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Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief, and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
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I suppose I admire what DeLillo has done with this book, but I can't say I loved it. There's lots of great language, especially when he's describing the attacks the World Trade Center, but much of the narrative annoyed me, also. I saw no real reason, for example, to have sections from the point of view of one of the hijackers. Perhaps the point was that he was also a falling man, and in some sense, in the plane, that was literally true, but I don't believe it was spiritually true in the same way that the main protagonist Keith was. Anyway, DeLillo fans will like this, but I doubt it will be anyone's favorite. And everyone else should probably give it a pass.
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