Book Review: Falling Man by Don DeLillo

A Google search for “9-11 novel” comes back with 142,000 listings. Indeed, two of the five nominees for the most recent National Book Award in fiction relied on 9-11 as a point of departure. And Americans are far from the only folks drawn to the power of this emerging theme, as demonstrated by French author Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and English novelist Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In short, the Post-9-11 novel may be as important to the current crop of literati as cowboy and horror stories were for readers of my father’s generation.

No American novelist is better suited to tackle this subject than Don DeLillo, who makes an outstanding contribution to the genre with his latest effort, Falling Man. A year ago, three of DeLillo’s works were highlighted in a list of the best novels of the last 25 years compiled by The New York Times, and each of them focused on themes of disaster, tragedy or looming crisis. DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise dealt with an “airborne toxic event” which beleaguers protagonist Jack Gladney, a professor who specialized in the emerging academic specialty of Hitler Studies. Three years later, DeLillo published Libra, which explored the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald. DeLillo’s 1997 magnum opus Underworld highlighted the world of toxic garbage, and drew its name from the author's imagined linkages between Pluto, the Roman deity of the underworld, with plutonium waste buried far beneath the ground.

Despite his recurring interest in disaster scenarios, DeLillo is well known for the light touch with which he tackles even the heaviest topics. When he introduces an “airborne toxic event” or a visit to the nation’s largest garbage dump, readers can expect incisive satire. I suspect that DeLillo is attracted to these themes because of the ease with which they offer themselves up to his ironical frame of mind. Yet it is to DeLillo’s credit that he steps back from this satirical tone in Falling Man, and takes a tougher stance in telling the story of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer working in the north tower of the World Trade Center on the day of the collapse.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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