These are the elements of Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man”: Smoke rising and rubble falling, acts of extreme selfishness or altruism played out in an atmosphere of confusion, and bewildered and scarred characters emerging from a city becoming a post-apocalyptic world unto itself.

“Man,” an enigmatic and poignant novel, explores several lives deeply affected by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center: Keith, a man who escapes from one of the towers; his estranged wife Lianne and son Justin; and Hammad, one of the hijackers.

These characters move in and out of the narration like ghosts, their identities and purposes often ambiguous, fading behind a curtain of aftershock and half-numbness that dominates the story.
Dialogue: both internal and external: dominates the majority of this novel.

Keith, Lianne, Justin, and Hammad grapple with the difficulties that have been forced upon them.   Keith ponders his desires and attachments to other human beings as he tries to reconnect with his wife after his near-death experience in the midst of an affair with another woman.   Lianne also wonders if these unfamiliar events are forcing her into falseness.   Do these bonds really exist, or are we being falsely united by trauma?   Other characters contemplate after the attacks how they should feel about the terrorists, their identities as Americans, or God.   Most dialogue is spoken as in a dream: fragmented, nonsequiter, and beautifully amorphous.   The style (also mirrored in the structure of the narration) can get a little irritating and hard to follow at times, but the various perspectives and theories the conversations reveal are well worth it.

The entire story is a long examination of a series of interconnected instances of cause-and-effect.   Don DeLillo tracks the ripples moving through the lives of children, adults, and seniors, all trying to find others or themselves.

Through DeLillo’s brilliant narration, we watch the progression of American fantasies: fantasies of wealth and power, but also destruction.   “Falling Man” draws us into the scene of a new country driven by tension, expressed mostly through ambiguity, moving characters blindly forward into the unknown and feared future.