Novel: Falling Man

Overview

Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) returns to territory he has long examined: the way catastrophe refracts private life and public language. The novel follows the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks through the fractured lives of a small circle of New Yorkers. It moves between intimate domestic scenes and unsettling public moments, probing how people try to reassemble identity and memory after a moment that resists comprehension.
The narrative resists melodrama and easy resolution, favoring short, crystalline scenes that accumulate into a portrait of dislocation. Images of falling, rubble, and ritualized reenactment recur as the characters confront loss, secrecy, and the pressures of a media-saturated culture that both demands and dulls feeling.

Plot and Characters

The central figure is Keith Neudecker, a survivor who emerges from the World Trade Center and returns home to a marriage already marked by distance. His wife, Lianne, and their son, Justin, must negotiate the presence of a man who looks like the man they used to share a life with and the absence of who he was before the day that unmoored him. Keith's survival becomes both a bond and a barrier; he is physically present but altered in ways his family struggles to name.
Circling them are other figures whose lives intersect with the city's attempt to resume ordinary rhythms. A mysterious street performer who reenacts a falling pose in public spaces becomes a focal point for anxiety and argument, drawing attention to the ethical and aesthetic questions around representation and remembrance. The novel allows these characters to move through therapy sessions, awkward reunions, and the routines of work and parenting, emphasizing small gestures and silences over plot-driven catharsis.

Themes

Falling Man is primarily about memory and the ethics of representation. DeLillo examines how trauma compresses time, leaving survivors to parse fragments and images that resist integration. The recurring motif of falling, literal, photographic, and performative, asks whether one can ever look directly at atrocity without becoming complicit in its spectacle, and whether ritual or reenactment helps or harms the work of mourning.
The book also interrogates the modern self under pressure from systems of work, law, and media. Characters try to reconstitute identity in a culture that offers narratives ranging from patriotic unity to commodified grief. Questions about authenticity, the privatization of sorrow, and the strange ways language both obscures and attempts to clarify experience run throughout the novel.

Style and Impact

DeLillo's prose is spare, composed of short, precise paragraphs that create a cumulative rhetorical force. Sentences often hinge on image and phrase rather than overt explanation, inviting the reader to inhabit the unsettled psychic space of the characters. The novel's restraint, its refusal to dramatize every emotion, amplifies the profound awkwardness of survival and the everyday rituals that follow catastrophe.
Falling Man provoked varied responses for its handling of such a recent and raw event; some praised its cool, contemplative interrogation, while others sought more explicit moral or political commentary. Its enduring interest lies in the way it stages the tensions between remembrance and forgetting, private and public grief, and the uneasy language that tries to hold them together.

Conclusion

The book leaves readers with a lingering sense of questions rather than answers: how to live after witnessing the unthinkable, how memory reshapes identity, and how a society can carry forward without flattening pain into image. DeLillo avoids tidy closure, favoring a sober meditation on loss and the everyday acts that attempt to restore a sense of continuity in a changed world.