Falling for DeLillo

On my street there is new graffiti that reads “9/11= BS.” The black spray painted marks, reducing a catastrophic event into a trite formula, led me to wonder about how our perceptions of such an historic marker gets transformed over time. Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man, revisits 9/11 six years later through a series of characters including a survivor and his estranged wife, a widow and a suitcase. The novel follows these characters through the aftermath of 9/11 while simultaneously tracking the thoughts of a terrorist before he flies the plane into the first tower of the World Trade Center. DeLillo successfully reveals the complexity of the event’s aftereffects through a non-linear timeline: the present interweaves with the past, actual experience intersects with memory—all forming part of one continuum, ending with the cataclysmic occurrence of the crash itself.

Falling Man

by Don DeLillo

Scribner, 256 pages, $26