That's the title of Don DeLillo's latest novel, published last week. It deals with 9/11. I finished it yesterday and I have to agree with Michiko Kakutani of The NY Times -- the novel is "a terrible disappointment":
Certainly it’s unfair for the reader to expect any work of fiction about 9/11 to come close to the visionary scope and depth of Mr. DeLillo’s masterpiece "Underworld," which so brilliantly captured the American experience of the cold war era: not enough time has passed for any novelist to put the events of that day and its shuddering consequences into historical perspective; perhaps not even enough time has passed for any novelist to grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary testimony (from newspaper articles, television footage and still photographs) still freshly seared in readers’ minds. And yet even within these parameters of reduced expectations, "Falling Man" feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate.Yet there was one thing about the novel that I absolutely adored: it doesn't mention George W. Bush's name one. Single. Fucking. Time. In a masterstroke, DeLillo falls Bush right out of the story.
So is it only me and Don DeLillo, or is anyone else out there beginning to see the light at the end of this preznidential tunnel? Because one day in the not-so-distant future, we will have a new, possibly a coherent, maybe even a wise national leader. Very likely a Democrat. And maybe then, with Bush finally out of the story, we can begin to try, in ways that may necessarily feel "small and unsatisfying and inadequate," to get the end, if not to the bottom, of what happened on 9/11.
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