Don DeLillo has in a sense been preparing for years to write about the World Trade Center attacks. He’s often written about terrorism (The Names and Players). Libra, though a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement in a supposed JFK assassination conspiracy, is a study in domestic terrorism. Mao II, also about terrorism, addresses the cultural disjunction between the West and the Middle East and in passing describes the towers as “harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking.” His novel Underworld, written in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center, actually features the towers on the cover of the hardback edition, and they figure significantly in several scenes. Much of Cosmopolis takes place near the towers. So it is no surprise that DeLillo finally chose the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 as a primary text. Yet he does so in a surprising way.
In Falling Man DeLillo considers the impact of the September 11 attacks not in national or international or (overtly) political terms but in the context of a small number of individuals in various ways caught up in the attacks and their aftermath. There is Keith, who escapes from one of the towers and returns to his wife Lianne, from whom he’s been separated for a year. Lianne is confused by his return, doesn’t fully understand it, and isn’t even sure she recognizes her husband. A counselor of Alzheimer’s patients, she struggles against the loss of her own identity.
Then there is the African American woman Florence who loses her briefcase while fleeing one of the towers and develops a relationship with Keith who finds and returns it. Even Keith and Lianne’s young son is involved. He and his friends spend hours watching through the windows for more approaching planes — they talk of a man named Bill Lawton and speak about the disaster in a monosyllabic secret code that mystifies the adults around them. There is Hammad, one of the hijackers on the planes. Finally there is the falling man himself, a performance artist who at random moments around the city of New York appears to act out the plunge of a man from one of the burning towers.
DeLillo’s great novel so far has been Underworld, and since its publication in 1997 he has written three small and less ambitious books: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man. They are marked by a curious form of literary anomie, a disengagement from the outer world, a fascination with the solipsistic preoccupations of their main characters. In The Body Artist, the main character’s emotional numbness makes it difficult for the reader to engage with her or her situation.
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