is meant to be significant as some central motif, and represent the free fall and randomness of life, perhaps, but it felt too random. Maybe that was the whole point of it?

Summary: more than one "falling man" Rating: 4

This book opens with an apocalyptic-type scene where a man is walking through ash and debris. Three pages later we realize that the scene is New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Keith is a lawyer who escapes from the South Tower and goes home to his estranged wife Lianne and young son Justin. He brings with him a briefcase belonging to Florence Givens, who lost it during a fall in the stairwell. The book is about these 4 people, primarily Keith and Lianne, plus Hammad, one of the terrorists. The Falling Man is a performance artist who seems to re-enact the leaps from the burning towers by falling head first with a harness and a non-bungee-like tether. (My favorite image is that of the Falling Man as a Tarot card.) Symbolically, Keith is the falling man, though, as he has a brief affair with Florence and then becomes a full-time poker player--possibly in some kind of homage to his poker-night friends who died in the World Trade Center. DeLillo makes copious use of pronouns, so that it sometimes requires several paragraphs of reading to determine who is the antecedent of "he" or "she." This technique emphasizes the disconnectedness of the characters that is prevalent throughout the novel. The tragedy has caused them to become somewhat robotic and caused me to consider the lives of the survivors and their families. The inclusion of Hammad's story, brief and incomplete, seemed unnecessary to me, and he doesn't come to life nearly as well as the terrorists did in The Garden of Last Days by André Dubus III. As far as Keith and Lianne are concerned, DeLillo sums them up in what is probably the most quoted and most telling line in the novel: "She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

Summary: Lesser DeLillo Rating: 3

DeLillo's 9/11 terrorists read like a weak echo of earlier DeLillo gangs - most notably, of the Moonies of Mao II who sit in their van, intensifying their all-excluding faith. "They looked through the windows and saw the faces of fallen-world people. It totalised their attachment to true father. Pray all night at times, all of them, chanting, shouting out, leaping up from prayer stance, lovely moaning prayers to Master, oh please, oh yes ..." Here is Hammad, similarly pitying of unbelievers, similarly tunnel-visioned: "This entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever, illusion. In the camp on the windy plain they were shaped into men. They fired weapons and set off explosives. They received instruction in the highest jihad, which is to make blood flow, their blood and that of others." There is a definite decline in the quality of the writing. The middle two sentences about the "windy plain" and "explosives" could come from an Andy McNab novel. A few years ago, DeLillo's weapons wouldn't have been merely "fired" nor his explosives "set off". This isn't seeing-saying, it is repeating. For the truth is that, in Mao II, DeLillo had already written his great 9/11 novel, long before the specific date and the event happened to come around. He even identified the target: "Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word 'loomed' in all its prolonged and impending force."

Summary: This may be art, but it's dissatisfying Rating: 3

I don't doubt this writer's talent, but this novel is not engaging. In my view, a good novel will ponder the human condition, so my bias is that it should have realistic characters. And it doesn't matter to me if a character is from a remote time and place; if that character is sketched realisitically,I will be able to identify with his/her human element. In this novel, I felt no empathy for any character. (What parents refer to their child as "the kid"? That's so idiotic). I really feel as if only a handful of people who live in Manhattan, specifically, could relate to any character in this novel. Spare me the the diatribes about post-modernism and all that. I don't read novels to engage in an intellectural/theoretical activity. Novels engage me when real human nature is reflected in them and they express a truth about humanity that is so accurate that it's beautiful.

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