Jams

Falling Man

by Matt Hotz

By Don DeLilloScribner, 256 pp., $26

Never forget.

The slogan was ubiquitous in the days, weeks and months following 9/11. The latest novel from Don DeLillo � which opens in the street outside the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 � is a rumination on forgetting and remembering.

Keith Neudecker staggers away from the collapsing towers, drifting towards Brooklyn, not quite sure why. He and his wife have long been separated, but he ends up at her door. Wordlessly, they know that he lives here again, recast in his original roles as husband to Lianne and father to Justin.

There is no happy ending, though. Keith was distant before the separation and is more distant upon his return. He falls into a brief affair with fellow North Tower survivor Florence. Lianne sees her husband lying next to her but feels no closer than when they were separated. Justin spends hours scanning the skies for more skyscraper-bound planes.

DeLillo defies some of his own tendencies in this book. Underworld and Libra, written more than a quarter of a century after the events that inspired them, unravelled slowly over hundreds of pages. Falling Man, however, is a slender volume published less than six years after 9/11. With so little difference between the now and the then, there's little room to offer the insights and gradual, realistic development of his other historically based novels.

Instead, DeLillo uses his characters and events to examine the idea of memory: Keith listening to Florence recount the trip down the stairs of the North Tower to fill in the gaps in his own recollections; Lianne working with Alzheimer's victims as they deteriorate; Justin and his friends mishearing the name of bin Laden and identifying the terrorist mastermind as Bill Lawton.

The last chapter opens with Hammad, a follower of Mohammed Atta, wielding box cutters on the plane that hit the North Tower. These brief, infrequent interludes, tracking Hammad's inner monologue, are the weakest parts of Falling Man, ill-fitting and flat. As in many of his earlier books, DeLillo also has some problems with dialogue, which is occasionally stilted and distractingly unnatural.

Midway through the last chapter, the perspective shifts to Keith at the point of impact. Following Keith as he makes his way towards the stairwell, this passage is as finely constructed as any prose DeLillo has published. Falling Man is far from DeLillo's best work, but the date and location of its opening and closing scenes make it memorable.