Falling Man

[sawyl]

What to say about Don Delillo's Falling Man? Set in the period just after 911, it follows a family as they reassess their beliefs and ideas following the attacks. Some of the themes are familiar from White Noise: family, children and the way children speak or don't speak, fear of memory loss and senescence, the relationships between husbands and wives, and the constant struggle to construct and maintain an identity in the face of an absurd and uncaring world.

While reading Falling Man I found myself reminded of Pattern Recognition, William Gibson's post-911 novel, with the two books seeming to form mirror images of each other. Both characters feature a father caught up in the fall of the towers, but whereas Delillo allows Justin's father to reappear covered in dust and blood, Gibson banishes Cayce's father to an unknown limbo. But both outcomes are similarly traumatic to those involved, with the trauma expressed in similar ways: Justin will only speak in monosyllables; whereas Cayce takes to recite the talismanic phrase, he took a duck in the face at 250 knots, to stay sane. The journeys taken by the two sets of protagonists may be different, but the results are the same. Where Gibson's characters travel the world, imposing order on the world through the medium of the Footage, Delillo's characters remain in New York and instead turn inward to re-evaluate their responses to an absurd and horrible world that can deprive a man of almost his entire poker group in a single dreadful blow.

Although I thought Falling Man was generally excellent — I particularly liked the scenes between Lianne and her declining mother, which seemed particularly touching — there were a few things I didn't think were completely successful. I'm not sure that the sections with the terrorists really added much, although I'll admit they did help integrate the last few pages in the whole novel, and I'm not entirely sure that the last section, set three years after the attacks, was quite as successful as its predecessors. But these are minor quibble, given the consistent strength of the majority of the novel, and it is probably only because of the quality of the rest of the book that I'm picking holes.