Flash fiction review: Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Falling Man by Don DeLillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's that way into reality DeLillo has. That once or twice or thrice remove. That appreciation of reality as negotiation, an endless series of negotiations, a space in which transcendence is always possible if not always achieved, even when reality gets so hideously crunched and warped by events, by horrifying events like 9-11.
DeLillo's book takes its title from the name New Yorkers gave to a performance artist who, at various locales in New York in the weeks and months after 9-11, seemed to be mimicking those who had so tragically and disturbingly fallen or jumped from the WTC towers as the buildings incinerated and then collapsed before the world. Why? Is he reclaiming the dead? Some kind of art therapy for a traumatised city? DeLillo doesn't provide easy answers as his characters deal with what happened, including two who escaped the buildings that day, and how then they, and à city of millions, a country of hundreds of millions, a world of billions, must then go on and somehow negotiate new realities in a world literally crumbling before their eyes. And love? Can that still be possible in such a world?

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