FALLING MAN
a novel by Don DeLillo
There were great expectations for a Don DeLillo novel that
confronted the epic tragedy of 9/11, but it seems reasonable that
"Falling Man" is less ambitious than many of us wanted it to be. It is
beautifully written and definitely furnishes the mood of severe
dislocation when a symbol of our abstracted sense of self, the Word
Trade Center towers, were attacked and destroyed. There is a
poetically conveyed sense of distance between the characters and the
unimaginable tragedy that unfolded. In keeping with DeLillo's themes of
staring down institutions that influence behavior, policy, choices and
assigns significance to products and habits that are meant to supplant
our inner life, the novel his the ongoing concern with trying to
understand people who vaguely adhered to images, propaganda,
manufactured consensus and consumerism that at least told us,
theoretically, what America and Americans stood for--a herd in many
ethnic and cultural subsets acting "as if" their life had fixed
certainty and purpose--who confront the terror not just of terrorism,
mass murder and increased violations of their rights, but the terror of
realizing that faith in The System and its statements of purpose are a
fiction intended to keep our eyes off the prize and instead glued to the
television tube and computer monitor.
The novel,though, reads
at times like a parody of DeLillo's best work. Despite the customary
excellence of the writing, the author strains for effect sometimes,
drifts into digressions that are page fillers. There is a sense of
obligation one detects in the otherwise superb craft; given tht he is
the genius who wrote "White Noise" and "Underground", two of the best
novels every written that found the empty chamber that passes as the
American heart, we have a great writer competing with a recent history
that is so incredible and ground shaking that it so fars defies literary
imagination to successfully diagnosis and turn into superb irony. It is
worth a read for DeLillo completest, but this is not the book to begin
with if you've been thinking of reading one or more of his books. I
would suggest "White Noise " or "Great Jones Street" for that.
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