Falling Man, by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has in a sense been preparing for years to write about the World Trade Center attacks. He's often written about terrorism (The Names and Players). Libra, though a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald's involvement in a supposed JFK assassination conspiracy, is a study in domestic terrorism. Mao II, also about terrorism, addresses the cultural disjunction between the West and the Middle East and in passing describes the towers as "harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking." His novel Underworld¸ written in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center, actually features the towers on the cover of the hardback edition, and they figure significantly in several scenes. Much of Cosmopolis takes place near the towers. So it is no surprise that DeLillo finally chose the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 as a primary text. Yet he does so in a surprising way.

In Falling Man DeLillo considers the impact of the September 11 attacks not in national or international or (overtly) political terms but in the context of a small number of individuals in various ways caught up in the attacks and their aftermath. There is Keith, who escapes from one of the towers and returns to his wife Lianne, from whom he's been separated for a year. Lianne is confused by his return, doesn't fully understand it, and isn't even sure she recognizes her husband. A counselor of Alzheimer's patients, she struggles against the loss of her own identity. Then there is the African American woman Florence who loses her briefcase while fleeing one of the towers and develops a relationship with Keith who finds and returns it. Even Keith and Lianne's young son is involved. He and his friends spend hours watching through the windows for more approaching planes—they talk of a man named Bill Lawton and speak about the disaster in a monosyllabic secret code that mystifies the adults around them. There is Hammad, one of the hijackers on the planes. Finally there is the falling man himself, a performance artist who at random moments around the city of New York appears to act out the plunge of a man from one of the burning towers.

DeLillo's great novel so far has been Underworld, and since its publication in 1997 he has written three small and less ambitious books: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man. They are marked by a curious form of literary anomie, a disengagement from the outer world, a fascination with the solipsistic preoccupations of their main characters. In The Body Artist, the main character's emotional numbness makes it difficult for the reader to engage with her or her situation. In ways The Body Artist resembles
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, also a work of emotional numbness that cloaks deep emotional turmoil stemming from the sudden death of a husband. Didion's carefully controlled hysteria effectively engages the reader. But she is writing in the first person—she's sharing her devastation. DeLillo writes in the third person, describing his characters rather than evaluating and assessing them up close. He holds the reader back from his characters—we see how they act, we hear what they say. We rarely know exactly what they think, unless they tell another character. It takes a major sympathetic leap for DeLillo's readers to realize that his focus on emotional numbness does not mean a lack of sympathy for his characters or an inability to write with emotional force. Just the opposite, in fact.

The innate interest of the September 11 catastrophe to an extent enables the reader's ability to engage with the characters of Falling Man, but they too are afflicted with numbness, an inability to articulate their circumstances.

DeLillo has been fascinated in recent novels with artist figures. Klara Sax from Underworld is the most notable of them. In this new novel the performance artist who simulates the plunge from one of the World Trade Center towers seems to be expressing through his performance a statement about the public impact of the catastrophe, as if the image of the falling man encapsulates everything, the totality of the entire experience. As the novel progresses we come to realize that, regardless of whatever public statement he may be trying to make, he is also making an inward statement about himself and his own circumstances. His repetitive reenactments take a physical and psychological toll. He suffers extreme pain from his performances, wrenches his spine, and his brother, after his death, talks about how the falling man had intended to do his last performance without a rope, thereby replicating to the moment of death itself the event on which he has fixated.

This interplay between the personal, inner worlds of individuals and the outer, external worlds is the fundamental axiom of this novel. The novel does not make clear which world is more significant and important and instead suggests that there are no distinctions.

This is best seen through the character Hammad, one of the infamous 19. He too is caught up in events, in emotional and cultural forces of which he has some understanding. Living in Germany and then in the United States, preparing for his role in the attacks, he at first seems tempted by the West, dating and sleeping with Western women, shopping in grocery stores, living invisibly among the people of the nation against which he conspires. Perhaps at first he drifts into the plot, but gradually it takes hold of him and he feels himself fated to be part of an act to which his entire life has been ordained. He feels Westerners live only on the surface, and that he is part of something they could never understand. His sense of separateness from the West drives his obsession with attacking it. Ultimately his identity becomes inseparable from the plot he is part of: "They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to this. There was the claim of being chosen, out there in the wind and sky of Islam. There was the statement that death made, the strongest element of all, the highest jihad" (p. 174). Hammad has a purpose, a sense of self inherently bonded to a personal and cultural ideology. None of the other characters in the novel are so self-aware.

Until the last few chapters, Falling Man lacks conventional tension or force. The numbness of the characters infects the narrative itself. Its momentum slowly grows out of the innate force of the events described, the momentous events that act on the characters, and their reactions. The characters themselves seemed to drift. Loss of identity, loss of self, personal breakdown—use whatever terms you like—in various ways they must reconstruct themselves after the towers fall. Yet the fallen towers do not create their problems. They are instead the traumatic catalyst that drive us on towards the powerful climax of the last few chapters.

DeLillo's characters emerge from the catastrophe with different reactions. The main character Keith before the attacks met on a weekly basis to play poker with colleagues from his office. Two of them die in the attacks. Keith and one of his surviving colleagues become professional poker players after the attacks. Keith's wife Lianne resorts to a disengaged political activism, attending rallies without much commitment to what they mean. The falling man does what he is best suited to do—fall.

DeLillo sometimes fixates on characters so confused and at such loose ends that there is no conventional way to explain them. Character analysis in any usual sense is pointless. They are like exploding balloons. DeLillo can only evoke their dissolution. Lianne with her extreme personal distress and confusion is a prime example of such a character. She can't make sense of herself. She is overwhelmed when she witnesses the falling man's performance, but she can react in only a deeply inchoate and emotional way. While she accepts the apparent reconciliation with her husband, she no longer recognizes him as the man she knew before their separation before. Everything is strange to her—her life, herself, her child, the world itself. Her mother is fading into old age. Her father committed suicide to avoid facing Alzheimer's. She encourages the Alzheimer's patients in the creative writing group she supervises to write about their world, even as it is dissolving away, as if by capturing it in words they can hold it for a while longer. She fears losing her own hold on the world. The patients in her writing group are losing themselves, and in a sense Lianne and other survivors in the novel have lost their identities as a result of their proximity to the falling, the fallen, towers. Lianne sees the falling man as an emblem of her situation, just as her husband sees the poker table as an emblem of his.

The only resolution for these characters is implied. There is no resolution, per se. There is only resolution in process. We don't know in any traditional, conventional sense where they are headed, where they are going to end.

The last chapter of Falling Man follows Hammad during the final days before the attacks on the World Trade Center. We last see him sitting in the plane, and when it hits the tower the perspective immediately switches to that of Keith, sitting in his office, reeling from the impact as his building sways, lurching, back and forth. He and other survivors arduously make their way down the stairs, trying to escape. Somehow Keith picks up a briefcase that is not his and continues on. The novel ends. The first chapter of Falling Man continues the account of Keith's escape and his return to his wife. The result is a kind of endless loop, as if there is no escape from the memory of the events this novel describes.

Originally published in Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/06/22/180508.php