Book Review: Falling Man

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

It seems Don DeLillo was always going to write a novel around the September 11 terrorist attacks. The elements of terrorism, faith, New York City and humanity at the extremes have been recurring themes through his 14 novels and 35-plus years as one of America’s most profound novelists. His new novel, Falling Man, is the book that brings them together.

The events of September 11, 2001, are so much a part of our collective consciousness that DeLillo does not need to spend much time on the big picture. Instead, he focuses on just three people: Keith, an office worker in the World Trade Centre; Lianne, his estranged wife with whom he reunites in the aftermath of the tragedy; and Hammad, one of the 9-11 hijackers whose three brief but haunting appearances punctuate the novel.

Of course, it is in the lives of individual such as these—individuals such as us—that the real issues of terror and faith, tragedy and hope, sorrow and love are played out. Any or all of us who have lost sleep wrestling with the realities of fear and death, the possibilities and impossibilities of God, the question of hope amid the despair of the world knows the human experience DeLillo invokes. And this is the real drama of DeLillo’s story.

Even DeLillo’s sketch of Hammad the hijacker is not as certain as such an outrageous act suggests. Hammad never quite expects the hijacking will take place, always expecting the plot will be foiled before it can be put into action. And as the hijacked plane hurtles toward the New York skyline, he buckles his seatbelt, even as he repeats to himself the assurances of his faith.

By contrast, three years after escaping the collapsing towers, Keith gambles away his days on the poker tournament circuit, perhaps prisoner to the seemingly random “luck” that saw him escape the towers while colleagues and friends did not get such a chance.

But it is Lianne who is the fraught soul of DeLillo’s novel. “There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? . . . She was free to think and believe and doubt simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.”

But Lianne find this impossible to do. In the last act of DeLillo’s novel, set three years after the attacks, she retains her resistance of paradox: “God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That’s why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be.”

While people around her are reading the Koran, Lianne finds herself a regular attender at a nearby church—not a participant, but an atendder—who begins to feel a connectedness with the other regulars. “Isn’t it the world that brings you to God?” she reflects while sitting in the near-empty church. “Beauty, grief terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas. Others bring you closer, church brings you closer, the stained glass windows of a church, the pigments inherent in the glass, the metallic oxides fused into the glass, God in clay and stone, or was she babbling to herself to pass the time?”

Whatever else it might be, Falling Man offers a portrait of contemporary faith, lived in a world of mass media, terrorism, urban lifestyle and private worlds. It is a psychological novel in which the questions of faith do not resolve neatly. We are caught between the fear that there might not be a God and the equal fear that there might be a God, either is terrifying and world-shaking. It takes faith to acknowledge and live in the tension between faith and doubt, when so much of life simultaneously urges us to God and repeatedly questions God’s existence and benevolence.

DeLillo describes the closest his character comes to resolution of this tension: “She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice. God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here.’”

And, as such, DeLillo’s novel ends at a sacred starting point.