Summary
The novel opens in a “time and space of falling ash and near night.” It is the morning of September 11, 2001 and the World Trade Center is collapsing. The reader is given slow-motion glimpses of the horror—the “stink of fuel fire” and the “fitful cries of disbelief.” Keith Neudecker, a lawyer in his late 30s who worked in the North Tower, walks in an ash-covered daze towards the place “where he’d been going all along”—the apartment of his estranged wife and their son.
Three days pass. The reader learns that Keith and Lianne have reconciled and he has moved back into their home. Lianne is comforted by his physical presence and his pilgrimage to her apartment. The couple is intimate again.
The focus of most of the remaining parts of the novel is on a series of alternating vignettes of the couple confronting his or her new reality: Keith, that he is still alive; Leanne, his return and its implications for her and their son. Keith remembers the poker games in his former apartment and is haunted by the deaths of so many of his friends. Lianne becomes immersed in her volunteer work for Alzheimer’s patients and begins to depend on the meetings for emotional support. Her patients are the “living breath” of the tragedy. Lianne also thinks quite a bit about her father, who committed suicide when diagnosed with dementia.
As Lianne moves from home to hospital, “Falling Man”, a performance artist who mimics “those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump”, intrigues her. Meanwhile, Justin, their son, steals a pair of binoculars, scanning the sky for planes and for “Bill Lawton,” his misinterpretation of the name Bin Laden.
Keith realizes he carried someone else’s briefcase out of the tower. He returns to the briefcase to its owner Florence Givens. Florence had been a Tower worker from the floor below him, and an immediate connection is made over their shock and guilt at surviving the tragedy. “She wanted to tell him everything,” Delillo writes. “He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.” She explains her torturous and seemingly endless attempt to get out of the building, repeating it twice for Keith. On his second visit to her, they sleep together.
During the next two weeks, Leanne and Keith try to adjust to each other’s presence, “their lives in transition.” Keith continues to feel “strange to himself.” Leanne becomes consumed in obituaries of the dead and sensitive to little nuisances, particularly the “music located in the Islamic tradition” that emanates from an apartment below theirs. She physically assaults the woman playing the music.
An interlude shifts the novel’s focus to Hamburg, Germany, where Hammad, an ex-Iraiqi soldier, joins the plotters and hijackers of 9/11, including Mohammaed Atta (the real-life leader of the 9/11 attacks). Hammad still reels over the killing of young Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, but is inspired by the discipline and devout belief of Amir, the terrorist leader, and joins the jihad. A later interlude with Hammad details his preparations for 9/11: training in an Afghani jihadist camp and to his lessons at a flight school in the Florida Panhandle.
The story then spins back to Lianne and Keith who remain physically intimate, but she continues to doubt the sustainability of their relationship. Keith continues to see Florence, who wants to expand their relationship. “You saved my life,” she says. “I was nearly gone, nearly dead. Then you walked in the door.” She believes he took the briefcase to keep her alive. Even...
(This entire section contains 898 words.)
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though the affair is brief, lasting only 15 days, it becomes clear to Keith that “erotic pleasure was not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together.”
Three years pass. Lianne fights to maintain a sense of order about her life but continues her almost pathological search for understanding. She becomes fixated on editing books about terrorism. She becomes unnerved by an appearance by Falling Man on a walk home. He dangles from a subway platform. The “stillness itself” of his stylized mid-air pose rattles her. Later in the novel, Lianne, still scanning obituaries, comes across the news of Falling Man’s death and is swept up in the feeling that she could never comprehend his actions.
Keith has become a professional poker player, coming home sparingly and “lost at times for something to say. There was no language to tell them how he spent his days and nights.” The marriage continues, but his absence causes both to withdraw from one another. Keith, while sympathetic to his wife’s longing to be a family again, senses a gulf, for “[S]he wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.” Lianne becomes immersed in religion and finally comes to term with her uncertainty and fear. She will leave Keith.
The novel ends with a collage of images of 9/11. First, Hammad’s last thoughts and acceptance of death as the flight he is holding hostage collides with the North Tower and then Keith, working in the building, stumbles out of the Tower with thousands of others, “walking in a long sleep.” In a daze, he is handed a briefcase—Florence Givens’s briefcase—and walks off with it, leaving the Tower moments before collapse.
