Reviewed by Scott Esposito
8.9.07

In End Zone, Don DeLillo's 1972 novel about how college football is like nuclear holocaust, one of the secondary characters takes a class in "the untellable." The dark irony is that while his classmate learns about what can't be spoken, the novel's protagonist becomes obsessed with the jargon of nuclear warfare, the very stuff that has drawn humankind's horrific self-apocalypse down from the reaches of the abstract into kill ratios and megatonnage.

We may have learned to speak about nuclear warfare all too casually, but Falling Man, Don DeLillo's new novel, is concerned with something that remains unspeakable, both for us and for its characters. Critics who have dismissed this book for not providing a vivid enough account of 9/11/2001 (most notably, Andrew O'Hagan in The New York Review of Books) miss the point; DeLillo isn't concerned with the events of that day so much as in dramatizing how the survivors and their friends and family—New York in general, really—fill the unique space created by an unprecedented atrocity on U.S. soil.

This makes Falling Man something of a curveball. DeLillo's earlier books were so interested in postmodern spectacles, public images of death, and piercing the hyperreal American bubble, that one might imagine DeLillo could dedicate an entire book strictly to the day the towers fell. Indeed, as Tom Junod wrote in Esquire, "no one in our literature has done more to earn the right" to write about 9/11 than DeLillo. The towers were precisely the catastrophic symbol that DeLillo would have invented (they're right there on the cover of Underworld, after all, in an eerie photo by Andre Kertesz), but here he leaves them alone. Good for him. Falling Man may not be what we were expecting, it may be a book more concerned with personal psychology than late capitalism, but it is still provocative and affecting, a book that shows that when fiction stops short of speaking, it often says far more than when nonfiction dribbles on with data and analysis.

The book starts when, walking dazedly away from the immense heap of rubble that once housed his office, Keith heads not toward a hospital, but toward his ex-wife's house. It's been eight years since the separation, but after he's patched up he moves back in, and neither Keith nor his wife, Lianne, can quite say why.

This is but the book's first example of people short of articulation, and as it proceeds they rapidly accumulate. DeLillo is chiefly concerned with how his characters confront the challenge of articulating in the days immediately after 9/11, but he stretches this to include more prosaic ways in which people fail to speak. Keith and Lianne, for instance, are faced anew with the problems that led to their separation and the challenge of talking about them this time. Lianne's mother, Nina, continually sidesteps Lianne's entreaties to come to terms with her aging body or to probe beneath the surface of her strange relationship with her European art-dealer boyfriend. Lianne herself fails to talk about her father's choice of suicide over Alzheimer's, even as she tries to self-medicate by leading Alzheimer's patients in weekly sessions in which they write about themselves and grow less and less capable of expression. Even TV is unable to speak: Lianne and Keith take to watching the news with the sound off, arguably an improvement.

Together, the characters come to feel like Falling Man, a performance artist who hangs from buildings wearing a suit and tie; they are falling through their lives toward their ultimate future, so intractably suspended in habit that they are unable to find any solid surface from which to make a change. (Those, that is, who even recognize a change is what they want.) The book becomes about Keith's struggle to not be a Falling Man, to choose to not "fall out of the world" but to grasp the possibility opened by the towers.

DeLillo is taking a fraught strategy, filling his novel with characters that fundamentally never go anywhere, but he makes it work largely because he gives them compelling metaphors that help the book articulate what they can't quite. For instance, Lianne's mother has paintings by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi on her walls; though no one knows quite what to make of the ashed-out blocks of Manhattan, these monochromatic still-lifes (quite fittingly, natura morta in Italian) seem the perfect representation of the grayed, depopulated landscape left around the towers.

That's a lovely image, but what's remarkable about this book is how DeLillo makes his metaphors perform double, triple, and even quadruple duty. The Morandis extend to become the focus of Lianne's mother's relationship with her boyfriend and a nexus for the intersection of art and politics, both pre- and post-9/11. Similarly, Alzheimer's isn't only used to concretize inarticulation. Later on, the disease's potential to cripple anyone for no reason becomes a taut symbol of terrorism's ongoing menace, the line between vigilance and fear, the new order that make no-news news:

She told him the findings were unremarkable. There was no sign of impairment. She kept using the word unremarkable. She loved the word. The word expressed enormous relief. There were no lesions, hemorrhages or infarcts. . . . Then she said she wasn't sure she believed the findings. Okay for now but what about later? He'd told her many times and told her again that she was devising ways to be afraid. This wasn't fear, she said, but only skepticism.

DeLillo is possibly also implying that our fear of terrorism stems from its ability to leave us mute like Alzheimer's, yet this degenerative menace also cuts to the core of Lianne's personality; her father's suicide is the defining event in her adult life, one that forms the basis of her character.

These metaphors that bear so much weight—and their increased potency when combined together—let Falling Man fit a surprising depth into its 246 pages; so does the book's elliptical structure. We are fed this story in tiny bits and pieces, scarcely any segment is longer than a few pages, and each segment seems to be about some subtext or theme or idea as much as it is about characters and events. Every word feels suspect, every utterance a potential clue or double-meaning. I would say that DeLillo has done this to mimic the post-9/11 world where no one's beyond suspicion and everyone's a potential mass murderer, except that DeLillo has been sculpting such paranoid, ivory-white prose his entire career. Nonetheless, Falling Man feels even more carefully distilled than other elliptical late DeLillo works, ponderous, cavernous, labyrinthine despite its slight size.

End Zone concludes with its protagonist opting for silence over words that mock catastrophe, and DeLillo has been wise to follow this example. Many 9/11-novels have failed because they have tried to be like fortune tellers, explaining events of that day far before any of us can know what they mean. As with fortunes, these novels have felt either absurdly empty or condescendingly pat. In Falling Man, DeLillo has simply acknowledged the honest truth: none of us yet knows what 9/11 means. His book is a compelling rendition of that fact, a portrait of grief-stricken people still trying to figure out what to say next.