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Struggled to truly get into this, and had it not been for my strict rule of finishing a book once I've got pass the halfway point I would have likely abandoned it. Falling man will be the last 21st century DeLillo novel I will read, and it also made me realise that Cosmopolis wasn't so bad after all. His 14th novel is an exploration of America's recent history, namely 9/11. DeLillo deploys a set of intersecting narratives which begins on September 11, 2001, just as the Twin Towers are falling.
It starts with New York City office worker Keith Neudecker who survives the attack, returning to his ex wife Lianne, and their young son Justin, instead of his own apartment, and in short, almost cryptic fragments that move around in time, we learn of the couple’s past difficulties and nominal reconciliation, in relation to Lianne’s troubled closeness to her elegant mother Nina, memories of her father, volunteer work with a Alzheimer’s patients� support group, and the poker playing cronies with whom Keith has led a separate life with. DeLillo connects these and numerous other segments, including the figures of an Iraqi true believer preparing himself for martyrdom, a jaded European who predicts America’s impending downfall, and an eponymous performance artist whose daring suicidal plunges increasingly foreshadows and embodies the experience of free fall which the other characters are leaning towards. Falling Man is compassionately written, and constructed with a harrowing momentum that did occasionally keep my nerves on edge, but it's disconnected style and characters that really didn't do anything for me, left me feeling empty after closing pages. Falling Man for some could be seen as one of DeLillo's better efforts in the last twenty years, but unfortunately for me it was just a chore to read.