Editors Reads Verdict
DeLillo's most formally restrained novel takes 9/11 as its subject and refuses to sentimentalize or explain it — a deliberately cold, fragmented work that is exactly as uncomfortable as the event it circles without ever directly depicting.
What We Loved
- The decision to write around the event rather than depict it is formally courageous and honest
- The performance artist subplot transforms the novel's central image into genuine metaphysical inquiry
- DeLillo's prose captures the dissociated quality of post-traumatic experience with uncomfortable precision
Minor Drawbacks
- The emotional distance that is formally justified can still leave readers feeling shut out
- Keith and Lianne's marriage never quite achieves the depth the novel's themes require
Key Takeaways
- → Trauma is not experienced as narrative but as recurring images and physical sensations
- → The aftermath of catastrophe is as invisible and disorienting as the event itself
- → The 'falling man' image — from both the famous photograph and the performance art — captures something language cannot
- → Marriage and family do not provide safe harbor from historical violence; they are permeated by it
| Author | Don DeLillo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Pages | 246 |
| Published | May 15, 2007 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, 9/11 Fiction, American Literature |
Falling Man Review
Don DeLillo had been circling the territory of Falling Man for his entire career. His novels had long been preoccupied with catastrophe, image, and the relationship between violence and meaning — White Noise with the “Airborne Toxic Event,” Libra with the Kennedy assassination, Underworld with nuclear anxiety. When September 11 occurred, it was almost overdetermined that DeLillo would eventually write about it directly. The question was how.
His answer is strategic withdrawal. Falling Man opens in the middle of the attacks — Keith Neudecker walking through lower Manhattan in dust and debris — and then retreats. The novel does not depict the towers falling. It does not attempt to describe the experience inside them. Instead it follows Keith and his estranged wife Lianne in the weeks and months that follow, as they try to reassemble something like ordinary life from the ruins of their marriage and their sense of the world. DeLillo’s prose in these sections is characteristically spare and dissociated, moving through scenes with a patience that some readers experience as flatness and others as formal accuracy — trauma does not feel like narrative; it feels like this.
The novel’s most vivid figure is not Keith or Lianne but the unnamed performance artist who begins appearing around New York in a harness, falling from bridges and buildings in a frozen pose that recreates the famous photograph of a man falling from the North Tower. The “falling man” is the image the novel circles: the image that was briefly suppressed by newspapers because it was considered too disturbing, then recovered as the definitive image of what September 11 actually meant at the human scale. DeLillo’s artist keeps falling, keeps recreating the image, insisting that it not be smoothed over by grief or narrative or the desire for meaning.
The novel’s third strand — brief chapters from the perspective of Hammad, one of the hijackers, in the months before the attacks — is its most controversial element. DeLillo attempts to render the interior life of a man preparing for mass murder without either excusing him or reducing him to a monster. It is the most difficult formal challenge in the novel and the least fully achieved; the Hammad sections feel researched rather than imagined. But Falling Man as a whole is exactly what the event it describes demanded: a novel that does not explain, does not console, and does not look away from the image at its center, which is a man in free fall who has no ground beneath him.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Falling Man" about?
DeLillo's 9/11 novel follows Keith Neudecker, who walks away from the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks carrying a stranger's briefcase, and the weeks afterward as he and his wife Lianne try to rebuild — and the performance artist who falls from buildings in a harness, recreating the image of the falling man. DeLillo writes around the event rather than depicting it, which is the only honest formal strategy for something that defeated language.
What are the key takeaways from "Falling Man"?
Trauma is not experienced as narrative but as recurring images and physical sensations The aftermath of catastrophe is as invisible and disorienting as the event itself The 'falling man' image — from both the famous photograph and the performance art — captures something language cannot Marriage and family do not provide safe harbor from historical violence; they are permeated by it
Is "Falling Man" worth reading?
DeLillo's most formally restrained novel takes 9/11 as its subject and refuses to sentimentalize or explain it — a deliberately cold, fragmented work that is exactly as uncomfortable as the event it circles without ever directly depicting.
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