A Muted Cry: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the “New Normal”Ah, the 9/11 novel. It hovers like a dark shadow over the literary landscape, beckoning its greatest writers to grapple with that tragic day and its lingering aftermath, to attempt to make some type of meaning, answer the unanswerable. The list is sparkling: John Updike (Terrorist, 2006), Jay McInerney (The Good Life, 2006), Ian McEwan (Saturday, 2005), Claire Messud (The Emperor’s Children, 2006), Jonathan Safron Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005) and Joseph O’Neill (Netherland, 2008) to name just a few. What separates Don DeLillo’s attempt, Falling Man (2007), from some of the aforementioned (and what has also divided critics), is his refusal to make any clear statements or offer any semblance of closure. According to Stacey Olster, some of these other texts showcase “the tendency of the imagination to blunt the impact of 9/11 with recuperative measures …. DeLillo’s re-creation of the attacks on the World Trade Center at the end of Falling Man, by contrast, leaves [the protagonist] Keith Neudecker where he is at the book’s beginning: witnessing a white shirt falling from the sky” (118). This leaves both writer and reader in a bind of sorts. We are left where we started, and herein lies the failure and success of DeLillo’s text. Falling Man, ultimately, is not a grand statement, a sweeping panorama of the American consciousness. Rather, it is a muted cry, showcasing the fragments and silences, capturing the gaps and ghostly minutiae of a few anesthetized individuals. Therefore, DeLillo’s novel encompasses the true American zeitgeist, the “new normal” following this tragedy, where Americans are stunned into picking up the shattered pieces and attempting to continue on with their lives in an uncertain future.Falling Man opens directly after the first plane hits. Keith Neudecker, a lawyer in one of the towers, makes his way “through the rubble and mud,” where “people [are] running past holding towels to their faces and jackets over their heads” (DeLillo 3), where he eventually arrives at the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne. Through a microscopic lens DeLillo follows these individuals as they attempt to piece their lives back together. Lianne hopes they start over again as a family, that this event will bring them closer together. Keith later becomes sexually involved with Florence, the woman whose briefcase he inadvertently grabs on his way out of the building. The sexual connection, though, is not driven by passion but an emotional fusion of their mutual traumas. Through this relationship each finds a brief connection—they share something others do not, but, like everything else in the text, this is only temporary as Keith eventually drifts away from both Florence and his family, spending large amounts of time in Las Vegas playing poker and feeling nothing. He is there but not there; his future as husband and father is left dangling, fading into the background under the weight of the event. Other individuals are brief, ghostly composites. Keith and Lianne’s son, Justin (along with his playmates), stare out of a window on the twenty-seventh floor watching for “Bill Lawton”—their misapprehension of bin Laden. A group of Alzheimer’s patients whom Lianne tutors by having them write in journals, scribble down thoughts and phrases—fragments—attempting to not only make sense of the event but their past and current lives as well. Each individual carries around trauma and hollowness, as though sleepwalking, anesthetized in his or her current existence, for “[t]here’s an empty space where America used to be” (193). Hovering strangely throughout the text is a performance artist named “Falling Man,” who visually recreates the image of people falling from the towers using a harness to suspend himself in mid-air. A panel discussion at a university argues whether Falling Man is a “Heartless exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror” (220). DeLillo uses the idea of Falling Man as a statement on the creation of art in the wake of horrific events. Is it shameless or exploitive, creating art out of others’ suffering? Is it too soon? Too painful? Is it ultimately up to our artists to represent these events? The only answer is that there is no answer. But the cumulative effect is a mimesis of sorts. The reader feels the numbness, the paralyzing aspect of horror, the fact that there are no answers, no direct way to deal with this event. This position is what has thus far divided critics.Michiko Kakutani reads Falling Man as a text containing “two paltry images: one of a performance artist reenacting the fall of bodies from the burning World Trade Center, and one of a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert” (3). Overall, she states, “Falling Man feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate” (1). What Kakutani does in her review is compare Falling Man to DeLillo’s previous work, especially his magnum opus, Underworld (1997). Whereas Underworld is DeLillo’s love letter to America, spanning decades with a seemingly endless cast of characters and ideas, Falling Man is small and muted, haunted with two predominant themes: trauma and loss. The only way to look at DeLillo’s 9/11 novel is in the context of other 9/11 novels. DeLillo can no longer write his previous way; he can no longer satirically comment about the consumer culture and its ramifications as he masterfully did in 1985 with White Noise. He, along with America, is traumatized, and this trauma is illustrated in the muted actions and silences, the sparse prose and fragments that make up Falling Man. Most of the time Keith Neudecker looks out “with a gaze that had no focus in it” (DeLillo 87); in bed with Lianne he “sometimes…seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all…” (103). Running into her on the street, Lianne notices this about Keith: “[t]here was a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze…. She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own…” (167). Florence, Keith’s brief lover, “talk[s] into her silence…another kind of eternity, the stillness in her face and body outside time” (157). What DeLillo does with his prose, these characters, is showcase a new mode of expression, something he began working on in The Body Artist (2001), and what he continues with in his latest novel, Point Omega (2010). Frank Rich sees the new DeLillo in Falling Man, noting that “[h]umor is not this novel’s calling card” (1). Unlike Kakutani, who emphasizes the limiting view of the text, Rich notes that “Falling Man, up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups…. In DeLillo’s hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There’s a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror” (1). This terror includes a frightening, claustrophobic look into the tower’s stairwell after the plane has hit:They had to wait at times, long stalled moments, and he looked straight ahead. When the line moved again he took a step down and then another. They talked to him several times, different people, and when this happened he closed his eyes, maybe because it meant he didn’t have to reply. (DeLillo 244)DeLillo has missteps within the text but they are few. His portrayal of Mohamed Atta, a terrorist who ends up on one of the planes, feels stilted and forced. Also, one of the text’s main strengths—its mutedness—comes close to overwhelming. What do we do when we can do nothing? How do we break out of our nightmares, deal with our traumas? These instances are overshadowed, however, by DeLillo’s crystalline prose. Memory is a thing one cannot escape from. The event is always there in the forefront, shadowing everything we do. Keith thinks of Florence and their brief affair: “[h]e’d thought of it in a remote way, like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you’ll never do” (227). What DeLillo has done in Falling Man is showcase the “new normal” in America. No longer are we a country untouched by terror. We now live in a new, scarier world. In an essay published two months after September 11, DeLillo remarks:We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations. Where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children. For many people, the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment. (7)What, ultimately, will come from this change? With our own tragedy will our empathy for others increase? DeLillo, in Falling Man, has given us memory, intimately showcasing our disturbances through the lives of a few people which, in turn, reflects on us as a whole.
Being clever, that's how DeLillo does it.Falling Man, a sparse work that is better than The Body Artist and much much better than Cosmopolis, does about as much as it can hope to do. Don DeLillo's powers simply aren't up to the task of making a new statement about a national tragedy like 9/11. He is an assembler of words and sentences and paragraphs and - at times - chapters, but he is not a thinker. What, then, has made him considered such an important voice in American letters?Being clever, that's how DeLillo does it.Americana and White Noise, much more than the oddly over-praised Libra and Underworld, are when DeLillo is at his very best. When he is able to write interesting sentences about unimportant things, when he is able to lend unserious topics the full focus of his rich prose, in other words, DeLillo is doing what he was called to do.But when he tries to use character-less personages to show us how important 9/11 was to New York's literary set, frankly, he's way beyond his talent's reach. Fundamentally, DeLillo is unable to lend gravity to a grave happening because such gravity would require characters that, in some way, resemble human beings.DeLillo doesn't seem to know any persons in real life, and so he assembles collections of phrases and limbs and quirky qualities - like a character who speaks only in monosyllabic words - and then subjects them to detailed scenery. DeLillo's characters belong to science fiction more than literary fiction - and in this way DeLillo seems to have become a lightweight Thomas Pynchon (which is fine; Pynchon can't be taken in more than small doses).Being clever, that's how DeLillo does it.In the last 10 pages of this 246-page book, there's a sentence that goes like this:She was arguing with herself but it wasn't argument, just the noise the brain makes.This sentence more than any other may act as metaphor for DeLillo's recent works. Standing alone in its own paragraph, this sentence seems to say something important. But once a reader stops and looks at it from 360 degrees (what any artist should want), the reader realizes there's nothing there at all.Better put, DeLillo is telling us a story but it isn't a story, just the noise a writer makes.When this unseriousness is married to DeLillo's usual tricks of repeating one clever phrase in stand-alone paragraphs throughout a chapter, what is left is a meaningless work by an artist whose fundamental lack of gravity has finally outrun his ample talent.Being annoying, that's how DeLillo did it.
What do You think about Falling Man (2007)?
The book’s title is a powerful metaphor for the descent of the West. The towers fall, survivors who emerge are dazed, their lives forever altered. Soon after the event, a “falling man,” dressed in a business suit, makes periodic appearances on the top of tall buildings, from which, strapped to a safety harness, he jumps off into the void to hang suspended and scare onlookers, until he dies, wittingly or unwittingly, in one of those jumps.The opening scene of Keith, clutching someone else’s briefcase, emerging from the wreckage is powerfully delivered. He asks to be taken by a friendly driver to his estranged wife’s apartment where she cares for him, and even allows him to sleep in her bed until his physical recovery is complete. But 9/11 has changed them forever and they drift into different worlds while remaining within the boundaries of a re-united nuclear family. Keith has a brief relationship with Florence, another survivor of the towers, and the woman whose briefcase he brought out of the wreck with him. Theirs is a shared experience and his visits to her offer an opportunity for both to expunge the trauma resident within. But after the catharsis is complete, she moves on and he returns to his dysfunctional family. The prose is sparse and impactful with minimum attributions, which I found a bit hard to acclimatize to as I did not know who was speaking at times. I found Keith and his wife Lianne sympathetic characters, pawns to the events that befall them and the periodic rages that overcome them as a consequence. Lianne finds her catharsis by assisting Alzheimer’s patients record their life stories before they lose their faculties; her father had decided to end his life prematurely when he was first diagnosed with the illness. To some extent Lianne, Florence and Keith are like Alzheimer’s patients themselves, stumbling along with frozen memories, disoriented from the “event that changed history.” And Keith’s poker players and their rules reminded me of the extremists and their rigidity. Many of the poker players too are destroyed in the falling towers and the survivors are released from the norms that bonded them and are dispersed to become professional gamblers, free to make their own rules.De Lillo aims barbs at America and the terrorists alike through his characters: quotes like “America is becoming the centre of its own shit” and “They (the terrorists) are not liberating a people, casting out a dictator – kill the innocent – only that.” The survivors of the event however do not blame either of these entities, instead they blame God; and their desire for revenge seems to be a natural reaction to such a violation.I was prepared to give this book higher stars than those given by many of the other reviewers, but then I stumbled upon passages that took me into the world of the terrorists – passages which must have been re-written from umpteen newspaper articles that had attempted to decipher their murky world in the days following 9/11. The final scene of the book was all about a terrorist and what he was going through as the planes hit the towers, and I wondered why? Whose story was this? I would have been much happier if this short book had ended when the unknown falling man had taken his final leap – point made! Perhaps the publisher wanted this book to slip out off the definition of being a novella and land up on the book store shelves as a novel?
—Shane
Although I understood that the writing style was fractured to reflect the fractured lives of the characters, I found the style annoying and frustrating. Though the topic was interesting, the author would switch from character to character and it was hard to figure out what was going on. In the beginning I would keep going back and looking for clues in the text so I could figure out which character's story I was on, but it became so annoying that I gave up and just would read, not always knowing which character we were on. I got that it was probably a reflection of the mindset after 9/11, that it all blended together and felt empty, but I just felt that this could have been communicated in a better fashion for the reader. The story is depressing and fractured. An interesting topic and manner of handling it, but just not to my taste. I think if the writing had been clearer or more engaging for the reader, I might have loved this book. Others might really enjoy it, particularly the more intellectual types - the english lit majors. (Yes, Katy Lain, I am talking to you)
—Julia
Organic shrapnel = undeniably awesome. Strong opening, riveting end. Otherwise, muddling through 245 pages of middling DeLillo isn't the worst way to pass some time. This one reminded me a lot of Roth's "Everyman," in that they both seemed like worked-up sketches compared to their more developed, "great" books. Also, these characters (other than the token terrorist) don't really exist in systems -- like the academy (White Noise), the football program (Endgame), the music industry (Great Jones Street), the plot to kill JFK (Libra), those touched by a particular baseball (Underworld) -- and so the characters hardly seem to exist (maybe that's the point of the unoccupied floating shirt at the end?). When the terrorist's plane goes into the building the POV switches in the middle of a paragraph to Keith, suggesting that the terrorist's intentionally voided humanity is transferred from Jihadist to an American office worker? But maybe that transfer comes too late? Or maybe it's too conveninent and sort of way too subtle a suggestion -- but if true to the author's intention, that transfer parries critiques that all characters seem like particularly DeLillo-brand semi-unhuman humans, mainly because everyone speaks the same suggestively clipped DeLillon English -- this doesn't bother me when the exposition throughout is high-art fireworks and we're happily immersed in DeLillo World, but here the prose is not so rockin' on every page, we're not exactly immersed, or more so we're skimming the surface? Plus, because these unrealish, not particularly particular characters aren't necessarily cast as "cogs in a machine," volitionless servants of fatality, their inhumanity doesn't suggest some hefty theme related to contemporary humanity? A "survivors of the stairwells" system isn't worked up well enough, same with "terrorized citizens of the NYC grid" system, again, compared to systems in the other books. Not that DD always needs to deal with these systems, just that it seems like that's the territory he's claimed, it's where he's planted his flag -- and it seems like if he worked another two or three years on this one, he'd more clearly squeeze some complexities out of the current draft and reveal a couple of hermaneutically bad-ass, heretofore-concealed matrices? Not sure I'm making sense. What I mean is: this one isn't as spare as "The Body Artist" -- its body actually has all sorts of stubby thematic limbs growing from it, and it'd've been awesome if these limbs evolved and grew hands and took hold of other hands so it could hug itself tight. Or, alternately, if the stubs were severed and sanded clean. Anyway, I'd say: two stars plus one for various passages of sheer DeLillo-y goodness.
—Lee
