Falling Man
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, 2007,
Hardcover, 256 pages, $26

The mythological Phoenix arose from the ashes of its own nest, reborn. And, evoking that myth, one of Don DeLillo’s central characters in Falling Man emerges from a similar netherworld, searching for his own rebirth.

It takes no more than two paragraphs into this wonderfully elegiac, at times maddeningly misdirected, novel for this odyssey to begin. Here, DeLillo hands us Keith Neudecker stumbling out of a swirl of smoke and ash, one that “came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherwordly things in the morning pall.”

The morning is Sept. 11, 2001 and Keith lives in Manhattan—that island of schist, aerie of glittering skyscrapers. More than that, he works—or rather, worked—in one of the two towers of the World Trade Center, those twin obelisks of American achievement and economic supremacy that have, unbelievably, unimaginably, been brought down, turned to rubble, to dust, to death. Keith needs redemption from the cataclysm, so he heads to the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne. Surprised yet heartened by the arrival of the sooty figure, she takes him in. And thus begins the struggle of two very ordinary people trying to reconnect: with themselves, with each other, with that realm of otherwordly things.

In many ways, 9/11 is a perfect landscape for DeLillo. A master of the lyrical narrative, he can overlay our collective pasts and presents with his character’s personal regrets and reflections with unparalleled grace. His specialty is illustrating communal occurrences— the “Airborne Toxic Event” of White Noise, the fantastically rendered Giants-Dodgers baseball game that begat “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in Underworld. This is coupled with his virtuosic ability to render that which we’ve been taught to fear—terrorism—in detail so loving, it makes humans out of people too easily identified as monsters. It’s as if the detonations wrought by terrorists, in some way, push us all together.

Yet, pushed together, we don’t, as Keith and Lianne discover, always adhere. Sometimes, we circle around each other and these two, once caught in a solar system where love served as the central star, are now spinning in neighboring galaxies. Keith finds himself flung into the arms of another woman, beginning an interracial affair with the wife of the man whose briefcase Keith, in the shock of the cataclysm, found himself carrying out of the towers. Lianne, in turn, establishes a life that revolves around a writing group for people with Alzheimer’s. And her sightings of the Falling Man, a business-suit clad performance artist, who, taking a cue from the censored image of an unknown man plummeting from the North Tower, jumps from buildings and elevated subway tracks alike only to hang like a suspended spider from a harness, limbs frozen in downward trajectory, to the delight and horror of the crowds gathered below.

There’s a reverence in the way DeLillo lays it all out on the page. You can’t help but be in awe of him. Until, that is, Keith gives up his legal practice to join the professional poker circuit. While presented as a metaphor for the community of loners 9/11 spawned, these renderings of five-card-stud addicts move at a slug’s pace. Compared with Lianne, and her frustrations raising their son, Justin—who searches the skies with binoculars for a “Bill Lawton”—Keith’s stakes seem minor. These gambling digressions almost threaten to dismantle the book until, in the last few pages, DeLillo—who has been delving into the minds of the terrorists at each chapter’s end—places you right into the second plane as it strikes the tower. Then a “blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall.” Eventually regaining his feet, he stumbles, with hundreds of others, down the smoky stairwell to a sort of freedom. That wonderfully-realized collision and its immediate aftermath brings the book full circle into an ash-encrusted world, and sends DeLillo, once again, blazing into fictional glory.