Justin wanted to talk in monosyllabic words? Was he looking for attention? Why? Did he want to annoy his parents? Why? Or was he just experimenting with language?

4. How does the big secret in Martin’s past play into this story? Read over the sections that talk about his past. What do you think he did? Does the author make this point to link Martin with the terrorists? Why or why not?

5. What role does Lianne’s father play in this story? Why does she worry about his suicide? Does she think she might do the same?

6. How does Lianne’s mother’s interest in art add to this story? Does the author link the still-life portraits that Nina loves with the performance artist in any way? Are Martin and the performance linked? In what way?

7. How does the inclusion of the terrorists fit into this story? What is the author trying to do by providing details about their lives? Would you have preferred not to have read those passages, or did they broaden the story for you?

8. What was the significance of the woman downstairs who continued to play loud music? Why was Lianne so upset with her, even to the point of violence? Was Lianne’s violence in any way linked to the violence of the terrorists, at least symbolically?

9. Why does Keith turn to gambling? Is he trying to reconnect to the times when he was living alone? Or was he trying to live on the edge, the only place he could safely allow any emotions? Or are there other reasons for his becoming so engrossed in gambling?

10. Discuss the idea of remembering and how it plays out through the patients who are suffering from Alzheimer’s, through Lianne, Keith, Nina, Justin, and Martin. Who is trying hard to remember? Who is trying to forget? How are these characters similar and how do they differ?

1. Draw your interpretation of what the Falling Man looked like as described in this story as he hangs from the side of different buildings. What is this man trying to say with this position? Use your drawing to provide the emotions that man must have been feeling, in your interpretation. What is the look on his face? When you share this portrait with your class, provide them with the emotions that you attempted to express.

2. Research the life of Osama Bin Laden. How did his background lead him to the position that he holds today? What motivated him to so dislike the United States? Write up your report and turn it in to your teacher.

3. Report on the statistics of the 9/11 attacks. How many people were killed? How many survived? How many terrorists were involved? How many passengers were on the aircrafts? How many firefighters and police officers lost their lives? Also provide information about the World Trade Center. When was it built? How big were the towers? What types of businesses worked there? Collect your data and provide a report for your class.

4. Read a book of critical essays about Don DeLillo. What do critics declare are the author’s strengths? What are his weaknesses? What are the general themes that he writes about best? How does he compare to other contemporary writers? With whom do most critics compare him? Present your finding to your class, giving them a general portrait of his works.

5. Research the real Falling Man, a man who jumped to his death on 9/11. What do news stories say of him? Has his identity been revealed? Can you find photographs of him? What are reporters writing about this man? Why is the image so different? Share the information you find about him with your class.

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) presents a different type of terrorism on the other side of the world in India. In a small village in northern India, different factions are coming together that will change the villagers’ lives. A retired judge loses interest in life. His young granddaughter loses a prospective lover. Two older sisters lose their land and home. Young rebels from surrounding Nepal and Tibet, fighting for social justice, take change into their own hands. This is a well-told and rousing story.

Denis Bock takes yet another twist on the affects of World War II. In his novel Ash Garden (2003), he pits the lives of a German physicist, who is partially responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb, and a Japanese woman, who is one of the thousands of victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.

For another take on the influence of September 11 on a different New York couple, try Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach (2007). The couple’s marriage is disintegrating as the wife gives up her career to take care of their autistic son, and the husband has just learned that his prized choreographic work, called “A Day at the Beach,” is being stolen right from under him. Then the towers come down, and it is time to reflect on what is really important in life.

DeLillo’s classic novel White Noise (1985) won the National Book Award and opened up the door to a whole new audience. In this story, a noxious cloud of toxic chemicals descends upon a town. The people of the town are more upset by the lack of media attention, it turns out, than they are at the threat to their lives. It is through this story that DeLillo criticizes the consumer culture and the belief that the television provides a clearer picture of reality than reality itself.

Falling Man was published with little fanfare and very little advance notice other than an appetite-whetting excerpt in the The New Yorker. Advance publicity may have been surprisingly sparse, but expectations were high, for who is better qualifiedto write the definitive 9/11 novel than Don DeLillo? Other writers have tried, from various angles and with varying degrees of success: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), John Updike’s The Terrorist (2006), Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Writing on the Wall (2005), and Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Films have also fallen well short: Oliver Stone’s flag-waving soap opera World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass’s much better, much more narrowly focusedindeed chillingly claustrophobicUnited 93 (2006), which recalls the “five miles of primetime terror” scene from DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), minus the irony.

The question worth asking was never whether DeLillo could write the great 9/11 novel but whether he needed to at all, having in effect already written it piecemeal over the past three decades. The Players (1977) features the World Trade Centerand a terrorist plot to bomb Wall Street. The Names (1982) deals with an obscure fundamentalist terrorist group in Greece. White Noise, DeLillo’s finest novel, is all about terrorthe fear of dying in an age of hypercapitalism, airborne toxic events, and pharmaceutical solutions to personal and spiritual problems. Libra (1988) brilliantly and obsessively chronicles the postmodern responseparanoiato national trauma (the Kennedy assassination). Mao II’s (1991) reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, finds himself in a brave new world in which “the future belongs to crowds,” where the televised image trumps the written word and where the novelist has been supplanted by the terrorist. In Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s most ambitious novel about “the American century” of profligate waste and constant low-grade anxiety, the twin towers appear twice, glimpsed from an artist’s window during their construction and on the dust jacket in André Kertész’s disquieting photograph, church steeple in the foreground, towers looming ominously behind, their tops lost in the clouds like some postmodern version of Kafka’s castle.

Exhaustively summing up the entire Cold War period and its aftermath in cut-up, intersecting narratives, recurring images, personal rituals, and national obsessions appears to have exhausted DeLilloat least that is what the extreme brevity of his next three works suggests: the play Valparaiso (pb. 1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003). Surely, as a subject, 9/11 would get DeLillo back on track and readers thinking about (rather than passively consuming) the iconic images that had silenced writers and public alike: First, the endless replays of the planes hitting the towers and the towers falling, later Joel Meyerowitz’s overly solemn, ultimately sentimental photos of ground zero, leading the way to Stone’s maudlin exercise in flag-waving and family values. In 9/11’s wake, solemnity ruled, until a Saturday Night Live sketch finally (if briefly) broke the tension. Novelists were themselves part of the problem, complicit with the national chorus, as in Martin Amis’s wildly exaggerated but dismayingly representative claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.”

Shocking as it may seem, the problem was never that 9/11 was too large for fiction but that it was too small to bear the enormous weight heaped upon it. When he took up residence in California, the Polish poet Czesaw Miosz was grateful for all America offered but dismayed by American naïveté and ignorance of history. The 9/11 attacks were America’s spectacular awakening to history and to the tragic sensibility long known to the rest of the world. Although condemned at the time, Susan Sontag’s remarks in the The New Yorker, shortly after 9/11, now seem commonsensical:Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us to understand what has just happened. And what may continue to happen . The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.

Even when most accessible, DeLillo has always challenged his readers, never infantilized them; more observant and prophetic than any other contemporary American novelist, he has always led, never followed, and always been the most cogent chronicler and commentator on the way we live now. Yet in 9/11’s immediate aftermath, even he came to accept and parrot the conventional wisdom rather than to challenge it: “This time we are trying to name the future, not in our normally hopeful way, but guided by dread” (“In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s Magazine, December, 2001). This is a rather astonishing claim to come from a writer who has been writing the American book of dread at least since White Noise. Six years after “In the Ruins of the Future,” the 9/11 novel Americans sorely need is the kind of historiographic metafictionDeLillo’s Libra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977)that critically examines “history” and historical pieties. Although better by far than other 9/11 fictions, Falling Man is not quite the DeLillo novel that people expected or needed.

Nevertheless, Falling Man’s first half, its opening pages in particular, does not disappoint. Here DeLillo is in top form, defamiliarizing 9/11 and reproducing the brittle, truncated dialogue that reveals personal relationships as fragile structures. Occasionally, Falling Man has a Law & Order “ripped from the headlines” feel. More worrisome, the writing seems canned, recycled from DeLillo’s earlier works but without the edginess, the irony, the insight. Old Man Treadwell (White Noise) reappears as a writing group made up of Alzheimer’s patients; the official Central Intelligence Agency history of the Kennedy assassination that Nicholas Branch struggles to write in Libra becomes the “book webbed in obsessive detail” that Lianne Glenn will edit; Jack Gladney’s wonderfully absurd medical tests reappear as Lianne’s more pedestrian ones. Although DeLillo has been especially adept at creating characters in a decidedly postmodern mode, Falling Man’s characters are abstract in a different way than in the earlier work, their dread much less convincing. This may be deliberate: the postmodern self further reduced to the kind of missing person featured on posters in lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11. Keith Neudecker is a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who survives the attacks; although his name links him with New York’s Dutch past, he is a shallow man who gives the impression of depth. Lianne Glenn is his thirty-eight-year-old estranged wife to whose apartment he returns on 9/11; she works as a freelance book editor and directs a writing group of Alzheimer’s patients. Justin is their seven-year-old son. Nina Bartos, Lianne’s mother, is a retired professor of art history. Martin Ridnour, Nina’s long-distance lover of twenty yearsa man who flies in and then flies outis an art dealer with a mysterious past, including vague ties to a German terrorist group in the 1960’s. Along with the novel’s title character, the performance artist whose real name is David Janiak, Martin is Falling Man’s most intriguing character because he is the one about whom the reader wants to learn more (because there seems to be a lot more to learn, as there does not with Keith and Lianne, the novel’s main characters). However, more is not what Falling Man is about, as another survivor, Florence Givens, suggests. She is the light-skinned, slightly heavy black woman whose briefcase Keith by chance takes with him from the tower, then returns, and with whom he has an affair. (Unable to save his friend and colleague Rumsey, he saves the briefcase.) “‘You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,’ she said.”

Keith’s arrival at Lianne’s even before going to the hospital is an early sign of the need for contact, for belonging, which runs throughout Falling Man. The need precedes the attacks; following their separation, there is “the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group,” he to his weekly poker game, she to her Alzheimer’s group. Like her morning run and his workouts at the gym, these personal rituals are postmodern versions of the terrorists’ commitment to their fundamentalist beliefs, including jihad. While the latter results in massive carnage, the former seem not just benign but absurdly inadequate: the hidey-holes where belief goes in a postreligious age of self-indulgence and hypercapitalism. That “people were reading the Koran” post-9/11 is less a sign of Americans wanting to understand Islam than a faddish consumer choice occasioned by intense but nonetheless passing interest. Lianne’s need for her Alzheimer’s group and Keith’s commitment to poker work serve much the same purpose.

The inadequacy of these gestures of commitment and belief makes one wonder whether the novel’s “spindly” structure (as Michiko Kakutani calls it), like the thinness of characterization mentioned earlier, may be intentional. If so, instead of being one of DeLillo’s weakest novels, Falling Man may be one of his riskiest, the aesthetic weaknesses pointing to larger cultural and political failures. If so, then Falling Man is made in the image of its title character: not its protagonist, Keith Neudecker, the ultimate man without qualities who has fallen into history, but the performance artist who repeatedly, and with no apparent interest in fame or monetary gain, reenacts one of 9/11’s best-known and most surreal images, Richard Drew’s photograph of a man falling, as if gracefully, to his death, one of the many who either jumped from or were blown out of the twin towers. Never announced in advance, the performances are Brechtian assaults on the public, alternately revered (the Guggenheim Museum tries to commission three weeks’ worth of jumps) and reviled (termed “moronic” by an unnamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) and certainly risky, his free fall arrested by a simple safety harness, which badly damaged his spine and which he would have abandoned for his final jump had he not died, ironically enough, of natural causes, five hundred miles from New York City. Drew’s photograph and Falling Man’s performances are strangely linked to the still lifes by Giorgio Morandi mentioned several times in the novel. “These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she [Lianne] could not name, or in the irregular edges of the vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even.”

Falling Man exists somewhere between performance art and still life, a high-wire act in a deceptively low-key mode that for almost its entire second half seems to lose its way, to repeat (rather like Morandi’s still lifes or Falling Man’s reenactments) rather than advance, arriving at novel’s end at the moment just before the novel’s opening, as two worlds meet, when plane and tower become one, when the terrorist Hammad’s life enters the lawyer Keith Neudeker’s, and “before” becomes “after.” “The attack on the World Trade Center,” Salman Rushdie wrote a few months after 9/11, “was essentially a monstrous act of the imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations, to shape our own imaginings of the future . The terrorists of September 11, and the planners of that day’s events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists, hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to strike at the very heart of our high-tech world.” Falling Man is another low-tech attack, but one that does little to alter the perception and understanding of a spectacular, supposedly iconic event that has already begun to recede into forgetfulness, kept alive chiefly by self-serving politicians in and for a society of metaphoric Alzheimer’s sufferers. Falling Man may not be the 9/11 novel that people need, but the author of The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld remains the best guide to how America got to where it is now.

Hagen, W. M. 2008. "Review of Falling Man." World Literature Today, 82 (1): 59. Hagen is not all that approving of DeLillo’s novel in this review.

Jackson, Thomas DePietro, ed. 2005. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. DePietro has scoured the media for tidbits from this reclusive author. In this collection, readers learn, from the author’s own words, the things that have inspired his writing.

Junod, Tom. 2007. "The Man Who Invented 9/11." Esquire, 147 (6): 38. Like many other critics, Junod believes that DeLillo is well ahead of his time, having all but predicted an event like 9/11. So who better to write a novel about the twin towers?

LeClair, Thomas. 1988. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. LeClair presents a collection of critical essays on DeLillo’s work.

Leith, Sam. 2007. "After the Fall." The Spectator, May 19, p. 246. Leith praises DeLillo’s writing, particularly the careful way he constructs each sentence. Leith, like many other reviewers, believes that DeLillo has been waiting all his career to write this book.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. 1991. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This excellent book is another collection of essays exploring DeLillo’s work.

McAlpin, Heller. 2007. “Falling Man: The Day It All Came Down." Christian Science Monitor, May 29, p. 13. McAlpin finds that DeLillo’s book has the ability to numb his readers with the chilling details of 9/11 that numbed the world.

Ruppersburg, Hugh, and Tim Engles, eds. 2000. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Boston: G.K. Hall. This is another excellent collection of literary essays by those who have studied DeLillo.

Seligman, Craig. 2007. "A Muddled Look at Memory, Loss and Pain." Seattle Times, May 27, p. K-7. Seligman provides a mixed review of the novel.

Szalai, Jennifer. 2007. "After the Fall." Harper’s Magazine, 315 (1886): 91–95. Szalai not only reviews DeLillo’s Falling Man, she also traces the history of the twin towers in DeLillo’s previous novels.