The Falling Man: His Latest Manifestation

A review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man by Chris Varlack

Don DeLillo. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007.  246 pp., $26.00 (hardcover).

Even today, Ground Zero conjures up unpleasant memories of the past—the blur of smoke and sirens, the flurry of broken glass, the ever-present sentiment that things were forever changed. As Don DeLillo writes in his latest novel, Falling Man, New York instantly became "a world, a time and space of falling ash.” With this first sentence, he sends us on a journey into the life-altering effects of the 9/11 attacks, maneuvering through the stories of Lianne and Keith, a divorced couple who reconnect in the days and weeks after the planes hit.

Cast back to that past of dismay and unparalleled fear, we are bombarded in this novel with the confusion and emotional tension that initially surrounded the terrorist attacks. And yet, there is something about the “frank and innocent openness of manner” in which DeLillo recreates the days after the attacks that causes his readers, like the characters he creates, to stop “feeling unnerved after a while.” But even then, deeply immersed in Lianne and Keith’s unfolding story, we might find ourselves inclined to ask: After so little time has passed, how can DeLillo even write about a subject that seems to hit so close to home?

That, dear reader, is the question and the answer. It seems that Falling Man is not just the story of two distant people who are forced to reevaluate their own perspectives. It is meant to be a reflective mirror, the untold story of millions of Americans whose lives were transformed in dramatic as well as subtle ways. Present then is an epiphany, a discovery about the self that makes this novel an odd sort of therapeutic journey. This approach, however, may not sit well with some readers who feel that the subject is still too emotionally-charged to be discussed.

While the novel is certainly not one of those post-9/11 dissertations, the ones you might often be inclined to toss aside at the bookstore, the characters who DeLillo asks us to identify with can be seen as relatively flat. For example, Keith never seems to grow emotionally, falling backing into the predictable role of a gambler—a role he adopts in the past, retaining it later as an escape, a release. But beyond this fundamental flaw, Falling Man is still the type of novel that you might enjoy reading a couple of times.

DeLillo exhibits a literary style here typical of poetic prose. For instance, Carmen G., one of the Alzheimer patients we meet, writes, “I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.” There is a lingering in this character’s speech—an irregularity, unnatural at best, but forgivable. DeLillo presents what is only fairly categorized as an unfiltered feeling to his dialogue as if the idiosyncrasies are just as important as the content that the characters express. Lianne also echoes this style later in the novel, questioning, “You’re not still sky-watching, are you? Searching the skies day and night? No. Or are you?” This method—how DeLillo shapes what his characters say—becomes an intriguing lens as they attempt to make sense of this fearful and also confusing post-9/11 world.

Throughout Falling Man, DeLillo crafts this poetic style with mastery, repeated phrases gaining intensity, imbued with new meaning as they shift and lightly turn. He utilizes a layered approach to shape this exploration, layering the more present experience of Lianne and Keith with a variety of smaller narratives that add depth and complexity to the story he is sharing. But it is clear as the novel progresses that these stories of characters like the Alzheimer patients and Florence Givens, Keith’s post-9/11 love affair, are just another piece of the puzzle we readers are still, years later, trying to completely figure out.

DeLillo’s Falling Man is ultimately then a book of remembering, an engaging and compelling look into the multiplicity of perspectives from which we now view our world. And DeLillo only further colors this world by presenting a parallel narrative—that of the hijackers he creates—Hammad and Amir. Until the last section of the novel, this narrative is separated from the overarching tale of Lianne and Keith. With this, the reader gets a glimpse into an alternative perspective: three short moments—impressively crafted, though one might wish they had a stronger presence—before the planes crash and the towers fall in a flurry of shattering glass. Here we get a deeper look into the lives and thoughts of the terrorists that caused this life-altering change.

These scenes hold immense power. DeLillo writes through a series of possibilities, not conveying a holy war confidently waged, but rather a narrative where “terrorists” become individuals swept up in a sequence of fast-paced events, individuals plagued by inner conflict. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that what is absent, for the most part, is the overwhelming clash of cultures, the essential divide that separates the United States from the Al Qaeda regime. The result is that we are asked to put aside our presuppositions, and rest with the distinct chance that the hijackers were actually human rather than the murderers we now have perceived them to be.

Ultimately Falling Man demands its readers’ attention at every corner. With its vague pronouns and sudden shifts in time, it is the kind of novel that lets one know he/she hasn’t been reading closely enough. In the final scene before the crash, for instance, DeLillo switches without warning between the perspectives of Hammad and Keith, not signifying the shift with names, but maintaining his use of the undefined “he.” Perhaps his goal here was to suggest that we are not so unlike, that the “us-them” philosophy of the present is actually a perspective of the past, and a flawed one at that.

Still, at the end, when the last words echo like recurring memories in our minds—“He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life”—we begin to recreate our favorite characters in our imaginations, imagining like a good story is supposed to allow us to do. While we are certainly left to ponder exactly who the falling man is—Keith with his regression to the past? Ourselves? Just a photograph taken by Richard Drew in the moments after the planes hit?—the question that is most likely at the forefront of your mind is the question that any author would love to hear: what happens to Lianne and Keith—or more importantly, what happens to us—next?


Christopher Allen Varlack has studied the literary arts at Carver Center for Arts and Technology as well as Loyola College in Maryland. He was recently accepted into the MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, a low-residency program he will attend starting in the summer.  Varlack was awarded second place for poetry in the Dylan Days Contest; his poems will appear in Talkin' Blues, the Dylan Days Literary Magazine of Hibbings, Minnesota.