Falling Man

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.

The Formal Challenge of September 11

DeLillo wrote an essay called “In the Ruins of the Future” for Harper’s Magazine in December 2001, three months after the attacks, which laid out some of the thinking that would eventually become Falling Man. He identified the attacks as an event that seemed to have been designed for maximum visual impact — an attack on the world’s most photographed skyline, timed so that both towers were struck while cameras were already pointing at them — and raised the question of how fiction could engage with an event conceived as an image.

Falling Man (2007) is his answer: by refusing to show the towers falling, by writing around the event rather than toward it, by focusing on the aftermath rather than the spectacle. This is formally courageous in the context of a literary culture that had produced, by 2007, many novels attempting to dramatize the experience of the attacks directly.

The Falling Man Performance

The unnamed performance artist who falls in a harness from buildings around New York — frozen in the pose of the famous photograph of a man falling from the North Tower — is the novel’s most vivid figure and its central artistic argument. The photograph was suppressed by many newspapers in the days after the attacks because it was considered too disturbing; it showed something that the culture wanted to grieve without confronting. The artist in DeLillo’s novel refuses that refusal. He keeps falling, keeps making the image present, insisting that the human reality of what happened cannot be smoothed over by grief-management or the desire for narrative resolution.

Born November 20, 1936 in the Bronx, DeLillo had been writing about political violence and its relationship to images since Libra (1988). Falling Man is the culmination of that long engagement with the specific event that defined American political consciousness in the way that the Kennedy assassination defined it for the previous generation.

The Hijackers’ Perspective

The Hammad sections — brief chapters from the perspective of one of the hijackers in the months before September 11 — are the novel’s most formally ambitious and least fully achieved element. DeLillo’s attempt to render Hammad’s interiority without excusing it or reducing it to caricature is the right instinct. That he attempted it, even imperfectly, is itself a statement about what fiction should be willing to do: to inhabit perspectives that resist habitation, to try to understand without endorsing.

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 centre, which is a man in free fall who has no ground beneath him.

Keith and Lianne’s Marriage

The novel’s domestic strand — Keith and Lianne attempting to reassemble their marriage in the months after Keith walks out of the towers — is less immediately vivid than the performance artist subplot but is the novel’s emotional grounding. Their marriage was already failing before September 11; the attacks do not save it but do not finally destroy it either. They continue, in a post-catastrophe mode that is neither recovery nor resignation. DeLillo’s handling of this is deliberately quiet — the marriage is not the subject of dramatic confrontation or revelation — which is formally accurate to how trauma actually functions in ordinary relationships. Life continues around the wound rather than healing it.

DeLillo in the Aftermath

Falling Man was published six years after the attacks, and DeLillo was criticised in some quarters for the novel’s coldness — for not providing the emotional warmth that some readers felt the subject demanded. This criticism misunderstands the novel’s formal argument. The coldness is not detachment but precision. DeLillo had spent his career studying how catastrophe and image interact in American culture; Falling Man is the application of that study to the event that most directly demanded it. Warmth would be easier and less honest. The novel’s refusal of consolation is its integrity.