(Picador, £16.99)
The elements of Falling Man's plot—in reality, hardly a plot at all—seem haphazardly assembled. Keith Neudecker, working at his unidentified job in the World Trade Centre on 9/11, survives the terrorist attacks and manages, along with a mass of other shell-shocked survivors, to exit the building by stairway. Although injured, he chooses not to go straight to hospital, but instead walks uptown from ground zero to the apartment where his son and estranged wife are living, thereby effecting a de facto marital reconciliation. Despite this, he begins a brief affair with a woman who has also survived the attacks, but then abruptly, and for no obvious reason, ends it. Later, also for no apparent reason—except, perhaps, as a sort of homage to the friendly weekly card game he attended prior to the attack—he begins commuting to Las Vegas for extended periods of time in order to play poker semi-professionally.
Keith's wife Lianne, a freelance copy-editor, is still in mourning for her father, an Alzheimer's victim who took his own life in order to avoid the deterioration lying ahead. As a form of self-therapy, Lianne conducts an evening writing class for other early-stage Alzheimer's sufferers, who compose short essays about their experience of the disease and their dread of its coming depredations. She also spends time with her widowed mother, Nina, a retired professor whose enigmatic European lover is an art dealer with a shady political past who travels to and from the US at irregular intervals and for mysterious reasons. Towards the end of the book, which covers a span of three or four years, we learn that Nina has died, although her death, like so many of the other key events in the novel, occurs off-stage, undramatised.
Keith and Lianne's son, named Justin but usually referred to simply (and annoyingly) as "the kid," plays apprehensive imaginary games with a couple of his friends, keeping a sharp watch out for a second attack from Osama bin Laden, whose name they mishear as Bill Lawton. Justin is occasionally sullen, occasionally cheeky, but most often severely under-characterised, somehow just there, a generic factor in the dysfunctional family equation.
Three times in the course of the novel, we spend brief interludes in flashback with Hammad, one of the 9/11 hijackers, first in Germany, then in Florida, and finally in one of the commandeered planes as it heads back towards Manhattan. Almost nothing happens during these interludes, other than repetitious internal monologues about faith, martyrdom, and jihad.
If this bald recitation of the plot seems a bit flat and a bit static, it is no accident. The novel itself is flat and static. Very few of its strands develop in a way that could be described as dramatic; most are simply presented, and then more or less reiterated with minimal variation. Nor do they feel as if they have much to do with one another. It is easy enough to suggest a nexus of themes: chance, mortality, the waywardness of memory, the precariousness and apparent purposelessness of existence, the tenuousness of relationships, the need for, and the impossibility of, establishing durable connections. Easy enough, and not necessarily inaccurate, but still in some fundamental way misleading. Such abstractions are not themselves the stuff of narrative, and in this novel they are never brought to life; their presence never coheres into a satisfying unity.
And the narrating voice, no matter how intimate the scenes it describes, always sounds dispassionate, external, disengaged. This authorial distance has been a hallmark of DeLillo's prose throughout his career, an unsettling absence of affect, a certain matter-of-fact alienation that reinforces the oddness of his vision by appearing oblivious to it. Here, however, the effect feels laborious and self-conscious, drawing attention to itself while establishing an emotional barrier between the reader and the novel's events and characters. DeLillo has—he has always had—a gift for creating an atmosphere of inchoate dread, and while it doesn't fail him here, neither does it seem to attach itself to any larger artistic purpose.
One can argue—as no doubt some will—that DeLillo's stylistic neutrality, his rigorous anaesthetising of sentiment, is the objective correlative of precisely the emotional numbness with which this novel concerns itself. It's a defensible position, but it doesn't, to me, reflect the actual experience of reading Falling Man.
There are compensations, of course. DeLillo is a master, and one finds oneself admiring sentences, paragraphs, snippets of dialogue, a few extended set-pieces. And the climactic scene is extraordinarily powerful. The novel ends almost cinematically, with a sudden jump-cut shifting focus from Hammad, on the hijacked plane heading inexorably towards the twin towers, to Keith, at work in his office as the plane strikes. What follows are seven pages of intense, precise, beautifully evoked chaos and horror. These vibrant pages are not enough to redeem the desiccation of the previous 239, nor to justify appropriating an immense historical tragedy for a slender account of domestic malaise. But they are enough to make you wonder, however briefly, whether you have misjudged the book you have just finished.
