Book Review: Falling Man by Don DeLillo - Page 2

In the aftermath of the event, Neudecker seeks out his estranged wife Lianne and their son Justin. But in the following days he finds himself obsessively returning to the apartment of Florence Givens, a middle-aged black woman who also survived the disaster. In typical DeLillo fashion, the novelist interposes several sub-plots against this major narrative – surprising interludes dealing with poker tournaments, writing classes for Alzheimer patients, a performance artist known as the Falling Man, and the machinations of the Al-Qaeda hijackers.

DeLillo builds these various stories by piling up dozens of small set pieces of three or four pages duration. DeLillo has used this technique elsewhere -- most ambitiously in Underworld -- and it is one of the trademarks of his style. His plots accumulate through these vignettes, and he constantly shifts the scene in the manner of a film director, never letting any storyline dominate for more than a few pages at a time.

The other DeLillo trademark, equally evident in Falling Man, is his sputtering dialogue. His characters converse at cross purposes, achieving many things -- self-justification, rationalization, stream-of-consciousness musing -- but rarely communication. Some critics have questioned the realism of these strange conversations, but they miss the point – such dialogue, much like the bantering in a Tarantino or Altman film, achieves a stylized heightening of effect that goes beyond mere verisimilitude. As I see it, no novelist of our time writes better dialogue than DeLillo. Even so, I am disturbed by DeLillo’s terrorists, who talk more soberly and straight-forwardly than any of the other characters in Falling Man. It almost seems as if Mohamed Atta has wandered into these pages from another novel.

These fragmented narratives circle each other, resisting easy resolution. And DeLillo plays daring games with chronology, returning in the final pages to the moments that take place immediately before the opening of his novel, when the planes hit the towers. The narrative here demands high drama and intensity, and DeLillo rises to the occasion. We will no doubt encounter these same zero hour tragedies in other novels, given this booming field of 9-11 fiction, but for the time being DeLillo has set the standard.

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.

Visit Ted Gioia's author page — Ted Gioia's Blog