Falling Man
Escaping from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, Keith Neudecker makes his way to the uptown apartment where his ex-wife and young son are living and considers how the day's events have irrevocably changed his perception of the world.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2019–2020years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- When it comes to post-Underworld DeLillo, as far as I am concerned his major novel of that period, and really the only work that sticks in the memory after a few weeks (and I have read them all) is Falling Man.
If you are asking about books from any period of his output, then White Noise can be recommended, I personally see it as his greatest achievement. Underworld gets a lot of hype due to its sheer length but I don’t find it particularly impressive or moving.
- Falling Man seemed to me to capture what happened to the American psyche post 9/11 better than anything else that I've read. As far as I can tell we're collectively still falling.
- He's probably my favorite living author (although to be honest I mostly read books by long dead authors). I've read a few. I think Libra was the best one. I also read Falling Man, Cosmopolis, and The Body Artist. He has a wonderful writing style.
I've been trying to get through Ratner's Star for years. It's not bad but I suppose it's just not the most compelling.
- Pretty much all of his work is highly recommended! He's famous for White Noise and Cosmopolis (there was a movie with the guy from Twilight), but Mao and Falling Man are probably my favorites.
Delillo and Cormac McCarthy are two current authors I would expect to be read 100 years from now.
- > A character is part of the pleasure a writer wants to give his readers. A character who lives, who says interesting things. I want to give pleasure through language, through the architecture of a book or a sentence and through characters who may be funny, nasty, violent, or all of these. But I’m not the kind of writer who dotes on certain characters and wants readers to do the same. The fact is every writer likes his characters to the degree that he’s able to work out their existence.
This is exactly how I feel about characters in novels. It reminds me of Nabakov, who famously ended a lecture with:
> In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter
I think that's basically right: the best way to read a novel is as a dialogue with the author.
DeLillo is the only example of an American who has written about recent history and contemporary American life in a way that resonants with me: unmistakably American, involved, but also detached. He's written about everything from foreign policy (The Names), to academia (White Noise, Ratner's Star), to JFK's assassination (Libra), to the Cold War (Underworld), to finance (Cosmopolis), to 9/11 (Falling Man), to the Iraq War (Point Omega), to start-up culture and worship of technology (Zero K).
